American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  Equipped with a higher manhood and a higher calling, settler colonials boldly conquered the wilderness, the outback; inherited the True North; and reclaimed the land of Zion. Having imagined powerful connections to their chosen lands, settlers defended them violently and at all cost.

  Comparative Analysis

  Settler colonial studies facilitate comparative analysis that reveals surprisingly similar histories evolving at different places and at different times. “The fact that settler societies resemble one another in several respects is not a consequence of conscious imitation,” Donald Denoon explains, “but of separate efforts to resolve very similar problems.”26 As settler colonial studies are relatively new, Lynette Russell notes, “One of the future directions for research include detailed comparative studies.”27

  While this book homes in on American settlement, the United States emerged out of a broader history of global colonialism and especially of British settler colonialism.28 “The course of American history,” Weaver points out, “connects deeply, extensively, and reciprocally with land-taking and land-allocation episodes in the histories of British settlement colonies.”29 The American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and South African settler colonies shared common cultural traits and similar outlooks toward indigenous people—ambivalent attitudes as well as lethal ones—yet important distinctions remained.

  Although Canada like the United States was a product of British settler colonialism, geographic and demographic distinctions constructed a different history with indigenous people. In essence Canada had far fewer settlers, far fewer indigenes, and plenty of space to avoid one another for a longer time. Contrary to popular mythology, British Canadians were neither wiser nor morally superior in their handling of Indian affairs; rather they felt less pressured to address the issue. Canadians were also preoccupied with internal divisions between French and English settlers and between maritime and interior provinces.30 Not until the 1860s did the Canadian policies begin to resemble the American removal policies, but the scale and scope of conflict with the First Peoples was small compared with the United States. “Aside from the 1869 Matisse resistance in the Red River country and the 1885 Matisse and Indian uprising,” Roger Nichols points out, “the Canadian record featured little violence particularly when contrasted to what was happening at the same time in the United States.”31

  In southern Africa both the much-mythologized Dutch “trekboers” and British settlers and investors colonized through violent dispossession of indigenous people. As in other settler societies, “the quest for more land continued relentlessly,” especially with the discovery of gold and diamonds. The colonizers cheated, killed, and removed the indigenes while the Dutch also enslaved them and, as in the United States and Australia, removed children from their families.32 In South Africa, as in the United States, Australia, and other settler colonial settings, “warrior resistance played into allegations of savagery, thus confirming unfitness for tribal or individual land title” and justifying violent retribution. Again, however, the scope and scale of the colonial violence, while hardly negligible, did not match the American experience.33

  The same was true of New Zealand (Aotearoa in the Maori language). New Zealand settlers purported to take a humanitarian approach to the Maori, who were dispossessed nonetheless by legal means in the wake of the disputed Treaty of Waitangi (1840).34 As in the United States and other settler societies, disease took a severe toll on the Maori.The Pakeha (whites) “took it for granted that the Maori population would continue to decrease” as their own proliferated.35 Thereafter, the settlers moved onto Maori land, as “frontier avarice throttled principal.” Beginning in 1860 the New Zealand Wars raged for a decade.36 “Maori resistance was effective rather than futile until numbers overwhelmed them.” The Maori population steadily declined, as in other colonized societies, as they were “dominated demographically” in the wake of massive waves of immigration in the 1860s and 1870s.37

  The settler state that most closely mirrors the American experience is Australia. As in the United States, the ethnic cleansing of Australia extended across an entire continent, proved genocidal in its effects, and until very recently has been subjected to persistent historical denial. Ambivalence on the part of both colonizers and indigenes materialized in both societies, as did drives for religious salvation and assimilation. Both Australia and the United States adopted “reforms” that entailed cultural genocide, including national campaigns removing children from their families.38

  At the arrival of European settler colonialism in the late eighteenth century, from 750,000 to 1.5 million “Aborigines” lived on the continent. Ravaged by disease, dispossession, and indiscriminate slaughter, the number had plummeted to 31,000 by 1911.39 In the early 1640s the Dutchman Abel Tasman was the first European to explore New Zealand, sight the Fiji Islands, and set down on the island south of the Australian mainland that is named after him today. More than a century later the three voyages of the legendary British seafarer James Cook from 1768 to 1779 spurred Anglophone settlement in the Pacific. Cook traversed the eastern coast of the continent and named it New South Wales. On April 29, 1770, he planted the British flag in Botany Bay, about 30 kilometers from modern-day Sydney. Cook made only limited contact with the natives whereupon tensions surfaced immediately. “All they seemed to want is for us to be gone,” he noted.40

  Despite this chilly reception, as in North America ambivalent relations including trade and cooperation characterized the early interaction between the British settlers and indigenous peoples. “Contact between explorers and Aborigines was often friendly and mutually satisfactory,” Henry Reynolds points out.41 The Europeans often depended on the aboriginal people for food, access to water, and generalized local know-how. Some Aborigines already had exposure to European commodities including pottery, cloth, and metal tools that had arrived through trade routes from Southeast Asia. The new settlers brought iron, guns, and other desirable trade goods.

  As in the future United States, ambivalent relations gave way to violence as settlements expanded and the Europeans strove to drive out the indigenes, considered primitive and inferior. Both Americans and Australians displayed “relatively little use for indigenous people and a penchant for considering Aborigines and American Indians as impediments to progress,” Benjamin Madley notes. The colonizers perpetrated “a particularly high number of massacres” and displayed “surprisingly congruent tactics despite the fact that they occurred decades apart on separate continents and under different regimes, while targeting dozens of different indigenous peoples.”42 Settler colonization of Queensland, for example, resembled California, as settlers and squatters unrestrained by central government authority orchestrated massive cleansing campaigns replete with indiscriminate violence.43

  The most significant difference between US and Australian settler colonialism was that the Americans formally recognized Indian possession of the land and thus dispossessed them by means of ostensibly legal treaties, whenever possible. On the other hand, through their embrace of terra nullius—”land belonging to no one”— the Australian settler colonials adopted a more extreme version of the Doctrine of Discovery than in the United States. Under terra nullius the Australians considered the natives to be British subjects rather than independent peoples hence they would be dispossessed without legal wrangling.44

  Terra nullius, like American Manifest Destiny, constituted an “imperial fantasy” that enabled Australian settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of the continent. A romanticized national history in which people thrust rudely onto the barren shores “down under” became “a good and neighborly” community elided the history of settler invasion and destruction of Aboriginal culture. Colonial discourse depicted Australia as “a wild, untamed space that existed beyond the boundaries of colonial civilization.” As Rod Macneil points out, “The creation of a prehistoric landscape enabled colonization to be couched not in terms of appropriation and exploitation, but as progress and re
demption.”45

  The similarities between the United States and Australia as well as other British settler societies suggest that American history is not exceptional. On the other hand, the breadth and scope—and thus the violence—of Euro-American settler colonialism have no parallel, not even in Australia.

  Race, Gender, Religion, Nation

  Settler colonialism typically unfolds in association with nation building. Constructions, hierarchies, and inclusions and exclusions pertaining to race, class, gender, religion, and nation enable settler communities to cohere. Often these constructions are comingled and mutually reinforcing. The settler community and nation define themselves, expand and police their borders, and project their power into colonial space on the basis of these constructed hierarchies and exclusions. In constructing identity, exclusion of “the other” closes off their narratives and discourses while privileging one’s own.46

  It is in this sense that Fanon pointed out, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” Without the colonized other, the European could not define his own identity through manliness, whiteness, godliness, progress, and the civilizing mission vis-à-vis the colonial world. Similarly, as Kevin Bruyneel has argued, “The very identity and meaning implied in the name America as the national identity of the United States was in no small part constituted through this nation’s real and imagined relationship with indigenous people.”47 Likewise, Australia defined itself in opposition to the aboriginal other.

  Neither “the people” nor “the races” actually exist rather they are based on a fictive ethnicity that becomes naturalized within the imagined nation. “For the nation to be itself, it has to be racially or culturally pure,” hence it becomes an “obsessional imperative” to drive out exogenous others. Constructions of race, gender, religion, and often a common language construct “a single national project that effectively neutralizes people’s differences” and thus enables the imagined community of the nation to cohere. Without these discourses, constructions, and demarcations of space “patriotism’s appeal would be addressed to no one.”48

  Colonial varieties of racial formation were often especially virulent as these discourses performed the representational work of sanctioning the extreme violence of slavery and genocide. Racism is an enduring human social formation that preceded modern colonialism and nationalism. Prior to the advent of Darwinian thought there existed an “archaic racism with genocidal potential, constituted by the visual othering of indigenous populations.” The discourse of scientific racism piled onto existing racisms and helped justify “the other’s expulsion from native lands, economic exploitation, destruction of the indigenous ecosphere and even eventual genocide.” Class tensions, closely intertwined with race, played out in colonial encounters. The removal of indigenes from the land created more wealth while promoting the perception among poor whites that they would have greater opportunity for advancement. In any case they could count themselves members of a “master” race.49

  Gendered constructions complemented racial exclusions as the two became mutually reinforcing under colonialism. “Persistent gendering” marginalized the feminine and thus exalted male power. Competition, aggression, control, power, and other traits of colonialism were distinctly male. Settler colonies exalted manliness, and regeneration of manhood, as they subdued savage foes and “tamed the frontier.” Colonialism simultaneously reinforced gendered practices within metropolitan societies, as the emphasis on woman’s proper place in the domestic sphere and white men as the protectors of vulnerable women affirmed male authority. On the other hand, women could gain agency by taking part in the colonial encounter, for example as missionaries or in promoting policies of child removal.50

  Gendered tropes feminized the “virgin” land and its conquest. Gendered colonial discourse often represented indigenous women as queens or alternatively as enticing maidens. Their nakedness and lack of sexual inhibitions aroused desires otherwise repressed in the Christian West. Representations of the dark-skinned indigenous male threat to white women powerfully reinforced repression of the bestial male native yet the rape and enslavement of indigenous women by white men was a common and rarely punished occurrence. Captivity narratives, the specter of miscegenation, and of the proverbial “fate worse than death” pervaded colonial discourse.51

  Western practices transformed gendered social and economic roles of indigenous people in settler societies. When engaged in civilizing missions, colonial authorities typically tried to convert male warriors into sedentary farmers and relegate women (who performed the agricultural work in most indigenous societies) to a domestic sphere. Colonialism altered family structures and “eroded many matrilineal or women-friendly cultures and practices, or intensified women’s subordination in colonized lands.”52 Colonialism enabled paternalist discourse viewing colonized peoples and their children as having undeveloped minds that needed to be molded, scolded, properly socialized, and ultimately the children removed to a civilized environment.

  Christian missionaries promulgated many of the gendered Western practices, underscoring the centrality of religion in the colonial encounter. Settler colonials typically viewed their own projects as divinely inspired and providentially destined. Missionaries displayed colonial ambivalence, as they sought to “uplift” indigenes and save their souls, but this sort of paternalism produced cultural imperialism and encompassed genocidal practices such as child removal. Westerners thus showed little recognition or respect for indigenous spirituality. They often linked the “atheistical” and “diabolical” savages with biblical forces of evil. Manifestations of indigenous spirituality threatened these colonial discourses and thus inspired a violent response, for example in 1890 when the Sioux Ghost Dance preceded the Wounded Knee massacre (see Chapter 6). Tightly infused with concepts of space, race, and nation, religious discourse justified and propelled the settler colonial project.

  Historical Denial

  Historical distortion and denial are endemic to settler colonies. In order for the settler colony to establish a collective usable past, legitimating stories must be created and persistently affirmed as a means of naturalizing a new historical narrative. A national mythology displaces the indigenous past. “The settler seeks to establish a nation, and therefore needs to become native and to write the epic of the nation’s origin,” Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson point out. “The ‘origin’ is that which has no antecedent, so the presence of Ab-origines is an impediment.” Becoming the indigene required not only cleansing of the land, either through killing or removing, but sanitizing the historical record as well.

  The critical sleight of hand in propagating a new national narrative was the settler’s displacement of the indigene. Increasingly, the settlers depicted themselves and their cultures as indigenous. As the inheritors of a “New World” and cultivators of a “virgin land,” the settlers elided their actual historical role as invaders and conquerors of colonial space. “Empty land can be settled, but occupied land can only be invaded,” Johnston and Lawson point out. “The word ‘settler’ was itself part of the process of invasion; it was literally a textual imposition on history.”53

  Even with the removal and marginalization of indigenes onto reservations or Bantustans their existence could not be forgotten entirely, yet that which remained could be subtly absorbed within the dominant culture. In the quest for authenticity the settler colonial societies appropriated the indigenous style of clothing—the buckskinned frontiersman for example—and adopted the “attributes and skills (the Mounties, cowboys, range-riders, gauchos, backwoodsmen), and in this way cemented their legitimacy.” They simultaneously romanticized the “noble savage” or relegated the indigenous past to the realm of place names and sports teams, subsuming the violence of conquest within the “liberating frivolity of play.” They also cultivated an “imperialist nostalgia,” as they produced stories, literature, and images focusing on the inevitable “passing” of the indigenous race, as in the “last of the Mohicans
.”54

  These historical representations and cultural constructions notwithstanding, history remains a neuralgic subject in settler colonial societies. Denial and disavowal of the history of violent dispossession of the indigenes characterize settler societies. “Revisionist” challenges invariably meet with denunciation or marginalization rooted in the naïve assumption of the existence of a true and immutable sacred past. Hence in the 1990s “history wars” raged in both the United States and Australia, South Africa conducted “truth and reconciliation” hearings, while the debate over “post-Zionism” roiled Israeli society.55

  Historical denial helps explain why study of the United States within the context of both settler colonialism and postcolonialism has been relatively scarce and “especially controversial.” Even as postcolonial studies “has expanded its scope to include the United States,” Jenny Sharpe points out, “it has not addressed its status as an imperial power, past or present.”56 Analysis of American imperialism has always been problematic. For generations, as the legendary diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams pointed out in 1955, “One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire.” As they narrated the Cold War as a rigid binary pitting the “free world” against “godless communism,” consensus historians dismissed the very concept of American imperialism as “a stock expression in the Marxist vocabulary, connoting, to the leftist mind, both the wickedness and decay of capitalism.” To the extent the United States engaged in imperial policies, Julius Pratt explained in 1950, “peoples of primitive or retarded cultures” needed “guardians to guide and direct their development” hence the US Empire was “benevolent” and “accepted by those living under it.”57