Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism is a specific form of colonialism where settlers come to permanently inhabit and exert control over a territory. Unlike other forms of colonialism, which often involve exploitation of local resources and labor without necessarily displacing the Indigenous population, settler colonialism focuses on establishing a new society by displacing the Indigenous population. Settler colonialism is an inherently geographic phenomenon. The definitional characteristic of settler colonialism is that the settlers come to stay, permanently inhabiting the land and reterritorializing it in line with imposed cultural norms. Materially, settler colonialism effects the displacement of Indigenous peoples, who are often forcibly removed from the land or constricted in their exercise of territorial rights and title. Simultaneously, Indigenous ways of being and knowing the world are subject to erasure by settler institutions such as schools, churches, hospitals, courts, and government agencies. Assimilationist programs erase Indigenous cultures, languages, and histories, replacing them with those of the colonizers. Economically, settler society approaches the land as resources to commodify and exploit, displacing Indigenous relationships to the land. The settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples is ideologically rationalized on the basis of racist myths of white superiority and terra nullius, which held that Indigenous peoples were not sufficiently civilized to possess or improve the land. Importantly, scholars have emphasized that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, meaning that it continues to shape societies long after the initial colonization. Although tactics of settler colonialism have shifted over time, for instance oscillating between overt genocidal campaigns to inflict mass death and programs of assimilation, its larger aim has remained consistent: the elimination of Indigenous peoples as an independent presence on the land. As Indigenous peoples’ struggles for the land and self-determination are enduring, settler colonialism presents a structure that continually thwarts Indigenous aspirations, reinscribing and extending historic patterns of dispossession into the present. Recent work on settler regimes of recognition and reconciliation suggests that although colonialism has adopted a new face that appears more consensual than violently coercive, the underlying structures of Indigenous erasure endure.