Settler colonialism names a specific structure of domination distinct from classical colonialism. Where traditional colonialism primarily exploited Indigenous labour and extracted resources, settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous peoples and replace them with settler populations. The settler comes to stay rather than merely to extract.
Patrick Wolfe articulated this distinction through his formulation that settler colonialism operates through a logic of elimination. This is not primarily genocidal violence, though that remains central. Elimination encompasses diverse mechanisms ranging from physical killing to legal erasure to cultural assimilation. The goal is Indigenous disappearance.
The logic of elimination
Elimination serves a specific function within settler colonial projects. Settlers require land rather than labour. Indigenous peoples therefore represent obstacles to be removed rather than populations to be exploited. This creates fundamentally different colonial dynamics than systems based on slavery or indentured labour.
The logic manifests through multiple technologies. Military conquest and physical violence establish initial control. Legal frameworks then codify dispossession through property regimes treating land as commodity. Assimilation policies aim to absorb Indigenous peoples into settler society. Each mechanism works toward the same end.
Wolfe emphasised that settler colonialism is structure not event. It does not conclude with treaties or constitutional recognition. The logic of elimination operates continuously through institutions, laws and everyday practices. Contemporary Indigenous struggles address ongoing settler colonialism rather than historical injustice.
Distinction from classical colonialism
Classical colonialism established exploitative relationships between metropolitan centres and peripheral colonies. The British Empire exemplified this model. Resources and labour flowed from colonies to imperial centres. Political control served economic extraction.
Settler colonialism operates differently. Settlers do not primarily send wealth back to imperial centres. They establish new polities on Indigenous lands. The United States, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand exemplify settler colonial states. Settlers become the dominant population rather than colonial administrators.
This distinction matters for understanding decolonisation. Classical colonies could achieve independence through expelling colonisers or assuming state control. Settler colonies cannot decolonise through independence because settlers constitute the dominant population. Decolonisation requires fundamentally transforming settler states rather than achieving statehood.
Land and property
Land proves central to settler colonial projects. Settlers require territory for agricultural production, resource extraction and population expansion. Indigenous relationships to land therefore threaten settler sovereignty.
Property regimes constitute key mechanisms for dispossession. English common law treated land as commodity that could be owned, bought and sold. Indigenous peoples often understood land through relationships of care and reciprocity rather than ownership. Imposing property frameworks enabled legal theft.
The doctrine of terra nullius exemplifies how law served elimination. By declaring lands legally empty despite Indigenous presence, settler states legitimated seizure. Contemporary land rights struggles address ongoing effects of these foundational legal fictions.
Elimination through recognition
Glen Coulthard developed crucial analysis of how recognition politics reproduce settler colonialism. When settler states offer Indigenous peoples limited forms of cultural recognition whilst maintaining control over land and resources, this accommodates Indigenous difference within settler frameworks.
Recognition often demands Indigenous peoples prove authenticity according to settler criteria. This creates incentives to perform static indigeneity rather than assert sovereignty. Recognition thereby contains resistance whilst maintaining structural dispossession.
The politics of refusal offers alternative to recognition seeking. Audra Simpson articulated how Haudenosaunee assertions of ongoing sovereignty refuse settler state jurisdiction. Refusal rejects the terms of settler political frameworks rather than seeking accommodation within them.
Temporal dimensions
Settler colonialism operates through specific temporal logics. Mark Rifkin and others have analysed how settler time structures experience and possibility. The settler colonial present treats colonisation as past event rather than ongoing structure. This temporal framing obscures continuity of elimination.
Audra Simpson’s concept of settler colonial presentism names how the fiction of temporal rupture serves power. By treating the present as fundamentally different from the colonial past, settlers avoid confronting how contemporary institutions perpetuate elimination. Indigenous assertions of temporal continuity challenge this framing.
Temporal-sovereignty involves Indigenous peoples determining their own relationships to time. This resists settler imposition of linear progress narratives and monochronic standardised time. Recovering Indigenous temporal systems constitutes decolonial practice.
Biopolitics and elimination
Brendan Hokowhitu and others have analysed how biopolitics functions within settler colonial contexts. Foucault identified biopolitics as power over life focused on managing populations. Settler colonialism deploys biopolitics toward elimination rather than optimisation.
Scott Lauria Morgensen distinguished between genocide and amalgamation as biopolitical strategies. Genocide seeks physical elimination. Amalgamation absorbs Indigenous peoples into settler populations through intermarriage and assimilation. Both serve the logic of elimination.
Contemporary manifestations include child removal policies, restrictions on Indigenous reproduction, and health inequalities producing premature death. These constitute ongoing elimination through biopolitical regulation of Indigenous life.
Crisis and emergency
Epistemologies-of-crisis illuminate how settler states invoke urgency to justify dispossession. Kyle Whyte documented how real or perceived crises become pretexts for eliminating Indigenous presence. Climate change discourse risks reproducing this pattern when mitigation projects dispossess Indigenous lands.
Crisis rhetoric treats present moments as unprecedented emergencies requiring immediate action. This presentism obscures how crises emerge from settler colonial structures. It also erases Indigenous adaptive capacities developed across generations of forced displacement.
Settlers historically used soil depletion, resource scarcity and security threats to justify seizure. Contemporary examples include hydroelectric dams framed as national development and carbon offset projects presented as climate solutions. The crisis framing suspends ethical considerations and Indigenous rights.
Intimacy and domesticity
Ann Stoler’s work on colonial intimacies reveals how power operates through domestic and affective relations. Settler colonialism functions through state violence and everyday intimacies. Family structures, child-rearing practices and sexual relations became sites of elimination.
Residential schools exemplify how intimacy served genocide. Removing children from families and communities disrupted kinship transmission of knowledge and identity. The violence was physical, sexual and psychological. It aimed to eliminate Indigenous futures by severing intergenerational connections.
Contemporary child welfare systems continue this logic. Indigenous children remain disproportionately removed from families. The state frames removal as protection whilst perpetuating the same eliminatory pattern. Decolonisation requires confronting how care and violence intertwine within settler institutions.
Heteropatriarchy and gender
Indigenous feminists have demonstrated how heteropatriarchy functions as colonial tool. Andrea Smith and others argue that imposing rigid gender hierarchies restructured Indigenous societies to enable land theft and political control.
Many Indigenous societies featured gender diversity and women’s political authority. Colonisers imposed patriarchal family structures and male-dominated governance. This served multiple functions. It weakened Indigenous political systems. It facilitated land transfer through male property ownership. It disrupted kinship systems organising Indigenous life.
Sexual violence against Indigenous women constitutes ongoing elimination. Jennifer Denetdale and Sarah Deer document how five centuries of colonial policy produced epidemic rates of assault. Violence against land and violence against Indigenous women prove interconnected rather than separate.
National and transnational dimensions
Settler colonialism manifests distinctly across different contexts whilst sharing structural features. The United States, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand developed through similar logics applied to different Indigenous peoples and environments.
Comparative Indigenous Studies examines homologies across settler states. Coll Allen’s concept of trans-Indigenous Studies addresses how Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters occur within and against structures of various colonialisms. Shared patterns enable solidarity whilst respecting place-based specificities.
Global dimensions include how settler states export elimination logic. Israeli occupation of Palestine employs settler colonial mechanisms. Understanding structural patterns enables analysis beyond individual nation-states whilst attending to particular histories.
Resistance and resurgence
Settler colonialism generates ongoing Indigenous resistance. This takes diverse forms from legal challenges to land occupations to cultural revitalisation. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and others articulate resurgence as Indigenous peoples rebuilding nations and regenerating cultures outside settler frameworks.
Resurgence differs from resistance alone. Where resistance opposes settler power, resurgence centres Indigenous practices and relationships. It involves recovering languages, ceremonial practices and governance systems. Resurgence asserts Indigenous presence rather than merely refusing settler dominance.
Contemporary movements like Idle No More and land defence camps embody both resistance and resurgence. They block extractive industries whilst asserting Indigenous law and responsibility to land. This dual character challenges settler sovereignty through Indigenous assertion.
Decolonisation
Decolonisation in settler colonial contexts cannot mean what it meant in classical colonies. Independence already occurred when settlers established states. Decolonisation requires fundamentally transforming or dismantling settler states rather than achieving statehood.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang insist decolonisation is not metaphor. It centrally concerns land repatriation and Indigenous sovereignty. Using decolonisation to name other justice projects dilutes its specific meaning. Solidarity with other struggles matters but decolonisation has particular content.
What decolonisation looks like remains contested. Some envision reformed treaties and shared sovereignty. Others argue settler states cannot be reformed only replaced. The question of whether settlers can participate in decolonisation or whether they must simply stop being settlers remains unresolved.
The difficulty of imagining decolonisation reflects how thoroughly settler colonialism structures existing institutions and consciousness. Decolonisation requires not merely policy changes but transforming fundamental relationships to land, property and political authority. This proves conceptually and practically challenging within settler frameworks.