Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito

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      Securing its land base has been and remains integral to the United States’ establishment and expansion, the creation of its wealth and power, and the maintenance of its global hegemony. This is why the cry of “border control” has such resonance among those who see their interests aligning with those of the state. The central narrative is also, of course, a story about people, but only as seen through settler eyes. The primary actors are European colonizers and their descendants—particularly male settlers, in accordance with their patriarchal worldview.

      Indigenous peoples are problematic to this narrative. Their very existence calls into question the legitimacy of settler occupation and, thus, their nations have been targeted for destruction, containment, and conceptual disappearance. As Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham put it, “The settlers must consume us. There is no one to challenge their ownership except ourselves, which of course cannot be allowed.”2 The appropriation of land and natural resources thus “requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way.”3 This is a foundational premise of American history, a reality that—as Derrick Bell noted about the intractability of racial subordination—“many will wish to deny, but none can refute.”4 At this point it is tempting, at least to many non-Indigenous people, to say, “Yes, yes, we know it was ugly, but it’s all in the past and we just need to move on.” Exasperated by being told “Don’t go there” when she talks about race, Korean American comedian Margaret Cho responds, “I live there. I bought a house there.”5 We, too, live there—here—and we cannot deconstruct the racism that permeates American society without being willing to confront its origins and the functions it continues to serve.

      How the United States acquired and maintains its territorial base is rarely subjected to close scrutiny. Among non-Indigenous people, some attribute this to the belief that there is no point in feeling guilty about things we cannot change. However, if we really could not change anything it is unlikely that the resistance would be so adamant. It is the possibility of fundamental change that makes “going there” scary, tempting us to simply accept colonial occupation as a given, rather than to consider the implications of decolonization. A functional analysis that begins with space—the acquisition and maintenance of territorial control—is critical to understanding and countering the strategies that have been and continue to be used to keep all those deemed Other literally and figuratively “in our place.” The exploitation of non-Indigenous peoples of color forced or induced to migrate to the United States required land, the “basic precondition” of settler society, and the institutionalized racism we live with today originated in the strategies utilized to occupy Indigenous lands.

      This chapter lays the foundation for an analysis of the racial subordination of non-Indigenous Others by summarizing some of the strategies employed by American settlers to occupy the land, appropriate its resources, and exercise their claimed sovereign prerogative. Lorenzo Veracini identifies twenty-six practices or “transfer strategies” commonly used by settler colonists to remove Indigenous peoples from their lands and from settler consciousness.6 Using his taxonomy as a starting point, this chapter looks at settler attempts to “disappear” American Indian nations, beginning with the “racing” of Indigenous peoples in the colonial narrative and then addressing strategies of elimination, displacement and containment, and conceptual disappearance.

      Racialization

      “The organizing power of the idea of the Indian as incommensurable savage inspired a new art of imperial government administered by the West’s first modern settler-state society. . . . [and] was the inaugural step in defining a white racial identity for the United States as a nation,” according to Robert A. Williams Jr.7 By racially constructing Indigenous peoples as part of that wilderness, as “beasts” rather than as fellow human beings, the colonizers could justify virtually any atrocity they perpetrated. Veracini describes this as “perception transfer,” an assertion that Indigenous peoples do not really exist, except as part of the natural landscape.8

      Thus, the United States’ Indian policy began with George Washington’s proclamation that “the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”9 The relegation of American Indians to nature—and, therefore, in the settlers’ view, outside the bounds of human society—is embedded in law, as well. The Supreme Court’s defense of settler property rights rests, to this day, on the premise that Indigenous peoples were “wandering hordes” and “fierce savages,” that “to leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness.”10

      Such depictions reflect a colonial strategy of conceptual displacement that allows Indigenous peoples to be excluded from “civilized” spaces. But the narrative of American Indians as “pathologically mobile and ‘nomadic’”11 goes beyond facilitating their exclusion from territory claimed by the colonizing power. It also means that “when really existing indigenous people enter the field of settler perception, they are deemed to have entered the settler space and can therefore be considered exogenous.”12 In other words, American Indians become a threat to society simply by virtue of existing. The settlers deny that “wandering savages” come from any given area; therefore, they have no cognizable rights anywhere. This is why it took twenty years of contestation for US scientists and judges to concede that the Native peoples of the Columbia River Valley were entitled to bury the remains of their Ancient One (“Kennewick Man”) who died some nine thousand years ago in the Pacific Northwest, in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.13

      The tropes of American Indians as not only uncivilized but part of the “wilderness” continue to pervade popular consciousness. Into the early 2000s, natural history museums across the country routinely displayed “American Indian cultures alongside dinosaur fossils, gemstones, and taxidermied animals.”14 In 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton analogized her opponent Donald Trump to men who “get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak,” to which Trump gloated, “the Indians have gone wild” over her use of the phrase.15 Contemporary examples abound, but one need look no further than the settlers’ furious insistence on a “right” to preserve the name and imagery of the Washington, DC, “Redskins” football team—despite well-documented association of the term with scalp bounties—to appreciate American society’s profound cultural attachment to the image of Indian-as-savage.16

      The dominant narrative attempts to transform hundreds of sovereign nations into “a race,” and then to racialize Indigenous people as inherently backward or—at best—ecologically conscious holdovers from a bygone era. The focus on “race” facilitates the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into a minority rights framework that presumes the legitimacy of the settler state and undermines their right to self-determination. Thus, the Trump administration’s 2018 call for a racial definition of American Indian identity was intended not only to subject Indians to the work requirements of the new healthcare law, but to undermine their political status as well.17 More generally, the racialization of Indigenous peoples as other than human, as uncivilized and always a potential threat, has facilitated the colonizers’ many attempts to “disappear” those whose very existence calls the legitimacy of settler sovereignty into question.

      Strategies of Elimination

      Early Angloamerican settlers were unable to envision systems of shared land tenure and governance, and unwilling to adapt themselves to extant Indigenous polities. As a result, the elimination of Native peoples became essential to their mission. Employing the fiction that the land was “vacant,” the colonists quickly set about making it so. While more subtle means have been utilized subsequently, it is important to acknowledge that the settlers’ preferred method, at least initially, was simply to kill those who lived here—men and women, children and elders. The “absence” СКАЧАТЬ