Theoretical

How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The core concepts this lens builds are the logic of elimination (the system wants the land, so it wants the people gone), settler colonialism as a structure rather than an event, the politics of recognition and its refusal, resurgence, and decolonization as the literal repatriation of land rather than a figure of speech. If the room takes only one idea, take Wolfe’s: this did not happen, it is happening, and it is what the country is made of.

An honest note about access before you plan a session. Almost all of this field is published by the University of Minnesota Press and Duke, and almost none of it is legitimately free. Only one book here is borrowable. But every paywalled book in this lens has a free lecture by its own author attached, so a study circle can run this theme without buying anything. Those lectures are all small, a few thousand views each, which is normal for academic talks and says nothing about the argument.

Anchor questions

• What is the difference between a system that wants your labor and a system that wants your land? What does each one need to do to you?
• Wolfe says invasion is a structure, not an event. If that is right, what tense should this theme be in?
• Why would a state offer recognition to people it has dispossessed? What does the offer cost the people who accept it?
• Tuck and Yang say decolonization is not a metaphor. Everything else in this school is arguably a metaphor for it. What are they accusing us of?
• Blood quantum makes Indians disappear on paper by arithmetic. Every other American racial category expands. What is a category designed to shrink?
• Can a settler state ever give an Indigenous nation what it owes, or is the asking the trap?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Read Wolfe first; everything here answers him.

The spine

• Patrick Wolfe (1949 to 2016), Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (2006). Twenty-four pages that reorganize the whole field. Settler colonialism is not a bad kind of colonialism, it is a different kind: the colonizer wants labor and eventually leaves, the settler wants land and stays, so the settler needs the native gone, by killing, by assimilation, by blood quantum, by adoption, by whatever works. “Invasion is a structure not an event” is the sentence, and elimination is the organizing principle rather than an excess. Free from the publisher: tandfonline.com
• Lorenzo Veracini, Introducing: settler colonial studies (2011). The field’s own statement of why it is a field: the difference between colonialism and settler colonialism is not degree, it is form. Open access: tandfonline.com
• Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (2012). Decolonization means land goes back. It is not a synonym for social justice, not a thing you do to a curriculum, and it is not meant to make anyone comfortable. The essay is largely a catalogue of the “settler moves to innocence” people use to feel decolonial while keeping the land, and every room will perform at least two of them in the first hour. Shared with the pedagogy theme. Free: clas.osu.edu

Recognition, refusal, resurgence

This is the live argument in Indigenous political thought, and it is more interesting than the settler debate about it.

• Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Red Skin, White Masks (2014). Taking Fanon to Canada: the liberal politics of recognition does not undo colonial domination, it reproduces it, because it asks the colonized to want the colonizer’s affirmation. His answer is to stop asking. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu. His own lecture, free, about 6,200 views: youtube.com
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), Land as Pedagogy (2014). Start here: twenty-five free pages arguing that land is not where education happens, land is the teacher, and that Nishnaabeg intelligence is generated by living in relationship rather than by studying. Read it directly against this school’s own method. Free: jps.library.utoronto.ca
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (2017). The full statement of resurgence: freedom is rebuilt by doing Nishnaabeg practice, not by winning concessions. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu. Her earlier Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) is the one book here you can borrow: archive.org
• Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk), Mohawk Interruptus (2014). Kahnawake refuses Canadian and American citizenship both and holds its own, which she theorizes as refusal: not a demand to be recognized but a standing no, and a sovereignty nested inside a state that pretends otherwise. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu

Possession, and the wider frame

• Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul, Quandamooka), The White Possessive (2015). The settler nation as a white possession: owning the land and being the nation are one claim, held by what she calls patriarchal white sovereignty. From Australia, which is useful precisely because it breaks the American frame and shows the same machine running elsewhere. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu
• Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw), The Transit of Empire (2011). Indianness became a portable template: the United States carries it abroad and processes each new conquest through the figure of the Indian. The direct bridge to Imperialism and the Global System. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu

The tension this school has to hold

• Iyko Day, Being or Nothingness (2015). This theme and Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism describe different machines, and the field has spent a decade arguing about how they fit: whether settler colonialism is the master frame, whether anti-Blackness is, and what happens to the labor question when land becomes primary. Day works that argument rather than choosing a side, which is why it is here. Paywalled: jstor.org

On Andrea Smith and the three pillars. The framework of three distinct logics of white supremacy, slavery and capitalism, genocide and colonialism, orientalism and war, is influential enough that this school’s race themes are arguably shaped by it, and any reader going further will meet it. It is listed under further reading with the situation stated plainly: Smith’s claims to Cherokee identity are widely regarded as fraudulent. She commissioned a Cherokee genealogist twice herself and the results came back negative; her own family said so publicly; Cherokee scholars published an open letter; and in 2023 UC Riverside announced her resignation citing fraudulent claims to Native American identity. In a theme about who may speak as Indigenous and what it costs when someone falsely does, that is not a footnote to be dropped in silence. Use the framework, name the problem, and note that Iyko Day above does much of the same work without it.

A note on method

The hard part of this lens is not difficulty, it is position. Wolfe, Veracini, and Tuck and Yang will all make sense on a first read. What they ask is something else: to accept that the room is inside the structure they describe, and that understanding it better does not exit it. Coulthard and Simpson then make it worse, in the useful way, by declining to want the settler’s approval at all. A group that finishes this lens looking for the correct thing to think has not finished it.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Iyko Day, Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique (2015). Works the tension this school’s three race themes have to hold: how settler colonialism and anti-Blackness relate without one being folded into the other, and what a settler-colonial critique does with the labor it needs. The theoretical statement of the problem the index names. Not free: jstor.org
• Andrea Smith, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy (2006). The influential three-pillars framework: slavery and capitalism, genocide and colonialism, orientalism and war, as three distinct logics of white supremacy. LABEL THIS PLAINLY IN THE ROOM: Smith’s claims to Cherokee identity were investigated and are widely regarded as fraudulent, she twice commissioned a Cherokee genealogist herself and the research came back negative, and UC Riverside announced her resignation in 2023 citing fraudulent claims to Native American identity. In a theme about who may speak as Indigenous, that is not a footnote. The framework is here because it is cited everywhere and the room will meet it; Iyko Day above does much of the same work without the problem. Not free: dukeupress.edu

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is built around one claim, Wolfe’s, and the arguments that answer it. Two honest weaknesses. Access is the first: this field lives at Minnesota and Duke, only one book here is borrowable, and the lens leans on author lectures to stay usable, which is a real limitation rather than a design choice. The second is scope: this is a North American and Australian lens. Latin American Indigenous thought, Sami, and Palestinian scholarship on Zionism as settler colonialism are all absent, and the last of those is a live and serious literature that this school should carry. Contributions welcome, especially from Native scholars and facilitators.