In the contemporary Western academy, especially in the USA, the repudiation of binarism partakes of a certain sacredness. Not only are its premises unquestionable, though they certainly are. More strictly, and in keeping with Durkheimian fundamentals, the repudiation of binarism expresses membership of a collectivity that constitutes the source and origin of righteousness. Hence the heat that typically accompanies its enactment. An identification is at stake. In notable contrast to the customary wordiness of scholarly interchange, the repudiation in question is typically expressed with emphatic brevity, the charge of binarism constituting one of the more conversation-stopping items in academic theory's inventory of reprimands. Despite the semblance of consensus, however, a dissenting positionality persists. As one who argues that settler colonialism is premised on a zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, I have regularly been accused of binarism – though not once by a Native. Why should it be that the spectre of binarism, so disturbing to non-Native sensibilities, should be less troubling to Natives? More provocatively, could it be that the repudiation of binarism represents a settler perspective? To the extent that this may be the case, the heat that the issue generates is revealing. It takes us directly to the affective dimensions of settler subjecthood, a conflictual realm that many of the essays in the first volume of this special collection opened up.¹

To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all its empirical inadequacy, the concept of the frontier has the virtue of expressing the protean fact of a historical coming together of societies that had previously been mutually discrete. Prior to a certain point or points, their separateness had been unqualified. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion – a cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing the existence of an unqualified empirical binarism. The question is not, therefore, one of the ground for binarism, but one of where and when – if at all – the originary binarism became dissolved or transcended. Significantly, scholars of the doctrine of discovery have not questioned the polarity of Natives and Europeans, so we can take it that the requisite historical rupture – assuming it occurred – was postponed for some centuries in the wake of Columbus.² A breakthrough, if such it can be called, came in the USA in the form of the Marshall court's concept of domestic dependent nationhood, which decisively compromised the inconvenient binarism hitherto presupposed in the formalities of separate national sovereignties. In failing to distinguish adequately between Indian sovereignty and that assigned to European nations, the embryonic republican legal system had set US and Indian sovereignties in counterpoint to each other. Cherokee v. Georgia downgraded that theoretical symmetry, encompassing Indian sovereignty within and below that of the USA without jettisoning the language of statecraft.³ In so doing, the judgement adapted the horizontal vocabulary of international relations to the vertical reality of domination.⁴ As such, Marshall's pluralist innovation was emphatically unilateral. It expressed conquest, which hardly undoes opposition. Despite the rhetoric of coexistence, in other words, the judgements in no way undid the binary reality. Rather, the rhetoric of coexistence served as an instrument of conquest, as the Jacksonian removals that coincided with the judgements so brutally demonstrated. Accordingly, far from a historical rupture, the Marshall episode suggests that the denial of binarism may itself constitute an instrument of conquest. Moreover, in the contemporary US academy, Marshall does not lack apologists.⁵ Where, then, is the rupture?

The primal binarism that is maximally visible during the era of the frontier subsequently becomes less and less visible in settler-colonial discourse – which, as Lorenzo Veracini has pointed out, persistently seeks its own transcendence through declaring itself a thing of the past.⁶ In the wake of the frontier – and here at least I agree with Frederick Jackson Turner – something very important happens. The end of the frontier marks the end of the centuries-long process whereby Natives have been being transformed, spatially at least, from outsiders into insiders. They have become surrounded by, and contained within, settler society. Typically, this is a drawn-out process. Removal only postpones it. Sooner or later, the land hungry, the diggers of gold, the extractors of oil, the scalpers, the doggers, the sex workers, the pastoralists, the railroad men and the farmers – Turner's whole litany of types – arrive at the boundaries of the substitute homelands to which Natives have been removed and the process starts all over again, aggravated by the fact that, the second or third time around, Natives' ties to their land are that much less robust.⁷

In the wake of this protracted historical containment, with no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy.⁸ To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream. Without minimising the catastrophic long-term death rates that settler colonialism has brought about, therefore, we should not view the logic of elimination as solely a drive to exterminate Native human beings. Rather, as Colonel Richard Pratt was well aware, the irreconcilable Native difference that settler polities seek to eliminate can be detached from the individual, whose bare life can be reassigned within the set of settler social categories, a social death of Nativeness.⁹ Hence the demonisation of Indigenous collectivity in the immediately post-frontier Dawes-era USA, which persisted until John Collier devised a scheme, incorporated in the 1934 Indian Reorganisation Act, whereby tribal organisation might itself be domesticated.¹⁰ As in the case of Marshall, this strategy sought to neutralise Natives' irreducible externality to the settler social contract. In both cases (Marshall and Collier), tribal autonomy would be diminished through incorporation rather than opposition. This situation prompts me to register an appreciative disagreement with Veracini, who has aptly pointed out – my disagreement being with his inference rather than with the point itself – that settlers bring their sovereignty with them.¹¹ This enables Veracini to distinguish between settlers and immigrants, the latter being those who do not bring a sovereignty with them. On its own terms, this distinction seems questionable (where, for instance, does it leave White settlers of Irish descent?). Even assuming Veracini's triadic scheme, however (settlers, immigrants and Natives), Natives remain distinct as the only bearers of sovereignties that exceed the monistic version that settlers imported with them, immigrants having abandoned or been made to forfeit their own. This awkward fact has prompted settler authorities' repeated attempts to represent the unilateral as consensual. In the USA, from the treaty era onwards, Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives' consent to their own dispossession. Not only is this situation inherently binary but a preoccupation common to these policy alternations, which have all sought to incorporate Natives either individually or collectively, has been the suppression of that very binarism. To this extent, the post-structuralist indictment of binarism endorses colonial policy-making. Thus it is naïve, if not consciously complicit, for academic discourse to recapitulate multiculturalism's claim to have subverted a binarism of White vs. the rest. Rather, multiculturalism maintains settler authorities' historical suppression of Indigenous specificity into the so-called ‘post-racist’ era. As we have seen, frontier history raises the question of when, if at all, the colonial binarism became diluted or pluralised. Assimilationists do not doubt its persistence. Rather than when the original binarism became diluted, they want to know how it can be diluted in the present. Thus the matter goes to the core of the politics of academic representations.

In deploying its administrative resources to suppress Native difference, settler discourse concedes institutional life to the very problem it seeks to eliminate. For something to be suppressed, it must first exist. By its very charter, an Office of Indian Affairs or an Aborigines Department attests to the persistence of the Native problem. During the era of the frontier, this is only to be expected. Territory, together with its Native population, remains to be conquered, so there remains an acknowledged external threat that requires institutional management. In the wake of the frontier, however, the continued need for institutional management becomes anomalous, attesting as it does to the persistence of a refractory externality that proclaims conquest not to be complete after all. To the extent that conquest remains incomplete, as Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch suggest in their chapter below, the settler state rests – or, more to the point, fails to rest – on incomplete foundations. Here, then, is an affective ground for the settler anxiety that binarism provokes: it signals incompleteness. In seeking to internalise the Native problem, the settler state seeks to complete itself. This requirement is independent of simple demographic numbers. It persists so long as uncontained alternative sovereignties, areas of incompleteness, persist within the bounds of the settler polity. To contain these alternatives – to complete its polity – settler discourse seeks to de-politicise them. To this end, a key strategy is to conflate the Native problem with internal disorders such as crime, insanity and cognate forms of delinquency or neglect. For the external to be rendered internal, in other words, the political is rendered technical. A well-known, if premature, example of this device was the transfer of the US Office of Indian Affairs from the War Department to the newly created Department of the Interior, which took place in 1849, when the US Cavalry had barely set hoof on the Great Plains.¹² The transfer's prematurity was consistent with settler expansion. It expressed a desire for completion. As such, it prefigured the rash of anti-tribal initiatives, mopping-up for operations for civilisation, which rapidly complexified US Indian affairs administration in the Dawes years following the end of the frontier.

The more the Native question is problematised, however, the less it goes away. In mobilising against Native specificity, settler discourse inadvertently supplements Native agency, chronically reinscribing the frontier in domestic discourses ostensibly addressed to technical means rather than political ends. Thus abetted, the Native repressed insistently returns to haunt post-frontier settler culture.¹³ This confounding of attempts to negate the Native/settler binary is a phenomenon of considerable generality. I have more than once cited a striking example of assimilationist propaganda to illustrate the extension of eliminationist logic into Australian domestic discourse.¹⁴ I return to the example here for two reasons: first, for comparative purposes, to connect my earlier analysis to the cross-cultural observation (between Australia and the USA) that, in the post-frontier era, settler authorities characteristically seek to depoliticise Indigenous externality through rendering it a technical problem for civic administration and, second, for analytical purposes, to illustrate the new point that settler attempts to suppress the Indigenous binary are inherently contradictory and, as such, are more likely to sustain their object than to suppress it.

In 1947, A.O. Neville, who for the preceding quarter century had served as Protector of Aborigines for the state of Western Australia, published an exculpatory memoir entitled Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in The Community. In Australian parlance of the time, ‘coloured’ referred to people whose biological ancestry encompassed both Native and settler components. The proposition that such people should be in ‘the’ (i.e. White people's) community distinguished them from ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal people, who were classified as external to settler society. On the basis of this elementary assimilationism, Neville had presided over an official campaign of child abduction, whereby countless Indigenous children, generally of relatively light complexion, had been taken from their families without warning or pretence of consent, typically by force or by stealth, the express intention being their merger into White society. Though the post-war context in which his book appeared was dominated by news of the Nuremberg trials, with negotiations over the terms of Raphaël Lemkin's proposed genocide convention in full swing at the newly established United Nations, the principal problem that Neville acknowledged for his policy was not its genocidal nature. Rather, he was concerned that candidates for adopting the stolen children could be deterred by the prospect of atavistic throwbacks, whereby subsequent generations of their putatively White families might produce Black offspring. To allay this concern, Neville presented the following illustration. Duly buttressed by anthropological technicalities, this image was intended to show that, given successive admixtures of Whiteness, Aboriginal genes could be expected to recede evenly through the generations (Figure 1). ¹⁵

Figure 1. Neville, Australia's Coloured Minority, facing p. 72.

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For the purposes of my present argument, the key factor in this picture is its numerical limit. Aboriginality ends with the boy. To the left of him (his right), all is Whiteness. Thus the racial arithmetic (‘full’, ‘half’, etc.) is not an expression of static degrees. Rather, it is a three-generational lap count to extinction. This, then, is the settler-colonial logic of elimination in one of its discreetly technocratic post-frontier modalities. Despite the semblance of plurality in the hierarchical arrangement of the depicted subjects, their internal variety serves to maintain the fundamental cut-off separating them from the Whiteness that extends, invisible and unqualified, from the left-hand edge of the picture. Neville's illustration was intended to vouchsafe an elementary binarism that claimed intermediate anomalies for the dominant pole.

On its surface, Neville's fractional mathematical idiom directly parallels blood quantum discourse in the USA. Moreover, as various scholars and activists have pointed out, the outcome – the attrition of Indigenous numbers – is also consistent. While this consequence of blood quantum has been well critiqued,¹⁶ the idiom's operative terminology remains largely unexamined. Why, in particular, mathematics, and why its particular combination with blood? Posing the question thus highlights the simple fact that blood, being liquid, readily lends itself to quantification. It would be impossible to calibrate, say, culture or politics with comparable precision. As such, blood is well adapted to sustain the technical vocabulary that, as observed, supplants the political language of international relations in post-frontier settler discourse. As in the case of skull measurement, the politics are overwhelmed by the objective technicalities of numerical reasoning.¹⁷ Thus blood quantum perfectly satisfies the requirements of a political ideology. As classically formulated by Marx and Engels, ideologies have two primary characteristics: they legitimate the hegemony of a particular social group, and they do so by assimilating that hegemony to nature, which places it beyond human intervention.¹⁸ As a measurable liquid, blood straightforwardly constitutes an object of natural science, a quality that powerfully legitimates blood-quantum discourse's furtherance of the settler-colonial logic of elimination.

A related consequence of blood quantum's mathematical phrasing is more specific to the suppression of binarism. As we saw in the Neville illustration, the proliferation of fractions can obscure the priority of the division separating Natives from settler society. In the USA, this effect is hyperelaborated in the Bureau of Indian Affairs's blood-quantum reckonings, which reflect the exigencies of tribal enrolment and titular succession from the allotment rolls that were instituted at the dawn of the twentieth century. Though terms such as ‘full-blood’, ‘mixed-blood’ and ‘half-breed’ had been common enough for most of the nineteenth century, it was not until Dawes commissioners confronted the problem of determining which Indians should be entitled to individual allotments of reservation land, and of what extent, that these casual designations came to acquire mathematical refinement. This development can be dated, with some precision, from the year before Turner published his seminal essay on the frontier.¹⁹

19. Turner's ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ was read before the Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association in July 1893, subsequently being published in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in December 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1893). For the full text, see The Frontier in American History (American Studies Program, University of Virginia, 1920, c. 1): http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/. An earlier version of its central thesis, entitled ‘Problems in American History’, had been published in the Wisconsin student publication The Ægis in November 1892, a bare three months after Commissioner Morgan's report. These were by no means the only contemporary symptoms of the end of the frontier. Two years previously, in 1890, less than three years after the passing of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, the US Bureau of the Census had reported the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line (Robert Porter, Henry Gannett and William Hunt, ‘Progress of the Nation’, in Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1895, xviii–xxxiv)). Two decades prior to that, however, in 1871, Congress had already voted to discontinue the practice of treaty making with Indian tribes (16 Stat. [US], 566, c. 120, s. 1). In collective consciousness, however, as Philip Deloria has observed, 1890, the year of General Nelson Miles's massacre at Wounded Knee, marks the profoundest of ruptures: ‘Wounded Knee – ostensibly the last instance of armed resistance and violent betrayal – organizes the big break between the possibility and the impossibility of military struggle, and it does so as a cross-tribal and cross-cultural milepost’. Crucially, though, as Deloria goes on to note – and luminously depict – the end of the era of Indians' armed military resistance signalled a redeployment, not a suspension or cessation, of Indian resistance: ‘Across Indian country, the recognition of military defeat had pushed Native people to develop strategies for continuing the struggle. Treaty organizations, regional political organizations, pan-Indian reform groups, Indian fraternal organizations…Native actors sought to participate in a struggle waged on the cultural front, particularly through the developing forms of mass media, which promised to reach larger audiences’. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: Kansas, UP, 2004): 16; 104.View all notes

Writing in 1892, Indian Affairs Commissioner T.J. Morgan distinguished the rigorous quantifications that the administrative requirements of tribal allotment had necessitated from the looser usage of earlier eras.²⁰ Back in 1856, Morgan declared, it had been enough for Attorney-General Caleb Cushing simply to recommend that: ‘half-breeds (and in his opinion he seems to use the expressions half-breeds and mixed-bloods interchangeably), should be treated by the executive as Indians in all respects so long as they retain their tribal relations’.²¹ So unfamiliar was his refinement, however, that Morgan proceeded immediately to ignore it, going on to refer to Chief John Ross, whose detractors never tired of pointing to his seven white great-grandparents, as ‘a Cherokee chief, who was a half-breed’.²² In the event, Morgan's innovation was to have disastrous consequences for the thousands of Indians who found themselves excluded (or, with political misjudgement, excluded themselves) from the Dawes rolls,²³ an eliminatory effect that was subsequently compounded by the additional blood-quantum provisions that would accompany tribal enrolment under the Indian New Deal of the 1930s.²⁴ Blood quantum furnished a post-frontier analogue to the Vanishing Indian. Thus it was not only on the surface that the BIA's mathematical idiom resembled Neville's Australian formula, for which it constitutes a precedent. In either case, racial arithmetic provided for the social death of Nativeness. It would be hard to find a more extreme example of numerical fractions obscuring a governing binarism than the obsessively elaborated sanguinary catalogue that was still being included in a fieldworkers' manual put out by the Phoenix, Arizona, office of the BIA in 1984 (Figure 2):

Figure 2. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Phoenix Area Office, Tribal Enrollment (Phoenix, AZ: BIA, 1984), Appendix E, 67.

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This morbid excess of reason – which would surely stretch the point beyond credibility had it not actually been issued for official use – exemplifies the statistical overwhelming of binarism with manic clarity. While the chart conspicuously specifies, in the box outlined in bold in the bottom left-hand corner, that ‘N.I. means Non-Indian’, only one of its 593 classifications (the one at top left) is actually occupied by the designation ‘N.I.’.²⁵ The other 592 classifications all denote descending degrees of Indianness. The governing discrimination, in relation to which all the others are hierarchically organised, is that designating the monolithic self-sufficiency of the Non-Indian category, a classificatory black (or White) hole that systematically draws the smaller fractions of Indianness into itself. Beneath the bamboozling variety of its surface, this chart actually provides for two cardinal categories, Indian and Non-Indian. Unqualified and self-sufficient, the lone monolith in the top left-hand corner, like the Whiteness extending invisibly beyond the left-hand edge of Neville's illustration, is a cut-off that reinscribes the frontier in contemporary bureaucratic procedure.

In comparison to the Australian example, however, the category ‘Non-Indian’ is notable for its ethnic versatility. To establish themselves, the Australian colonies did not import enslaved people.²⁶ Rather, the coerced labour put to work in Australia was initially provided by convicts, an almost exclusively White group who did not transmit their condition to succeeding generations. As a result, the racial politics of Australian settler society have developed very differently from the situation in the USA. In keeping with the aims of the White Australia Policy, Aboriginal assimilation provided for a departure from Aboriginality that was simultaneously an entry into Whiteness. The two were synonymous. Whiteness was the only destination. In the USA, by contrast, there were other destinations. In particular, the post-slavery ‘one-drop’ rule provided for Indigeneity to be overwhelmed by Blackness as well as by Whiteness – a situation that has not only been exploited by settler society but, of late, by some Native groups as well.²⁷ Thus comparison with the US example enables us to clarify an ambiguity in settler discourse that is left unresolved in the Australian case. Native assimilation is not primarily a recruitment into Whiteness. If that were so, it would be hard to see its purpose, as supplementary White people can be acquired more easily through immigration. Rather, Native assimilation is primarily an elimination of Indigeneity. In the case of Indians being made Black under the provisions of the one-drop rule, two ethnocratic goals are achieved simultaneously: Indian elimination and White racial purity. Those who promote racist exclusions within Indian tribes might do well to reflect on this consideration.

The semblance of plurality that emerges from assimilation's extravagant mathematics is not, of course, without foundation. As groups of immigrants who have arrived under widely varying dispensations, from bondage to subsidised passage, settler societies typically evince a high degree of internal heterogeneity. Indeed, this was the focus of the first volume of this collection. But the existence of major differentiations within settler (and, for that matter, within Native) societies does not alter the binary nature of the Native/settler divide. The respective differentiations are of different orders. In this connection, it is important not to be misled by voluntarism. The opposition between Native and settler is a structural relationship rather than an effect of the will. The fact that I, for example, am an Australian settler is not a product of my individual consciousness. Rather, it is a historical condition that preceded me. Neither I nor other settlers can will our way out of it, whether we want to or not. No doubt our respective individual consciousnesses affect how each of us responds to this shared historical positionality, but they did not create it and they cannot undo it. The fact that enslaved people immigrated against their will – to cite the most compelling case for voluntarism – does not alter the structural fact that their presence, however involuntary, was part of the process of Native dispossession. White convicts also came against their will. Does this mean that their descendants are not settlers? There could hardly be a better illustration of the determinate nature of structural relations than the recent report that the Jewish Agency has been recruiting Native Peruvians from Iquitos, in the Amazonian rainforest, to bolster the population of Israeli colonies in occupied Palestine. Allegedly, the recruits in question trace their descent from a group of Mizrahi Jews from the Maghreb who migrated to the Amazon region in the nineteenth century to work in the rubber industry. More than 250 are reported to have arrived in the 1990s, with a further 100 currently having their applications considered by the Israeli Interior Ministry.²⁸ Regardless of the outcome of the Israeli Interior Ministry's deliberations (the Jewish Agency has reportedly been asked to supply ‘complementary’ evidence in relation to the group), the mere possibility of Natives from one country being enlisted as settlers in a different people's country demonstrates the supra-individual, structural contingency of the designations ‘Native’ and ‘settler’. It also highlights the error of essentialising Nativeness. The state of being Native is not an inherent quality that individuals carry anywhere with them. In addition to its cultural and political dimensions, it is structural and site-specific. Circumstances permitting, there is nothing to prevent colonised Natives from one region becoming settlers in a different region (think, for instance, of Native American soldiers stationed in Hawai'i). It is very important to note that this does not entail a statement about either the historical fortunes or the moral worth of (in this case) putatively Jewish-Amerindian individuals. Regardless of the conditions that motivated their dealings with the Jewish Agency, their presence in occupied Palestine would take space and resources away from Native people, a consequence that would not be affected by the conditions they encountered on arrival. From the 1950s on, when recently arrived Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) were relegated to marginal transit camps (ma'abarot), Israel made a practice of populating frontier areas with low-status immigrant groups.²⁹ Such divisions are, however, internal to Israeli settler society. They do not affect the subordinate groups' participation, willing or otherwise, in the colonial process. Whatever differences may distinguish the individual motivations of stigmatised Mizrahim (or, for that matter, Peruvians) from the eliminationist fanaticism of army-backed religious settlers, they share the historical situatedness of being part of the process of Palestinian dispossession.

As a collective designation, Nativeness – Indigeneity – is acknowledged rather than claimed. The sound made by the clap of the Wannabe Indian's solitary hand is its very silence: the lack of acknowledgement from community and, with it, the resounding absence of a tie to the invaded land. Settler discourse is replete with such wishful usurpations, from Israeli restaurants passing off Palestinian tabbouleh as ‘Israeli salad’, through the New Age's envious parodying of Indigenous spirituality (which ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui learnedly unravels in her chapter below), to the portentous appropriations of Nativeness that adorn settler banknotes and government buildings.³⁰ But history shows through. In claiming an entitlement that can only be trumped by Native priority, settler ventriloquism undoes itself.³¹ In his chapter, Dean Saranillio notes how, in the memoir of a Filippino state governor of Hawai'i, the common settler claim to be ‘Hawaiian at heart’ is bolstered by a parapraxis that, in spite of itself, cannot but yield the turf to Native priority: ‘I've lived in Hawai'i long enough to feel I'm Hawaiian’. In the attempt to usurp, the settler reluctantly cedes.

In the context of academic discourse on settler colonialism, Saranillio's acute critique of Governor Cayetano's genealogical pretensions is notable for its relative impartiality to race. Since most of the world has been colonised – or, more specifically, settler-colonised – by White people, it is only to be expected that the critique of settler supremacism should converge with the critique of White supremacism as consistently as the two converge in practice. In addition to benefiting from dispossession, White settlers also benefit from race, the two colonial privileges being fused and mutually compounding in social life. For all their operational cohesion, however, the two are categorically distinct. If they were not distinct, we would have to presume that Tibetans, West Papuans, Khoi-san, Kashmiris and others in comparable predicaments should take solace from the fact that their colonisers are not White. Campaigning against White supremacism would not help these people. It would be more likely to delight their colonisers. In the Hawaiian case, the initial invasion was a White-only initiative, albeit rapidly endorsed, as Saranillio observes, by Japanese plantation labourers petitioning for participation in the newly imposed political system. As I have repeatedly pointed out, however, invasion is a structure not an event. The dispossession of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) is not a past occurrence that came and went in the 1890s. Rather, it commenced much earlier than that and has been maintained, reproduced, transformed and extended ever since, processes that continue to preserve the conditions for their own reproduction into the future.³² The ongoing suppression of Kanaka Maoli governance and land tenure was a precondition for the importation – which is to say, immigration – of indentured Pacific labourers onto US-owned plantations in Hawai'i. That suppression remains directly continuous with current attempts even further to erode Kanaka Maoli entitlement to the Ceded (or, as they are bitterly dubbed, Seized) Lands.³³ Very obviously, two distinct colonial relationships of inequality are involved here: one (the dispossession of Natives) centring on land and the other (the exploitation of immigrants) centring on labour.³⁴ Through their combination – the application of immigrants' labour to Natives' land – colonial surplus value is generated. US imperialism conjoins and depends on both historical relationships. To be effective, therefore, anti-imperial solidarities must also conjoin the two (inter alia). But solidarity is not assimilation. To conjoin is not to dissolve. To work together, differences have to be integrated rather than levelled. Failing this, the beneficiary is imperialism itself, the prime locus of White supremacism which, as Saranillio shows, maintains itself in Hawai'i by ceaselessly orchestrating Kanaka Maoli and Asian-settler differences. As observed in the first volume of this collection, solidarities misguidedly predicated on a blindness to history encourage discord rather than unity.³⁵ Imperialism is an inherently complex transnational formation that requires correspondingly complex responses. For anti-imperial purposes, to homogenise is to divide.

The need to spell out these elementary considerations arises from an intervention that Saranillio's chapter is partly devoted to addressing. With scant regard for the differences between the various historical articulations whereby particular conquered populations have been co-opted into imperial formations, Nandita Sharma and her co-writers have invoked a historically flattened concept, the so-called ‘global commons’, which takes levelling to the point of self-identification.³⁶ For all its rhetoric of subaltern inclusiveness, Sharma's ‘commons’ is actually a markedly exclusive construct, informed by a concept of exploitation that has no place for Native rights.³⁷ In a manner suggestive of the category ‘public land’ that Israel uses to dispossess Palestinians, the bulk of the ‘commons’ that Sharma seeks to appropriate and redistribute actually belongs to Natives.³⁸ Safely relegated into the past, however, territorial dispossession ceases to apply, so that Sharma and her fellow-travellers can migrate innocently between expropriated homelands (in her case, Canada and Hawai'i) without needing to account for the ongoing colonial spoliation on which their blithe peregrinations are predicated. Given its elimination of the Native domain, it is consistent that Sharma's writing should reproduce related features of settler-colonial discourse as well (in addition, that is, to her orchestration of Kanaka Maoli and Asian-settler differences). For instance, as Saranillio also observes, her unfounded fantasy that the critique of settler colonialism represents a desire to expel Asians from Hawai'i reprises the common settler reversal, whereby imagined violence on the part of Indigenous movements ‘allows Native savagery to stand in for settler self-critique’.³⁹ This reversal is, of course, a very general phenomenon, whereby settler excesses are routinely attributed to their victims. Where the fantasy of expulsion is concerned, for instance, one thinks of the oft-expressed fear on the part of Israelis, who, having driven the majority of the Natives into the sand in 1948, returning to the attempt in 1967, insist that it is they themselves who are in danger – of being driven into the sea.

Colonial resonances pervade Sharma's thinking. For example, her global commons is counterposed to White supremacy. Whatever else one may wish to say about it (and there is much to say, not least about the racial essentialism), this racial binary means that, in excluding the Native movement from the global commons, Sharma is assimilating it to the White pole. Lest there be any doubt that this is her implication, she confirms it by dubbing proponents of the Native movement, represented in the critique of settler colonialism, ‘neo-racists’ – an epithet that could hardly situate the Native movement more firmly on the White-supremacist side of her scenario.⁴⁰ Moreover, since Sharma does not point to any era when racism has fallen into abeyance, it is hard to see why she should depict it as requiring renovation. Rather, it would seem that the prefix ‘neo-’ furnishes her with a way to avoid spelling out the inescapable absurdity entailed in her analysis, which attributes racism to Native self-defence. For ‘neo-racism’, read ‘Native racism’. This absurdity is the price that Sharma pays for seeking to replace the primacy of a historical relationship (invasion, occupation, settlement, ongoing resistance) with that of an ahistorical – which is to say, essentialised – concept of race, whose only value would seem to lie in its false promise of absolution from her own involvement in settler colonialism. In the event, rather than challenging either White supremacy or settler colonialism, let alone the two together, Sharma ends up bolstering both, negating the movement for Native rights by assimilating it to White supremacism.

But Saranillio has larger concerns than responding to Sharma. As he illustrates in his concluding cameo, a human diorama of the hemispheric networks that brought the different branches of his family to share colonial servitude in Hawai'i, imperialism reconfigures global histories at the local level. In their daily struggle to rise above the banalities of exploitation on a small portion of the most remote of Pacific archipelagos, three generations of this unexceptional family have confronted the combined historical weight of British, Spanish, Japanese and, ultimately, US imperialisms.⁴¹ It would be hard to find a better example of settler colonialism's dual structuring. In addition to being continuous across time, as structure rather than event, settler colonialism is structured in the morphological sense, in that it is globally complex. Settlers, by definition, come from somewhere else.⁴² They bring other histories with them, forged in other places, and expropriate Native homelands into global formations. These two structural dimensions – temporal continuity and spatial interconnectedness – are mutually reinforcing. Compared to the fixity of the Indigenous stock, settler resources are elastic and globally reproducible. There are always more settlers where the first ones came from – and, if needs be, from somewhere else. The same applies to the import of capital, drawn by the prospect of the cheap expropriated land that settler invasion makes available. This global elasticity ensures that the local contest is recurrently and ever-augmentably weighted against the Native, reinforcing the settler advantage across time.

The need to accommodate a fractious convergence of migrant populations, often bringing long-established metropolitan enmities with them, renders ‘new-world’ societies susceptible to democratic ideologies that exchange immigrants' historical baggage for the unmarked equivalence of egalitarian individualism. Externally, this inclusiveness has an exclusive complement, though that condition can be qualified by White supremacism, as in the acolyte status of non-citizen Whites in the early-republican USA.⁴³ With particular reference to the expropriation of Native peoples, the Janus-faced quality whereby settler ideologies combine individualism internally with exclusivism externally has two principal outcomes. While their external exception renders Natives' rights, in particular their property rights, of a lesser order than the entitlements available to White people, an inclusive rhetoric of egalitarianism also makes Natives readily assimilable into the immigrant mix – so long, that is, as their difference is reconstituted in terms of ethnicity rather than sovereignty. Minus their real estate, Natives can be merged into the melting pot. Thus it is important to recognise settlers' imported advantage, the global legacy that I have termed preaccumulation, in cultural as well as material terms, as a historical endowment of consciousness.⁴⁴ European settlers brought with them historically specific ideologies of class, race, gender and nation that had participated decisively in collective subjugations at home and abroad. A core element in this ideological inheritance was the figure of homo economicus, whose formal contractual rationality – mechanical, impersonal and, above all, context-neutral – rendered him maximally free of historical accretions and, accordingly, maximally adaptable to a society in the making. As Max Weber seemed to recognise in setting so much of his analysis of the emergence of the capitalist ethic in the USA, though without spelling this out: the anonymous means-end optimiser of the capitalist market place was simultaneously the ideal settler-coloniser, homo assimilans.⁴⁵ For the paradigm expression of colonial capitalist rationality, however, we turn not to Weber but, as Manu Vimalassery does in his chapter, to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Perhaps even more than the writings of John Locke, this canonical text, as Vimalassery shows, stands in relation to settler capitalism both as symptom – being an elective affinity par excellence – and, reciprocally, as a powerful programme, a manual for reproducing expansion into the future.

With dense precision – you have to read him slowly – Vimalassery tracks the logic of capitalist accumulation from Smith's insouciance concerning the dispossession of Native Americans to the modern global economy. Though the logic is constant, the scope of its operations shifts from geography to temporality, as the new world expands from continental specificity to constitute the fateful phase of pan-human development that has come to engulf life on earth. As symptom, Smith's writing was organic to the settler project, whose spontaneities it formalised. Faithfully reflecting colonial discourse, Native property and land management were transparent in his text, invisible centres that in practice organised the entire scheme. As Vimalassery makes clear, Smith's canonical analyses of fundamental terms such as money, land and credit (labour and value, we can take it, being thereby implied) all ‘emerge in historical and conceptual relation to the colonization of Indigenous life and land’.⁴⁶ The key conceit whereby Indigenous labour was rendered invisible in a labour theory of value was the concept of nature, which substituted Indigenous agency for that of the cosmos, enabling improvements effected by Natives to figure as serendipity. This is, of course, a ubiquitous settler theme. As Robert Kenny has recently observed, ‘to suggest that pre-settlement Australia was “pristine” is to place Aboriginal Australians in the category nature, and thus deny them humanity’.⁴⁷ In this cutting-out of the Native middle man, terra nullius and Smith's market place fuse inseparably (the discovery and the commodity, after all, are both animated by novelty), connecting settler capital directly to a landscape miraculously emptied of the accumulated human labour, male and female, that has made it what it is. In the outcome, all the ostensibly self-sustaining actors in Smith's liberal-individualist drama – the entrepreneur, the labourer, the investor, the citizen – turn out to be comprehensively reliant on the sustained violence of colonial expropriation. The very nations whose wealth was Smith's central concern ‘were in fact empires’.⁴⁸ To make the liberal an individual took a cast of thousands, most of them in the wings. Imperialism is not the highest stage of capitalism but its foundational warrant.

If this much has been at least partially prefigured in ‘post’ colonial (and, before that, Leninist) analyses, Vimalassery pursues the logic of settler colonialism's long-run structuring in directions that challenge modernity itself. Critically – and positively – his diagnosis sustains its own remedy. As programme, rather than (or as well as) symptom, Smith's text continues to inform and stimulate capitalist expansion, reproducing and transforming the initial dispossession of Indigenous peoples in new, ‘often newly invasive, forms’. Thus, it is only to be expected that the current sticking points for capitalist expansion should centre about ‘key elements of ongoing assaults on the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples: ecological devastation, speculation on real estate, and enclosures of resources and intellectual property’.⁴⁹ The critical strength of Vimalassery's analysis lies in his deriving a positive prescription from this destructive continuity. Just as the settler invasion continues, postponing crisis after crisis for capitalism, so does the alternative life-world, which Vimalassery terms Indigenous relationality, that capitalism is predicated on suppressing. It is important to note the rigour of Vimalassery's account, lest it be confused with romantic invocations of Native counter cultures conceived as capitalism's mirror image. Rather, in his carefully immanent historical critique, the continued suppression of Indigenous relationality is shown to be a condition of the possibility of capitalism's destructive expansion and, accordingly, of the current crisis for life on earth, a predicament that is not confined to humanity. Decolonisation, in this account, systematically undoes the specific suppressions on which capitalism's violent irresponsibilities are premised, supplanting alienation with involvement. The ecological is sociological. As both symptom and programme, and as a positive ethical antidote to the destructiveness of Smith's global market place, Indigenous relationality, ‘with its grounding in relationship and responsibility to place’, offers ‘a richer, more substantial critique of political economy’.⁵⁰

Smith's blindness to Natives' relationships to their homelands participates in a wider Euro-colonial mindset that views land instrumentally, as an inert setting for human productivity. The view of land as a passive ground or receptacle for the fertilising energies of man is, of course, as gendered as it is colonial. Either way (or both ways), the Western will to power is parthenogenetic, presenting relatedness as self-generation. In this view, and in keeping with the most dualist of Cartesian fundamentals, human social processes are radically divorced from nature.⁵¹ This civilisational prejudice is profound enough to reconcile major theoretical divisions, in which regard even Karl Marx did not modify Adam Smith. As Glen Coulthard has cogently argued, Marx's key analysis of primitive (which Smith termed ‘previous’) accumulation was out of kilter, emphasising one of its two central components, the formation of an industrial proletariat, at the expense of the other, the dispossession of landed producers.⁵² Following Coulthard's lead, we can consider why it should be that the great champion of oppressed people should downplay territorial dispossession in a manner bound to marginalise settler-colonial invasion. While there is a great deal to be said about this (at another time), suffice it to note here that Marx's theoretical destination, ‘pure’ capitalism, was as self-supportingly anthropocentric as anything in Smith. This is not to suggest that Marx failed to note European capitalism's historic dependence on the violence of conquest, dispossession, slavery and related features of settler expansion. On the contrary, his depictions remain arrestingly vivid:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.⁵³

Thus the point is not that Marx understated or minimised the crimes of settler colonialism, though even this excerpt is notable for its prioritising of labour. Rather, it is that dispossession was merely ancillary to, or supportive of, Marx's main event, which was the historical emergence of the ‘free’ proletariat, an unprecedented being who could only arise in the absence of ties to land or other alternatives to dependence on the daily contract binding labour as a commodity to capital, a radically sociogenic condition that Marx explicitly distinguished from other forms of exploitation:

Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarisation of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given.⁵⁴

In this scenario, territorial dispossession is necessarily subordinated as a stepping-stone to Marx's ultimate theoretical goal of a pure capitalism uncluttered by feudal vestiges. By the same token, territorial dispossession cannot figure as a continuing structure. To the extent that territorial dispossession remained incomplete, the industrial proletariat would not be fully deprived of alternative means of subsistence and, accordingly, could not be fully committed to its cash-mediated confrontation with capital. On internal theoretical grounds, therefore, Marx committed himself to a historical rupture that excluded land from the dialectic of capital – or, at least, relegated land to preconditional status in relation to capitalist production. The historical rupture and the exclusion of territoriality were two sides of the same theoretical coin. In doing this, Marx was doing the same thing to land, only on the level of theory, as his capitalist was doing in practice: commodifying it, rendering it a passive object of human labour to be traded in the market place alongside any other commodity. To revise Marx's alienated dialectic, therefore, we should free it from the narrow instrumentalism that views land as a one-dimensional object of (or for) human appropriation and recognise humans' multifarious engagements with land, for better or worse, as a set of holistic dialectical relationships.⁵⁵ To this end, when we assert that land is settler colonialism's irreducible element, it is crucial to note that this is not merely a statement about real estate. Rather, when settlers dispossess Natives of their land, they violate a collective life-world. Correspondingly, in replacing that life-world with a social system based on an instrumental concept of land as alienable property, settlers create a new and fundamentally alienated alternative life-world of their own. Settler social institutions are not less tied to land than Native ones. They are differently tied. Settler territoriality encompasses the furthest reaches of social and cultural discourse. As the example of Adam Smith illustrates, this includes scholarly practice. To write on settler discourse is to write on landedness, however covert the inscription. In his chapter, Kevin Bruyneel interrogates such an inscription, one that has had particularly weighty historical consequences: settler colonialism's silent centrality to the liberal tradition in the USA.

To a reader from outside North America, it can come as a surprise to hear, as Bruyneel tells us, that Louis Hartz's most famous book is The Liberal Tradition in America.⁵⁶ The rest of us could be forgiven for thinking that Hartz is principally famous for his later coinage, in The Founding of New Societies, of one of the key concepts in the literature on settler colonialism: the colonial fragment.⁵⁷ As Bruyneel shows, however, in his lucid dissection of the logic of Hartz's two texts, The Liberal Tradition in America was already a book about colonialism, though Hartz could not bring himself to say so. But nor could he fully suppress it. Rather, like an unruly dog, the outcast legacy kept sneaking back in. In pinpointing the tension that Hartz struggled to contain in his text, Bruyneel casts unflinching light on the original sin darkening the heart of US liberalism as a whole, with its claim to an exceptional innocence that sets it apart from Europe. For Hartz, the exceptional characteristic of US liberalism was that, in contrast to its European antecedents, its establishment had not required the bloody suppression of a preceding order (the War of Independence having been about something else). In this regard, as Bruyneel notes, Hartz was echoing more famous forebears such as Locke and Tocqueville (to whom we might, again, add Marx⁵⁸). The illuminating quality of the Hartz example is not, however, his relative fame, though he is famous enough. It is, rather, the historicity of Hartz's shifting attempts to deal with the glaring problem for his argument presented by the fact that US liberalism had, after all, engaged in bloody suppression in order to establish itself, only the object of its violence had been Native rather than feudal (making the USA a state of exception in a different sense). Hartz's strategy for dealing with this fundamental flaw shifted revealingly between 1955 (The Liberal Tradition in America) and 1964 (The Founding of New Societies). In 1955, when he was more thoroughly in denial about US liberalism's settler-colonial foundations, the USA was in the grip of McCarthyism. Nine years later, the context in which Hartz almost came to terms with the settler-colonial origins of US liberal thought was the era when the Vietnam war was bringing the suppression of anticolonial activity to the centre of US public concern. In astutely identifying this shift, Bruyneel illuminates ideological tensions that extend well beyond the one writer and his texts, symptomatising the foundational violence informing US liberalism as a whole. This engagement with liberalism's settler-colonial foundations enables Bruyneel to move beyond symptom to programme, as he specifies a positive avowal whereby we might find ‘a different way to intervene in the powerful discourses of American liberalism and exceptionalism’ – without, as he crucially qualifies, ‘re-animating them’.⁵⁹

Its effectiveness as a critique of scholarship notwithstanding, Bruyneel's discussion goes deeper than scholarship to the mythic reservoir from which Hartz's analysis contradictorily drew sustenance, endorsing its terms in the very act of exposing them. American exceptionalism is no mere scholarly doctrine. Rather, in expressing that doctrine, liberal scholarship gives voice to fundamental cultural premises that permeate all reaches of US civic discourse, including the psychological mechanisms of settler subject formation. As observed in the first volume of this collection, our analyses of settler colonialism need to go beyond the quantifiable positivities of law, economics, military force and government policy to encompass the affective dimensions of what Mark Rifkin terms personhood.⁶⁰ As Rifkin's chapter exemplifies, we need to explore what it means, how it feels, to be a settler even when Natives are not (declared to be) around. Reflecting on Thoreau's retreat into the woods surrounding Walden Pond, canonically depicted as exchanging civil society for ‘nature’, Rifkin points to the encompassing sovereignty that licensed Thoreau's access to a space that could conduce to a sensation of unruledness. Thoreau's sanctioned reprieve was conditional on Indians' removal and continuing banishment. Rifkin's discussion takes us beyond the mere fact of this historical condition, important though that is, to its humdrum modalities, highlighting the routine ways in which settlers tacitly rely on – and thereby re-enact – the dispossession of Indigenous people in their daily lives. This taken-for-grantedness, which he terms settler common sense, is not (or not necessarily) explicitly willed or directed from a totalising centre whose dictates it reflects and enacts. Rather, in its ‘mundane dynamics’, settler colonialism is sustained and reaffirmed in and through the ordinary sensations and exchanges of workaday existence. Implicit in Rifkin's perspective – and as I take him to mean – is a recognition of the Indigenous presence as an absent centre that structures settler discourse even in contexts that do not manifestly concern things Indigenous.⁶¹ In its powerful subtlety, his approach is pragmatic, interactive and phenomenological, though with a difference. Where these paradigms have traditionally emphasised novelty at the expense of continuity, suppressing structures of the long run in favour of the individual, the singular, the quirky – in short, the apolitical – Rifkin's phenomenology discloses the multifarious ways in which the settler logic of elimination is refurbished in daily life. Rather than suppressing structural determinations, the notion of settler common sense seeks to address how they become operational, ‘how settler occupancy and jurisdiction are realized, regularized, and actively produced as if inert context in everyday articulations, interactions, practices, and sensations in which Native people(s) may or may not appear’.⁶²

We have travelled a long way from the frontier, but settler discourse still structures itself in opposition to the Native alternative. This ongoing binarism is specific to settler colonialism, distinguishing it from other racisms and human-rights abuses. Where tyrants are susceptible to regime change, even sometimes to election results, such phenomena need not affect the continuity of settler colonialism, which constitutes a framework within which they take place. For all of Israel's protestations, therefore, the invasion of Palestine cannot be offset by the vicious abuses that some of the surrounding regimes visit on their own populations. The issue is not the perpetration of violence per se, which can spring from a variety of motivations, but its necessitation by virtue of the fact of invasion. On the basis of a systematic understanding of settler colonialism as a historical programme of elimination, not only does the necessity for violence emerge as intrinsic to the project. Domestication in the post-frontier era emerges as a post-conquest phenomenon. The violence does not go away. Indeed, it remains ever-present and manifest in post-frontier symptoms such as disproportionate Indigenous incarceration rates, zonal police deployments, Aboriginal deaths in custody and related statistics. In being always available, however, settler violence in the post-frontier era operates as a constraining hegemonic potential: when it is not actually being deployed, its proven superiority – as settler common sense is tacitly well aware – can be mobilised at any time. In their incompleteness, therefore, post-frontier settler regimes evince a shifting range of hegemonic balances, from the substantial incompleteness evidenced in the resort to martial law to the relative complacency evidenced in bureaucratically prefabricated versions of Indigenous self-determination, the former always being available when the latter shows signs of strain. In his chapter, Ilan Pappe concisely delineates the complementarity between some of the key hegemonic modalities that Israel has instituted in the course of its far from complete invasion of Palestine. Since Israel/Palestine remains locked in a frontier situation, a particularly wide range of settler-colonial modalities co-exist simultaneously, from the impunity with which Palestine Authority officials sweep through colonial checkpoints in their Israeli-credentialled limousines to the cross-frontier regime of exception that Israel imposes on Gaza and the ongoing exclusion of refugees.

The historical and political implications of Pappe's essay, whose reverberations will carry well beyond this collection, can hardly be overstated. Extending on his previous revelations concerning the deliberate forethought that went into Israel's 1948 ethnic cleansing of the western part of Mandate Palestine,⁶³ Pappe not only narrates the careful advance planning that went into the 1967 invasion but also goes beyond his work on 1948 to situate both 1948 and 1967 as integrated stages in a continuous programme of settler-colonial invasion that extends into the present and beyond. In analytical terms, Pappe presents us with a cross-section of an invasion, as its concurrent modalities are shown to represent so many different strategies for managing the shifting phases of a settler takeover. After the nakba of 1948, when only a minority of Palestinians remained in their homes within the Armistice borders to which Israel had begrudgingly acceded, their restlessness was unceremoniously suppressed by the imposition of martial law. The partial relaxation of martial law, nearly two decades later, did not represent any kind of concession to nationalist aspirations on the part of the Native population. Rather, it was a prelude to Israel's acquisition of more Palestinian territory, with many more Palestinian people attached to it, which was to occur in the following year, 1967, and for which plans had been drawn up in the politics department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as early as 1963.⁶⁴ When the second stage of the invasion finally came to pass, in 1967, the occupying authorities had a well-developed plan to hand, which resuscitated the martial law regime that had previously been imposed within the Armistice borders, and redirected its operations to the newly conquered territory. At the same time, previously conquered Natives within the Armistice borders remained subject to a more complacent post-frontier regime. In charting the complementarities between these different modalities of occupation and in pointing to ways to map the links coordinating the colonial regimes that Israel imposes in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in Gaza, in occupied Syria (the Golan) and within the Armistice borders respectively, Pappe provides us with a synchronic anatomy of various stages of a settler invasion, which are not discarded or superseded but persist and coexist as mutually supportive practices and potentialities. Martial law remains available. In critical circumstances – when the Natives get restless – settler common sense can always revert to the deliberate binary consciousness of frontier antagonism.

The jurisdictional patchwork that Israel presents at the current incomplete stage of its projected invasion of Palestine provides further caution, if such be needed, against confusing the extent of an invasion with settler nation-state boundaries. Apart from its own prolix classifications, Israel/Palestine encompasses acknowledged statehood within the Armistice boundaries, pretended statehood in ‘annexed’ East Jerusalem, belligerent occupation in the West Bank and occupied Syria, and the occupation in denial (capsular occupation?) of besieged Gaza. Nonetheless, while Israel's incompleteness is more visible than that of more successful post-frontier settler states, the difference is one of degree rather than kind. Within settler states, sovereignties remain contested and unevenly distributed. In Australia, the current so-called ‘Intervention’ separates out Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory for a kind of medium-intensity martial law, while, at a lower level of intensity, Native Title legislation discriminates between the proprietorial – and, accordingly, sovereign – capacities of different Aboriginal societies.⁶⁵ In the USA, the vagaries of registration and tribal enrolment provide for a plethora of uneven statuses. Such differences are not static. They represent balances, relative standings in continuing contestations over settlement. In addition to its manifest spatiality, invasion is intrinsically historical, being conducted in ever-shifting counterpoise to its reflex and constant companion resistance. New England is more completely invaded than New Mexico. The Northern Territory is less completely invaded – less complacently held – than Melbourne. The same holds, only more visibly, for Gaza and Tel Aviv. Moreover, as observed, it holds across time as well as space. The Northern Territory is less securely invaded today, it would seem, than it was 10 years ago, Gaza certainly so.

To varying degrees, then, and more or less explicitly, all settler states are jurisdictional patchworks. Thus the formal political realm, being the arena in which jurisdictions are delimited and distributed, has particular salience in the settler/Native dialectic. While observing Rifkin's injunction to go beyond the instrumentalities of state practice, therefore, our analyses should also register the particular importance of juridico-political discourse, in which the shifting balance between Native and settler potentialities is formally encoded. As Andrea Smith's chapter makes clear, the dilemma of citizenship, which was unilaterally imposed on Indians, brings together the essential elements of the settler-colonial condition. In a series of readings that illuminate the political embeddedness of legal discourse, Smith explores how the issue of voting, the central rite of US citizenship, is equally central to tribes' own survival. In addition, voting illuminates the crucial distinction between racism and colonialism with particular clarity. The question of who should be eligible to vote activates the stock allegations in racism's repertoire, in particular that of the retardation (or infantilisation) of Indians' capacity for reasoned decision-making. In this regard, Natives have shared in humiliations that racism has dispensed for people of colour as a whole. Shifting from the register of race to that of colonialism, however, Indians' ambivalence towards voting contrasts strikingly with the African-American campaign for civil rights, to which the desirability of equal access to voting was central. In the Native case, voting can constitute a threat to tribal sovereignty, undermining Indians' separateness from the settler polity. While relying on race, therefore, colonialism also incorporates a political dimension that cannot be expressed in the language of phenotypes. While the evils of racism and colonialism typically intertwine, they can also take separate trajectories, making it vital, as Smith puts it, not to ‘presume any anti-discriminatory strategy is necessarily good’.⁶⁶

Smith's caution takes us to one of the core themes of this collection, which is the capacity for ostensibly radical discourses to participate in settler colonialism without apparently jeopardising their oppositional credentials. In the first volume of this collection, Lindsey Schneider discussed some of the pitfalls of environmentalism, while Cameron Greensmith and Sulaimon Giwa problematised certain anti-Native tendencies in the Queer movement.⁶⁷ Three of the chapters in this volume take up this critical theme, each of them insightfully addressing the problems posed for Natives by ostensibly benign forms of radicalism. The implications of these three critiques are extremely wide-ranging. In the case of Sandy Grande's chapter, which focuses on the limitations of the Occupy movement, the wider object of critique is liberalism itself, from which the Occupy movement failed to constitute a departure. As Grande shows in her concise synopsis of the Occupy movement's origins and distinctive rhetoric, its critique of liberalism is conceived and articulated from within. Occupy's answer to the abuses of liberalism is more liberalism: freer individuals, more open democracy, greater inclusion. Since Occupy does not stand outside liberalism, it cannot address liberalism's enabling contribution to settler colonialism. Rather, it repeats that contribution in its own discourse, reconstituting territorial appropriation as ‘the democratic manifest’ without regard to Indigenous dispossession, overlooking even the fundamental fact that the territory it seeks to occupy is already occupied. As Grande notes, citing Joanne Barker, the ‘wall’ in Wall Street refers to fortifications originally erected by the Dutch to protect the territory they had mythically ‘purchased’ from the Lenape.⁶⁸ Thus Grande's critique of liberalism, and of Occupy within it, goes beyond immanence to take up an externality that is emphatically binary: ‘From the standpoint of Indigenous peoples the so-called 99% are not simply united in their collective indignation, but, more significantly, by their settler status. This is Indigenous Land’.⁶⁹ The appropriate remedy is not, therefore, more liberalism but the far profounder requirement for decolonisation, a requirement that sidelines the ephemeral symptoms of liberalism's internal disorders.

For scholars, the limitations of liberal inclusiveness acquire particular urgency when they apply to positive discrimination practices within higher education itself. In this connection, our critiques come home to roost, applying to situations into which we directly intervene. As Sarah de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood and Nicole Lindsay describe in their acutely focused chapter, settler-colonial power insidiously pervades the moral high ground of liberal academic reform. While a conspicuous Indigenous presence furnishes a political alibi for settler institutions, the requirements involved in providing that degree of visibility are so distracting that Indigenous scholars repeatedly find themselves unable to progress in the institution (one does not need to work in British Columbia to recognise the pattern). Noting the moral proviso whereby ‘the impulse to improve and help Indigenous peoples is remarkably immune to critique at the time of its unfolding’,⁷⁰ de Leeuw, Greenwood and Lindsay tellingly historicise Indigenous scholars' contemporary predicament, highlighting continuities between higher education initiatives in the present and missionary practice in nineteenth-century Canada. To decolonise higher-education, their recommendation is not to make Indigenous people more visible, thus rendering them more subject to settler demands, but to make visible the ‘naturalized, hegemonic, and remarkably invisible nature of settler-colonial power that requires illuminating and then destabilizing’.⁷¹ The antidote is history. Physicians heal ourselves.

The final chapter in this critical triplet addresses a putatively anti-hegemonic discourse that regularly provokes Indigenous ire: the New Age, with its extreme lack of scruples concerning identity theft. In her methodical dissection of New Age appropriations of the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele, ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui brings erudition to the critique of this style of spiritual posturing. Not only is she appropriately well versed in her own Kanaka ‘Oiwi (Hawaiian) tradition, but she is also conversant with the hotchpotch of separate regional creeds that the New Age promiscuously combines. Moreover, she too has an eye for historical continuities, noting how the appropriation of Pele from her moorings in Hawaiian genealogy and connectedness to place maintains the process of erasing traditional Kanaka ‘Oiwi beliefs that was begun by US missionaries in the nineteenth century. With its emphasis on individuality rather than religious affiliation, however, the New Age is closer to liberalism than its missionary forebears. Either way, as ho'omanawanui shows, it faithfully reproduces well-established features of settler-colonial discourse. Moreover, the shift to cyberspace (‘a relatively uncharted terra nullius’) enables the New Age to partake of settler colonialism's global elasticity, providing a radically ungrounded Archimedean palette on which to mix together local religious traditions in surreal detachment from their ancestral settings. In the process, not only do Native places become systematically desecrated by spiritual tourists. With place rendered inoperative, New Age colonisers can claim an essential connection to commodified figures such as Pele that bypasses the awareness of Natives themselves, who have ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ real knowledge. Pessimistic though this scenario is, however, ho'omanawanui stresses the continuing efficacy of Indigenous spirituality, ‘a real, tangible, genealogical and physical connection to ‘aina [the land]’.⁷² Think locally, act locally.

But what of the global? How might Natives organise internationally to defend their colonially besieged life-worlds without prejudicing the local specificity that makes them Native? As ho'omanawanui recognises, the global formation that is the Internet can work both ways, enabling Natives to mobilise as a consolidated power bloc at the international level. But where does this leave the place-specific genealogies undergirding the tribal identities on which cultural survival and political resistance are based? This is not a question of technological determinism. The Internet has not invented the problem, merely exacerbated it. The issue has been there ever since Native societies first debated the merits of joining together in opposition to colonial conquerors who did not differentiate between them. It is the problem of Pan-Indianism: how to build a united Indigeneity without reciprocating colonialism's construction of a unitary Native Other? In his chapter, Enrique Lima brings a hemispheric perspective to this question, surveying an America-wide range of Native responses to the tension between tribal particularity and the need for cross-tribal collaboration. In the course of his absorbing discussion, the problem that emerges is not so much for Indigenous people, who seem untroubled by differences that do not affect the overarching difference separating each of them from their colonisers. Rather, the problem exists for the settler nation-state, which reacts with alarm at Indigenous claims to a separateness that, in Lima's words, ‘shows the cracks and faults in the national imagining that posits a singular national character’.⁷³ The threat to the settler state, once again, is incompleteness, a vulnerability not shared by the Indigenous movement. As Lima's case study of novels written at either end of Métis/Indian public intellectual Darcy McNickle's long career makes clear, the imagining of a global Native alliance is rooted in a tribal belonging that remains resolutely diverse at the same time as it forges unity in the face of the shared colonial binary: ‘[W]hile McNickle shows us how tribal identities cannot be substituted for each other, so too does he illustrate how Indigenous people have been brought into relationship with one another by conquest’.⁷⁴

How, then, is settler-colonial critique to maintain this binary without casting Indigeneity as a reflex product of conquest, forever dependent on the settler initiative? Historically, Native and settler have indeed been rendered mutually dependent, like Hegel's master and slave, by virtue of conquest. In addition to characterising the past and the present, however, does our recognition of the structural continuity of settler colonialism predetermine the future? Could it be that our deconstruction of settler discourse actually reconstructs it, projecting conquest forward in time with the inevitability that Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch describe as ‘a kind of colonial fatalism’,⁷⁵ a resignation that disables the struggle for decolonisation in advance? In their meticulously argued chapter, organised around debates over the Australian Government's Northern Territory Emergency Response (‘the Intervention’), Macoun and Strakosch proceed from attributing certain strengths to settler-colonial theory as it has developed so far to consider whether these strengths might not be self-defeating, eternalising the very settler hegemony that they purport to challenge. Inevitability is not the only hazard. Associated with it is the totalising effect of an assumed scholarly authority that strives to contain everything, including ‘the entire field of our [settlers’] relationship with Indigenous people’ within its own reductive purview, an exclusivist conceit that ‘can serve to re-enact the central settler fantasy that we constitute and have authority over this space’.⁷⁶ The problem is not the recurrent complaint that settler-colonial critique fails to write in Native agency,⁷⁷ the notion that it is up to settlers to inscribe Native agency being a contradiction in terms. Rather, the problems of totalisation and inevitability converge when settler theorists claim to monopolise the whole ground of analysis and thereby exclude autonomous Native perspectives, unexhausted by settler hegemony, from posing independently grounded futures. The issue is not the existence of Native agency, as if that could be in doubt, but its theoretical usurpation. Macoun and Strakosch's acutely targeted concerns encourage us to renewed vigilance in regard to the scope of our scholarly claims and, above all (or so it seems to me), to our colonial positionalities.

With Macoun and Strakosch's critique, pointing as it does to current theoretical incompleteness and opening up directions for more rigorous scholarly practice in the future, we begin to move to a conclusion. In his attentive reading of Choctaw poet LeAnne Howe's ‘A Duck's Tune’, Joseph Bauerkemper does not appropriate or impersonate. He listens to what Howe has to say, relating her text to other Native utterances and taking on the lessons that they entail for settler-colonial critique. In common with Macoun and Strakosch, Bauerkemper is troubled by a discourse that is ‘in and of itself a story about settlers’. By the same token, it can also court pessimism, laying bare settler destructiveness without providing for constructive alternatives, ethical futures that can be nourished by ‘heeding the voices of Native scholars, writers, critics, and intellectuals who are imagining reconfigured social, cultural, economic, and political relations’.⁷⁸ In going beyond critique to a receptive exposure to Native texts, Bauerkemper's chapter suggests ways to imagine decolonisation, ways that are neither utopian nor self-defeating but performative, versed in internal critiques of colonialism but taking their alternative visions from sources and experiences that colonialism is unable to contain. It is fitting that this collection should end with a beginning, Bauerkemper's (or Howe's) ‘future anterior’ that embodies Indigenous continuity through the past, present and future.

It has been my privilege and pleasure to edit this collection. I could not have done so without the support and astute editorial feedback of Pamela Grieman of American Indian Culture and Research Journal, who not only steered the first volume through turbulent editorial waters but also, in collaboration with Lorenzo Veracini of Settler Colonial Studies, sanctioned the innovative arrangement whereby the two volumes have brought one of the leading Indigenous studies journals in the world into partnership with the premier journal of settler-colonial critique. Alexander Hirsch and Tsianina Lomawaima, the referees for volume 1, together with the two anonymous referees for this volume, provided authors with criticisms that were as productive as they were apt. Tsianina Lomawaima has since provided unflagging encouragement to the project, including her memorable launch of volume 1 at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association annual conference in Saskatoon in 2013. Above all, my admiration and thanks go to the wonderful group of authors who have written this special collection. You have taught me more than you can know or I can say.

Notes

1. Patrick Wolfe, ed., Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Alternatives in Global Context (1): The Settler Complex (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013)).

2. For a reasonably diverse range, see, e.g. Larissa Behrendt, Tracey Lindberg, Robert J. Miller, and Jacinta Ruru, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2010); David Kennedy, ‘Primitive Legal Scholarship’, Harvard International Law Journal 27 (1986): 1–98); Mark F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1926); and Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 233–86.

3. The Cherokee Nation vs The State of Georgia (30 US. 5 Pet. 1) 1831, p. 21.

4. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Against the Intentional Fallacy: Legocentrism and Continuity in the Rhetoric of Indian Dispossession’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2012): 12.

5. Wolfe, ‘Against the Intentional Fallacy’.

6. ‘[O]ne crucial distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism as separate formations is that the first aims to perpetuate itself whereas the latter aims to supersede itself’. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation’, Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 26–42: 28. See also Veracini, ‘Introducing settler colonial studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–12.

7. This situation was complicated in California, where Turnerian frontier expansion came across an already post-frontier situation in the lifeways of Native Californians who had previously been missionised by the Spanish. For Turner on the frontier, see note 19.

8. In the case of Australia, in keeping with the tacit assumption of terra nullius, colonial officials had not detained themselves with the rhetoric of international diplomacy, preferring to dispossess Indigenous people by means of violence on the part of police rather than soldiers. Thus the shift to a depoliticised post-frontier regime involved fewer formal adjustments in the Australian case than in that of the USA. As will be exemplified below, however, the practical outcomes were strikingly similar.

9. As Colonel Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle boarding school for Indian youth, famously put it, ‘Kill the Indian in him and save the man’. Richard H. Pratt, ‘The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites’ (1892), selection in Francis P. Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian,’ 1880– 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271, 261.

10. ‘Prior to the Indian Reorganization Act, tribes were presented with certain kinds of decisions and they were believed to possess inherent powers to control their domestic affairs. After the Indian Reorganization Act, the Secretary of the Interior was allowed to approve or disapprove the actions of a tribal government in almost every field’. Vine Deloria, Jr., ‘Laws Founded in Justice and Humanity: Reflections on the Content and Character of Federal Indian Law’, Arizona Law Review 31 (1989): 203–23, 213. See also Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45 (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1980); Patrick Wolfe, ‘After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy’, Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 13–51, 22–39.

11. My disagreement is not with Veracini's observation that, while settlers found political orders, immigrants encounter those orders already founded. It is with the implication that this distinction within sovereignty discourse detaches immigrants from the settler project of Native replacement, an implication that ultimately (or so it seems to me) hinges on voluntarism. See Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Natives Settlers Migrants’, Politica & Società 2 (2012: 187–204), esp. pp 202–4.

12. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (abridged ed., Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1986), 111–12.

13. This situation is itself abetted by the phenomenon that Tsianina Lomawaima has insightfully noted: ‘What purposes might maintenance of Indianness under strict federal control have served? Maintaining American Indians as wards, in circumstances that denied or destroyed economic development, served to legitimate US belief in its just inheritance of lands and freedom from Native people’. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, ‘The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: the Society of American Indians and the battle to inherit America’, American Indian Quarterly 37 (3, summer 2013, 331–51): 335.

14. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 187; Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, American Historical Review 106 (2001): 866–905, 875.

15. A.O. Neville, Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong Publishing, 1947), 58–9.

16. A systematic account is J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Kimberly TallBear, ‘DNA, Blood and Racializing the Tribe’, (Wicazo Sá Review 18, no. 1 (2003): 81–107) engages thoughtfully with tribal appropriations of blood-quantum discourse, extended and developed for biogenetic quantifications more generally in TallBear, Native American DNA: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science (Minneapolis, MN, Minnesota, UP, 2013). See also; Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2002); and Annette Jaimes' pioneering analysis of blood quantum as ‘statistical extermination’ in her ‘Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America’, in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 123–38, 126.

17. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).

18. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Press, 1970), e.g. pp. 64–65.

19. Turner's ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ was read before the Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association in July 1893, subsequently being published in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in December 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1893). For the full text, see The Frontier in American History (American Studies Program, University of Virginia, 1920, c. 1): http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/. An earlier version of its central thesis, entitled ‘Problems in American History’, had been published in the Wisconsin student publication The Ægis in November 1892, a bare three months after Commissioner Morgan's report. These were by no means the only contemporary symptoms of the end of the frontier. Two years previously, in 1890, less than three years after the passing of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, the US Bureau of the Census had reported the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line (Robert Porter, Henry Gannett and William Hunt, ‘Progress of the Nation’, in Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1895, xviii–xxxiv)). Two decades prior to that, however, in 1871, Congress had already voted to discontinue the practice of treaty making with Indian tribes (16 Stat. [US], 566, c. 120, s. 1). In collective consciousness, however, as Philip Deloria has observed, 1890, the year of General Nelson Miles's massacre at Wounded Knee, marks the profoundest of ruptures: ‘Wounded Knee – ostensibly the last instance of armed resistance and violent betrayal – organizes the big break between the possibility and the impossibility of military struggle, and it does so as a cross-tribal and cross-cultural milepost’. Crucially, though, as Deloria goes on to note – and luminously depict – the end of the era of Indians' armed military resistance signalled a redeployment, not a suspension or cessation, of Indian resistance: ‘Across Indian country, the recognition of military defeat had pushed Native people to develop strategies for continuing the struggle. Treaty organizations, regional political organizations, pan-Indian reform groups, Indian fraternal organizations…Native actors sought to participate in a struggle waged on the cultural front, particularly through the developing forms of mass media, which promised to reach larger audiences’. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: Kansas, UP, 2004): 16; 104.

20. ‘In close connection with the subject of Government control over the Indians and methods of administration, an interesting question has recently arisen, namely, What is an Indian? One would have supposed that this question would have been considered a hundred years ago and been adjudicated long before this. Singularly enough, however, it has remained in abeyance, and the Government has gone on legislating and administering law without carefully discriminating as to those over whom it had a right to exercise such control. The question has arisen latterly in connection with the allotment of lands …’ T.J. Morgan, Sixty First Annual Report of the Commissioner for Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printer, 1892), 31.

21. Morgan, Sixty First Report, 34.

22. Ibid.

23. The best general account of allotment is still D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands (Francis Paul Prucha, ed. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1973 [1934.]) For an excellent account of the allotment program's consequences for some of its primary targets, see Kent Carter, The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893–1914 (Orem, UT: Ancestry, 1999). See also Kent Carter, ‘Snakes & Scribes: The Dawes Commission and the Enrollment of the Creeks’, Prologue Magazine (National Archives, 29, no. 1, Spring 1997). www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/spring/dawes-commission-1.html

24. Wolfe, ‘After the Frontier’, 34–40.

25. It could be argued that there are two such designations, one being obscured by the downward-pointing arrow, but this hardly changes the point.

26. ‘To establish themselves’ because the situation of indentured Pacific Island labour in the late nineteenth century in some respects resembled slavery. See Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australia-Pacific Labor Trade (Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2007).

27. For varying accounts of this disturbing phenomenon, see, e.g. Jodi A. Byrd, ‘Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn't Stay There’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2011): 31–52; Kevin Noble Maillard, ‘Redwashing History: Tribal Anachronisms in the Seminole Nation Cases’, in The Indian Civil Rights Act at Forty, ed. Kristen A. Carpenter, Matthew L. M. Fletcher and Angela R. Riley (Los Angeles, CA: American Indian Studies Center Press, 2012), 87–103; and Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010).

28. Hebrew source cited in The Voice of Palestine (‘Occupation brings a group of American Indians to settle in Palestine’, London, Palestine Information Centre, 27th February, 2013, home page – daily news.). www.palestine-info.co.uk. Accessed 25th July 2013.

29. Marion Woolfson, Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 197–200.

30. When I arrived in Vancouver airport for the launch of the first volume of this collection, for a moment I wondered if the Indians might not have won after all.

31. For the concept of ethnographic ventriloquism, see Patrick Wolfe, ‘Reluctant Invaders’, Meanjin 2 (1992): 338; Wolfe, ‘Should the Subaltern Dream? ‘Australian Aborigines’ and the Problem of Ethnographic Ventriloquism’, in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. Sally Humphreys (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1997), 57–96.

32. Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Michael Dougherty, To Steal a Kingdom (Waimanalo, HI: Island Style, 1992).

33. See, for example, the Conklin website: http://bigfiles90.angelfire.com/CededNoSell.html For the Ceded Lands, see John M. Van Dyke, Who Owns the Crown Land of Hawaii? (Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2008).

34. In practice, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. In particular, Native labour is not disdained so long as it remains available. The point is, however, that the settler priority is not the exploitation of Natives but their dispossession. Others can provide labour. Only Natives can provide land.

35. AICRJ 37, no. 2 (2013): 6.

36. In their ‘Eating in Public’ (in Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle, eds., Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 180–88), Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma identify themselves with the seventeenth-century English Levellers. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui has effectively critiqued Chan and Sharma's essay in her paper ‘Nothing Common about “the Commons”: Indigeneity and the Politics of Land Dispossession’, presented to the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association annual conference, Saskatoon, June 2013.

37. The problem is not the invocation of the commons per se but its misappropriation as a pretext for denying prior Indigenous ownership, a misuse that theoretically reproduces the very attack on collective landholdings that advocates of the commons hold themselves out as opposing. For a more sophisticated advocacy of the concept (which is still not unproblematic, especially in regard to the assimilation of the Native estate to nature), see Giovanna Ricoveri, Nature for Sale: the commons versus commodities (London: Pluto, 2013).

38. For the campaign to discredit Kanaka Maoli entitlement to the Ceded Lands in terms that resonate with Sharma's ‘public’ commons, see, e.g. http://aloha4all.org/wordpress/basic-issues/essentials/the-ceded-lands/ For Israeli uses of the Ottoman category of public land in ways that are also compatible with Sharma's prescription, see David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of Arabs in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 52; Walter Lehn (with Uri Davis), The Jewish National Fund (London: Kegan Paul International, 1988), 77; and Rajah Shehadeh, Occupier's Law: Israel and the West Bank (rev. ed., Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1985), 25.

39. Dean Saranillio, this volume, 285.

40. Nandita Sharma, Review of Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism (Hawaiian Journal of History 44 (2010): 107–10). According to Sharma's online CV (http://socialsciences.people.hawaii.edu/faculty/?dept=soc&faculty=nsharma@hawaii.edu, accessed July 25, 2013), she published an article entitled ‘The Cultural Logics of Neo-Racism: Migrants as Colonizers in Asian Settler Colonialism’ in the same number of the journal (no pagination cited), but I have been unable to find it. No such article appears, only this review.

41. While unexceptional in its experience of colonial exploitation, the family is distinguished in other respects. As Saranillio also notes, his oldest sister is Candace Fujikane, whose Asian Settler Colonialism inspired this international debate.

42. Those who have been kind enough to read some of my work may recognise this passage, which is closely adapted, though not completely verbatim, from Patrick Wolfe, ‘Race and the Trace of History: For Henry Reynolds’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 272–96, 273. Other sentences and turns of phrase that I have previously used are also dotted through the present article. This is partly by choice – to signal connections between what I am writing here and wider concerns of which some readers may be aware – but it also occurs in the course of trying to build up a comparative account, which (or so I find) is a cumulative procedure. Earlier analyses keep acquiring wider implications and I cannot see any alternative to resuscitating them in order to explain the new or expanded perspective.

43. For shifting formal and informal definitions and practices of citizenship in the USA, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press/Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1978), esp. 213–15; 246–47. For shifting formal definitions of Whiteness in the nineteenth-century USA, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

44. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Purchase By Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism's Conquest of Economics’, Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 133–71, 136–39.

45. Weber went back to his original 1905 publication to add material dealing specifically with the USA, in particular the essay ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’. See the expanded, Weber-authorised 1920 version of his celebrated analysis: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Stephen Kalberg, trans., Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publishing, 2002), 127–48.

46. Manu Vimalassery, this volume, 296.

47. Robert Kenny, Gardens of Fire: an investigative memoir (Perth, Australia: Western Australia University Press, 2013), 145.

48. Vimalassery, this volume, 296.

49. Vimalassery, this volume, 296.

50. Vimalassery, this volume, 308.

51. This separation persists despite the Enlightenment episteme shift whereby, as Foucault famously asserted, natural science came to incorporate humanity into its account. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970).

52. Glen Coulthard, ‘From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh’, in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2014).

53. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (three vols, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans, Frederick Engels, ed., Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1954), i, 703.

54. Marx, Capital, 668.

55. Promising steps in this direction have recently been taken in Jon Altman and Seán Kerins, eds., People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures (Sydney: Federation Press, 2012).

56. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). The concept of the fragment was prefigured in this book (p. 6), though at this stage Hartz limited its application to the USA.

57. Louis Hartz, ed., The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich, 1964).

58. Marx characterised ‘North America’ as ‘a country where bourgeois society did not develop on the foundation of the feudal system, but developed rather from itself; where this society appears not as the surviving result of a centuries-old movement, but rather as the starting-point of a new movement’. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (Martin Nicolaus, trans., London, Penguin/New Left Review, 1993), 884–85.

59. Kevin Bruyneel, this volume, 312.

60. AICRJ 37, no. 2 (2013): 3.

61. For the concept of the absent centre, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Richard Howard, trans., New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981), 5–6; 87; Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in Glyph 1, (Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, trans, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 180. Concerning the ‘implicit arguments of local narration’ (‘even when the subject matter of local texts is not explicitly about Indians, it is frequently implicitly so’), see Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: writing Indians out of existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota, UP, 2010): xvii and passim.

62. Mark Rifkin, this volume, 327.

63. Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, Oneworld Books, 2006).

64. Ilan Pappe, citing memoir of Zvi Inbar, this volume, 342.

65. John Altman, Arguing the Intervention (Journal of Indigenous Policy – issue 14, June 2013); Deirdre Howard-Wagner and Ben Kelly, ‘Containing Aboriginal Mobility in the Northern Territory: From “Protectionism” to “Interventionism”’, Law Text Culture 15, no. 1 (2011): 102–34; Desmond Manderson, ‘Not Yet: Aboriginal People and the Deferral of the Rule of Law’, Arena Journal (new series, nos 29/30), 217–72; Irene Watson, ‘The Aboriginal State of Emergency Arrived with Cook and the First Fleet’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 26 (2007): 3–8.

66. Andrea Smith, this volume, 272.

67. Lindsey Schneider, ‘“There's Something in the Water”: Salmon Runs and Settler Colonialism on the Columbia River’, AICRJ 37, no. 2 (2013): 149–63; Cameron Greensmith and Sulaimon Giwa, ‘Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities’, AICRJ 37, no. 2 (2013): 129–48.

68. Sandy Grande, this volume, 374–375.

69. Sandy Grande, this volume, 370.

70. Sarah de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood, and Nicole Lindsay, this volume, 384.

71. De Leeuw, Greenwood, and Lindsay, this volume, 391.

72. ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui, this volume, 410.

73. Enrique Lima, this volume, 418.

74. Enrique Lima, this volume, 424.

75. Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, this volume, 435.

76. Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, this volume, 437.

77. See, for example, Tim Rowse, ‘The Reforming State, the Concerned Public and Indigenous Political Actors’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 1 (2010): 66–81.

78. Joseph Bauerkemper, this volume, 447.

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Special Issue: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Alternatives in Global Context (2): Recuperating Binarism

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