Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito
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For Hechter, internal colonization results from a “spatially uneven wave of modernization” that produces an “unequal distribution of resources and power” between “relatively advanced and less advanced groups.”60 The dominant group uses its power to monopolize and institutionalize its privilege, creating a system of social stratification—what he terms “a cultural division of labor”—that reinforces ethnic identification.61 As with classic relations between metropolitan centers and their colonies, power resides in the core and is “characterized by a diversified industrial structure,” while “the pattern of development in the periphery is dependent, and complementary to that in the core.”62
Hechter illustrates how a framework that acknowledges colonial exploitation can explain, in structural terms, the illusory nature of the presumption that internal “minorities” will inevitably, if gradually, be fully incorporated into a unified state. This latter perspective, the diffusion model, predicts that economic disparities will decrease and cultural differences become less significant over time. In this respect it is much like the models of assimilation or multicultural pluralism prevalent in the United States today. The internal colonial model, on the other hand, predicts that economic inequities will persist or increase, “peripheral culture” will be more strongly asserted in reaction to “domination by the core,” and “political cleavages will largely reflect significant cultural differences between groups.”63 These are, of course, developments we have seen within the United States.
The models’ divergent predictions result from their differing analyses of structural and institutional dynamics, and they lead us toward distinct—indeed incompatible—remedial options. Hechter’s analysis suggests that people of color in the United States might appropriately be characterized as internally colonized and that the disparities between privileged and subordinated groups will not be eliminated until the underlying institutions and political relations have been decolonized. Nonetheless, this is a model derived very directly from, and reliant upon, the conceptual framework of external colonialism. Its geographically oriented core/periphery distinction is of limited applicability in settler societies that, as historian Norbert Finzsch notes, “have no periphery and no core, since the capital-owning elites in the cities and the social actors on the frontier form one complex interactive community.”64 Further, its framing of colonization primarily in terms of economic exploitation and underdevelopment reflects a very Western, linear notion of progress that disregards the fact that contemporary goals of “development” and “modernization” are, themselves, colonial impositions.
Internal colonization is a construct critical to understanding contemporary struggles for self-determination within “postcolonial” states whose boundaries now encompass multiple preexisting nations. However, to the extent that internal colonialism is understood as a derivative of external colonialism—as it was by many US activists of the 1960s—it is of limited utility in explaining or remediating settler colonial exploitation. In settler societies, there is no geographically distinct metropolitan “mother country” or “core” to which the colonizers may retreat, and the full incorporation of subordinated peoples would simply consummate their colonization.65 Recognizing internal colonialism gives us a starting point for understanding that racial subordination in the United States is deeply, structurally embedded. Pursuing that analysis, however, requires us to acknowledge that settler states represent a distinct form of contemporary colonialism.
Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism replaces classic colonialism’s hierarchical relationship of center to periphery with one in which the settlers reject the suzerainty of the metropolitan center and directly assert control over colonized lands and peoples in order to establish a state of their own. “Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity,” according to anthropologist Patrick Wolfe.66 It is widely acknowledged that Europe’s industrial revolution and its attendant economic “development” were fueled by external colonial expansion, that is, the appropriation of African and Asian natural resources and labor.67 Less appreciated is the critical role North American settler colonies played by using occupied land, appropriated resources, and colonized labor to generate commodities and expand markets for the goods being produced in Europe.68 Individual settlers’ desire for land “dovetail[ed] with the global market’s imperative for expansion,”69 with the result that, according to historian James Belich, “it was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion.”70
In the classic colonial model, the colonizers’ primary goals are to extract wealth from the land, labor, and resources of the colony and to create captive markets for the goods they produce. The wealth thus generated is intended to enrich the colonizing power, and the colonists themselves intend to return home. By contrast, settler colonists intend to remain in the colonized territory. They bring with them a purported sovereign prerogative to establish a new state on someone else’s land; to create social, political, legal, and economic institutions intended solely for their own benefit; to determine who may or may not—or must—live within their claimed borders, and exactly how they are to live. The acquisition and occupation of the land itself thus becomes the colonizers’ first and foundational principle. “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element,” Wolfe notes.71 Land is what allows the settlers to create and control a society of their own imagining and then, using that land and its resources, to generate the profits that enable them to consolidate and expand their sovereign prerogative.72
The settlers’ assertion of sovereign entitlement distinguishes them not only from Indigenous peoples but also from the voluntary and involuntary migrants who come to join an existing society rather than to establish a new one.73 Thus, Mahmood Mamdani observes that settlers “are made by conquest, not just by immigration.”74 Or, as Belich puts it, an “emigrant joined someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own.”75 Because settlers view the occupied lands as the site of their own reproduction, Indigenous peoples become the obstacles to the realization of their vision.
Wolfe explained that although settler colonization relies upon the appropriation of Indigenous labor, it is “at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.”76 Replacement, of course, requires the elimination of that which already exists—Indigenous peoples, along with their towns, farms, and hunting grounds; their names and sacred sites; their languages and cultures. Warfare between Indigenous peoples and colonizers is central to the origin stories of most settler societies—certainly that of the United States—but in the process of colonial expansion, armed conflict is “necessitated” not by Indigenous peoples’ acts of aggression but by their mere existence. “People got in the way just by staying home,” as professor Deborah Bird Rose aptly observes.77
As Indigenous peoples are “disappeared” in various ways, settlers turn to strategies of replacement, and what they describe as putting appropriated lands and resources to “productive” use.78 This requires the active recruitment of a critical mass of settlers; the development of a unique cultural identity; the formation of independent structures of governance and social control, including but not limited to law; and the maintenance of military and economic power sufficient to sustain themselves in these endeavors. Settlers also perceive a need for a readily available labor force that is not intended to share the benefits accruing to the settler class and, accordingly, develop strategies to acquire and control those workers.79
Settler states establish, maintain, and protect their dominion by subjugating Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous Others, and “deviant” members of the settler class.80 The colonizers assert a possessory right to the state and establish legal systems designed to ensure that each population subgroup remains in its assigned place, geographically, socially, economically, and politically.81 The settler class portrays these as prerogatives of sovereignty but, as Aboriginal legal scholar Irene Watson observes, “The myth of colonialism is that it carried with it and applied sovereignty. The truth is that state sovereignty was claimed and constituted through colonialism.”82
The exercise of colonial power remains in constant tension with its ideological justifications—the settlers’ superior civilization, their democratic and humanitarian values, the leading role they play in their own narrative of progressive human