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

was good, and because the creation event did not include a ‘fall,’ the meaning of creation was that all parts of it functioned together to sustain it.”91 Humans can be understood not as destined to dominate or destroy nature, but as very literally related to all living beings. “Indigenous identity is formed by the intersection of land, culture, and community, and the way we respond to those critical elements of our existence defines the meaning of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘property’ for the First Nations of this land,” according to law professor Rebecca Tsosie. It is a reciprocal relationship, with the land looking after the people and “orient[ing] the people in understanding how to meet their responsibilities to each other and to the land.”92

      According to Mann, “The entire Iroquoian world is made up of complementary pairs,” which “function[] synchronously so as to maintain a balanced cosmos.”93 The clans and the nations were consciously created and organized according to a twinship principle to ensure balance, and their equilibrium is maintained by a gendering that posits men and women as “natural halves that parallel one another, socially, politically, economically, and religiously.”94 Thus, while the only governing bodies acknowledged in settler accounts were composed of men, the Clan Mothers had their own councils that, among other responsibilities, “appointed warriors, declared war, negotiated peace, and mediated disputes.”95

      This system of governance allowed the Haudenosaunee Confederation to prosper for many centuries prior to European contact, ensuring the well-being of the people through consultation with, and participation of, the individuals, families, clans, villages, and nations comprising the greater Iroquois League.96 Lumbee law professor Robert A. Williams Jr. notes that, in striking contrast to Western understandings of political authority, “above all, the Iroquois political system sought to assure that the Iroquois listened seriously to each other.”97 Councils met, often at length, until consensus was achieved, and the League Council’s decisions did not impose its decisions, but communicated them “‘to the people, hoping they would agree.’”98

      These are just a few examples of the many worldviews, and ways of organizing society, that the American settler colonial state has done its best to destroy. Neither Indigenous perspectives and histories nor contemporary manifestations of Indigenous cultures can be incorporated into the master narrative in any meaningful way because they would undermine the legitimacy of the colonial project itself. More fundamentally, they cannot be acknowledged because there is no place in the European colonial zeitgeist for epistemological alternatives.

      Expanding our narratives to incorporate the stories and realities of those deemed Other can free us to recognize that we live in a “pluriverse” of worldviews, as Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash frame it, and to recognize the constraints of our own.99 As we come to see that we need not limit our vision of future possibilities to the master narrative’s constructions of indigeneity, property, or civilization, its linear framing of progress, or the gendered and racialized social hierarchies it imagines, we may be able to break out of the highly circumscribed conceptual paradigm of individual rights and formal equality within which we have been operating, and come to understand racial justice in a richer way.

      While remaining mindful of the pitfalls of substituting one universalizing narrative for another, we can begin to construct theoretical frameworks capable of explaining historical consistencies and disparities in structural rather than exceptional terms. In this process, I find it helpful to conceptualize racialization and racial hierarchy as a function of colonialism—settler colonialism in our case. To the extent that racism serves to consolidate colonial rule, its dismantling will require decolonization, and we will need narratives that accurately reflect this relationship in order to envision liberatory options. Because settler colonial theory is unfamiliar terrain for many of us, the following chapter briefly summarizes the constructs of colonialism that provide a conceptual framework for the remainder of the book.

      3

      Settler Colonialism

      Colonial subjugation and racial domination began much earlier and have lasted much longer in North America than in Asia and Africa, the continents usually thought of as colonial prototypes.

      —Bob Blauner

      Indigenous peoples have consistently recognized the impact of colonization on their communities, and in recent decades a strong body of scholarly analysis has emerged to address its ongoing manifestations.1 The situation of other peoples of color within the United States, however, is rarely discussed, much less theorized, in terms of colonialism.2 This was not always true. As noted in chapter 1, during the global “decolonization era” of the 1960s, powerful movements emerged in African American, American Indian, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian American communities that identified themselves, to some degree or another, as internally colonized peoples, and it was not uncommon for scholars of color to also articulate this perspective.3 Since then, however, internal colonialism has come to be regarded as—at best—an empowering analogy rather than a framework for meaningful structural analysis, at least with respect to non-Indigenous peoples of color.4 The demise of the approach has been attributed to the systematic and violent repression of organizations and movements that framed their goals in terms of national liberation, as well as the (perhaps related) failure of mainstream social science to recognize it as a legitimate inquiry.5 These developments, however, tell us only that the depiction of “racial minorities” as colonized peoples is perceived as a threat to the status quo; they do not address the underlying question of the extent to which ongoing colonization accounts for structural racism in the United States today.

      This was the question that led me to write this book. Did the construct of internal colonialism largely disappear from the discourse on race simply because of social and political repression or was the theory itself structurally flawed? Upon closer examination, I realized that most of the analyses invoking internal colonialism with respect to non-Indigenous peoples in the American context employ the lens of external or “classic” colonialism, as exemplified by European expansion into Africa and Asia. From this perspective, many parallels emerge between the histories and conditions of colonized peoples in Africa and Asia and people of color in the United States. But there are also many aspects of American racial hierarchy and exploitation that are not easy to account for within this paradigm. Viewing the United States as a different kind of colonial power, however, can fill in many of the narrative gaps that exist in each of these approaches.

      While the United States has maintained external colonies, it is first and foremost a settler state.6 Settler colonialism is structurally distinct from classic external colonialism and, thus, it is not surprising that a model based upon external colonization has limited utility when applied to a settler state. Analyzing the histories of American Indians, African Americans, and other peoples of color in the United States through the lens of settler colonial theory can explain a great deal about our contemporary racial realities. In particular, we can see how structures of racial subordination have been employed strategically to consolidate the settler state and to enhance the wealth and power of the settler class. Chapters 4 through 8 explore those strategies in more detail. Establishing a framework for those explorations, this chapter provides an overview of the concept of colonialism and describes briefly what is meant by external or “classic” colonialism, internal colonialism, and settler colonialism. It concludes by acknowledging potential benefits and pitfalls of “triangulating” settler colonial analyses by distinguishing non-Indigenous peoples of color from the settler class.

      Colonialism: An Overview

      Colonialism has taken many forms and is described in numerous ways. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a colony as “a settlement in a new country; a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connexion with the parent state is kept up.”7 To colonize is simply to establish such a colony. The mainstream narrative of the early history of British colonies in North America most often invokes this very benign understanding of colonialism. However, as English professor Ania Loomba observes, it is a framing that “evacuates the word ‘colonialism’ of any implication of an encounter