Settler Colonialism

Scholars began to use “settler colonialism” in the 1990s as a reaction to the “colonialism” and “postcolonialism” being “too blunt a tool.”[1] Emerging through Black and Indigenous criticism, settler colonial studies is the more specific consideration of contexts in which colonizers came to stay. Lest we fall victim to yet another form of scholarly erasure, however, it’s important to say that to analyze settler colonialism as a present societal structural, write Rowe and Tuck, is to follow the critical work of Indigenous peoples since at least 1492. In some sense, Indigenous peoples have always demanded that scholars attend to life as it’s lived on stolen Indigenous land.[2] Recently articulated as “settler colonial studies,” this body of thought coalesces around several key insights: First, settler colonialism is a territory-driven project for permanent settler acquisition of “land/water/air/subterranean earth.”[3] Second, it’s an ongoing “structure”—"not an event” that ended after the initial colonial invasion.[4] Third, it “covers its tracks” to naturalize settlement; that is, it seeks to erase public memory of initial and ongoing invasion.[5] Fourth, it blends both internal and external forms of colonization, so that “empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation.”[6] Finally, it’s built upon an “entangled settler-native-slave” triad—three structural positions that are not analogs, but more a set of antagonisms to each other, and to place, that make up settler colonialism’s conceptual order.[7] 

These core insights about life lived on stolen Indigenous land/water/air/subterranean earth make up the primary historical frame of this website. 

My take is that settler colonial studies has the potential to expand contemporary conversations about water politics into more humane territory by linking environmental injustices to a broader historical—but crucially *ongoing*—structure of colonial logics, like primitive accumulation and the logic of elimination. I find it fruitful to use this structure—as opposed to colonialism, which can seem like an abstract grand narrative—to analyze and imagine the conditions of possibility within local, historically specific, and concrete manifestations of water colonialism. 

[1] Jane Carey and Ben Silverstein, “Thinking with and beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories after the Postcolonial,” Postcolonial Studies23, no. 1 (2020): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1719569.

[2] Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–13, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616653693.

[3] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 5.

[4] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

[5] Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648799.

[6] Eve and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 5, 7.

[7] Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” 6; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 7.