Settler Colonialism

 Let us imagine for a moment that some Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) billionaire decided to turn your neighborhood into a truck depot (or exclusive waterpark or luxury high-rise block).

Let’s imagine that this billionaire claimed to have bought the property from someone with some spurious claim to it. When their employees show up and tell you that your home is scheduled for demolition you and your neighbors object. So they turn to the Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) military to evict all of you. The only reason this scenario feels implausible to a white American is because the US military is stronger than those others. So you’ll have to imagine for a moment that it isn’t.

This is the essence of settler colonialism. One important reason for the American Revolution was that the colonies were issuing warrants for Native lands west of the Appalachians and the British government wouldn’t support those claims. (Let’s note that the reason was not concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples; it was Parliament’s reluctance to fund a new war against the Natives while they were already heavily indebted for the Seven-Years’ War against the French.) George Washington was one of the leading speculators in those Trans-Appalachian grants.

So the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell. To steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people. To force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right.

This pattern continued all the way to the Pacific. Did you think that when Napoleon sold Jefferson 828,000 square miles of land, including all or part of thirteen states, he actually owned it? Or even controlled it? The basis of France’s claim to what they called Louisiana was just that: they claimed it. The exact same thing was true of the 529,000 square miles, including 7 states, that the United States forced Mexico to sell after occupying their capital city. And the 586,000 square miles of Alaska for which the US gave Russia 2¢ an acre.

All this land was home to a vast population of indigenous people who had been living there always. I won’t begin to discuss here the verbal gymnastics US courts have gone through to pretend it was legal to mount the subsequent military operations to evict the Native occupants and to replace them with white people (and the Black people they enslaved to make this eviction economically productive.) For over a hundred years after the American Revolution the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples to get actual and not just pretended sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States. The maps in your history book showing the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and the Oregon Treaty obscure all of this by pretending that diplomats in capitals many thousands of miles away had the legal authority to dispose of territory that they never even controlled.