Most of the systems this school studies want something from people. Capitalism wants the work. Slavery wanted the labor and built a color line to justify owning the people who did it. Empire wants the resources and the market. Settler colonialism wants none of those things. It wants the land, and it needs the people who live there to be gone. That is a different logic, and it produces a different history: not exploitation but elimination, not a wage but a treaty, not a plantation but a boarding school. Patrick Wolfe’s line is the theme’s spine: invasion is a structure, not an event. It did not happen. It is happening, and it is what the country is made of.
Once you see the mechanism, the strange things stop being strange. Why does the United States, alone among its racial categories, define Indians by blood quantum, a fraction that shrinks every generation? Because a race defined by dilution eventually produces no one to owe anything to. Why take the children? Because a people that cannot speak its language to its grandchildren cannot hold its land. Why sign four hundred treaties and break four hundred treaties? Because a treaty is what you offer a nation, and breaking it is how you stop treating them as one. None of that is cruelty for its own sake. It is a land transfer with a paper trail.
This theme is the third of a set, and the three do not collapse into each other. Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism follows a system that wanted Black labor and therefore needed Black people present, counted, and controlled. Immigration and the Making of Race follows the border deciding who may become American. This theme follows the demand for land, which needs Native people absent, and which therefore counts them in order to watch the number fall. Read them in relation. The same country ran all three at once, and the tensions between them are real: the Freedmen citizenship disputes in the Cherokee Nation are where Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty collide rather than harmonize, and this theme does not pretend otherwise.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. This theme has an unusually direct opener: put native-land.ca on a screen, find the room’s own location, and let people sit with whose land they are on before anyone reads anything.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script.
- Whose land are you on right now? Do you know the nation’s name? Did you know it an hour ago?
- What were you taught in school about how this land was acquired? What word was used, and what did it do?
- Every other racial category in America expands to absorb people. Indian status contracts by law, by blood fraction. Who designed that, and what does a shrinking category eventually produce?
- The United States signed hundreds of treaties with Native nations and broke essentially all of them. A treaty is an agreement between nations. What does breaking one say about who you were agreeing with?
- If decolonization means the literal return of land, what happens to the people living on it now? Including, possibly, you?
- What is the difference between being exploited and being eliminated? Which one is this, and what follows for how you fight it?
- Is a land acknowledgement a beginning or a substitute?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document).
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Open with the map: find the room on native-land.ca and let people name what they did and did not know. Read the Dawes Act aloud, a page of it, in the government’s own words. Close on the question the room will already be forming: this was legislation, not an accident, so who wrote it and what were they trying to make happen? See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential: the map, and survivor testimony from the boarding schools. Week 2 historical: removal, treaties, and the Dawes Act, read as a land-transfer machine with a paper trail. Week 3 historical: the boarding schools and blood quantum, which is where the mechanism is clearest. Week 4 theoretical: Wolfe on elimination as a structure, then Tuck and Yang on why decolonization is not a metaphor. Week 5 practical: Land Back as a thing actually happening, with the returns that have already occurred. Week 6 liberatory: stage the argument between land return, refusal, and treaty nationhood, and do not resolve it. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Friday evening: a screening, and the map. Saturday: the history and the theory, ending on Wolfe. Sunday: Land Back, the live fights, and what the room would actually do about the ground it is sitting on. See the weekend-intensive template.
A note on this theme and this school
Two things worth saying out loud before a group starts.
This theme asks something of settlers that the others do not. A white participant reading the capitalism theme can locate themselves as exploited. Reading this one, most non-Native participants in North America are not the wronged party; they are the beneficiary, standing on the evidence. Tuck and Yang wrote their essay precisely because that discomfort gets metabolized into metaphor, into “decolonizing” a syllabus or a diet, anything but land. Expect the room to reach for the metaphor. That reaching is the lesson.
Indigenous people are not a historical topic. The tense of this theme is present. The nations in it exist, hold governments, sign agreements, and are in court this year. If a session leaves the room with a feeling of tragedy rather than a map of a live political situation, the theme has failed.
Related themes
- Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism follows the system that wanted the labor rather than the land. Its Status notes have promised this theme for some time. Read the two together and the country stops looking like one racial system with variations.
- Immigration and the Making of Race completes the set: who may arrive and become American, on land taken from people who were already here.
- Ecology and the Climate Crisis carries Land Back, the Red Deal, and Kimmerer, and is where this theme’s argument becomes a climate argument.
- Imperialism and the Global System is the same mechanism pointed outward, and holds the Palestine material that this theme’s comparative question runs into.
- Critical Pedagogy and the Practice of Liberation holds Tuck and Yang, and the boarding schools are what this school’s own method is the opposite of.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is deliberately built around one claim: elimination for land is a distinct mechanism, not a variation on exploitation. Contributions welcome, especially from Native facilitators, and especially where this set is thin: Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian material, Latin American Indigenous movements, and the Freedmen question, which is named here but not yet resourced as fully as it deserves. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.