Land and Indigenous Peoples

Land is essential to any settler colonial project, and Indigenous nations stood in the way of Angloamerican occupation of the continent. The settlers racialized American Indians as “savage” and “uncivilized,” and then used these depictions to facilitate their strategies of elimination. These included officially sanctioned massacres, privatized violence, forced removals, mass incarcerations, and conceptual disappearance through assimilation and the imposition of identity. Understanding this history allows us to recognize how variants of these strategies both continue into the present and permeate the subjugation of other peoples of color.