Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States by Kevin Bruyneel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States by Kevin Bruyneel Kristalyn Shefveland Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States By Kevin Bruyneel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 227. Notes, index. Clothbound, $95.00; paperbound, $27.95.) Kevin Bruyneel, professor of politics at Babson College and engaged scholar of Indigenous Studies, interweaves historical events through political analysis and the pervasive damage of settler colonialism and settler memory. In a series of case study chapters, Bruyneel juxtaposes modern Native communities, settler memory of Native peoples, and the historical precedent of settler perspectives in the writing and erasure of Native peoples from the record and popular memory. Bruyneel argues that "simultaneous absence and presence of Indigeneity is inherent to the popular politics, discourse, and debate about race in the United States and in U.S. political life in general" (p. 2). Bruyneel asks about the role of settler memory in racial politics and discourse, imagining "what it would look like if Indigeneity and settler colonialism were no longer faint traces but rather active constituents of contemporary politics and discourse in and of the United States" (p. 9). Bruyneel's framework is provocative, thought-provoking, and an example of how to reexamine the privileging of white settlers in American history. His [End Page 95] chapter on Bacon's Rebellion, however, loses some of its strength by noting the work of only one contemporary historian, James Rice. While generations of historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists wrote narratives that either marginalized or completely ignored the Native perspective, Rice has labored to shift the focus back to the role of Indigenous peoples in Bacon's Rebellion and consider its impact on Indian Country. Over the last several decades, however, other scholars such as C. S. Everett, Christina Snyder, Robbie Ethridge, Maureen Meyers, Edward Dubois Ragan, and Ethan Schmidt have highlighted the Indigenous story. Importantly, and linked to Bruyneel's argument, these authors have demonstrated the importance of settler violence towards Native peoples, including the role of Indigenous enslavement and the goals of land dispossession. By meticulously reexamining Reconstruction, the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, and the legacy of land, Bruyneel showcases the power of settler memory and a persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. As a solution, he offers a "recomposed memory of Reconstruction" that can tell the story of "layers of dispossession experienced by Black and Indigenous peoples" (p. 65). Bruyneel's chapter on the powerful literary tradition of James Baldwin also highlights the ever-present settler memory of Indigenous peoples, the legacy of white settler masculinity, and its pervasiveness within American society, so intrinsic that it infiltrates Baldwin's perspective on whiteness and white supremacy. "Out of the tensions of his grappling with the settler resonance of U.S. white supremacy," Bruyneel argues, "Baldwin offered us words that cut to the core of how the violent settler colonial foundation of the United States maintains a shaping force on the present" (p. 109). In Chapters Four and Five, Bruyneel juxtaposes historical settler memory to its immediate impact on contemporary politics and Native identities, considering the case of American sports culture and mascots, as well as white settler nationalism in the era of Donald Trump, a populist who deliberately evoked the era of Indian Removal and Andrew Jackson. By focusing on the ubiquity of settler memories of Native peoples through caricatures and stereotypes, Bruyneel shows settler memory at work on the national consciousness, rendering Native peoples at once ubiquitous and marginalized, as "simultaneously there and not there in the larger story being told" (p. 167). Through the lens of settler masculinity and heteropatriarchy, the violence of dispossession, and the history of race, Bruyneel carefully deconstructs historical and contemporary events by confronting American collective settler memory that disavows genocide, dispossession, and the alienation of Indigenous peoples. [End Page 96] Kristalyn Shefveland University of Southern Indiana Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Indiana University