White Supremacy, Racism And Racial Formations
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-‐40
2012 E. Tuck & K.W. Yang This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), permitting all non- commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Decolonization is not a metaphor
Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz
K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego
Abstract Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space- place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances. Keywords: decolonization, settler colonialism, settler moves to innocence, incommensurability, Indigenous land, decolonizing education
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Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36
Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality.
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 45
Introduction
For the past several years we have been working, in our writing and teaching, to bring attention to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational research in the United States and other settler colonial nation-states. These are two distinct but overlapping tasks, the first concerned with how the invisibilized dynamics of settler colonialism mark the organization, governance, curricula, and assessment of compulsory learning, the other concerned with how settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives – repackaged as data and findings – are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures. We are doing this work alongside many others who – somewhat relentlessly, in writings, meetings, courses, and activism – don’t allow the real and symbolic violences of settler colonialism to be overlooked.
Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization means, what it wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice. Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list of considerations – as an additional special (ethnic) group or class. At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet, we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous
Decolonization is not a metaphor 3
peoples, our/their1 struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North American lands where many of these conferences take place.
Of course, dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as “Navajo print” underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and other appropriations of Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so frequently. Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.
Our goal in this essay is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization – what is unsettling and what should be unsettling. Clearly, we are advocates for the analysis of settler colonialism within education and education research and we position the work of Indigenous thinkers as central in unlocking the confounding aspects of public schooling. We, at least in part, want others to join us in these efforts, so that settler colonial structuring and Indigenous critiques of that structuring are no longer rendered invisible. Yet, this joining cannot be too easy, too open, too settled. Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict. There are parts of the decolonization project that are not easily absorbed by human rights or civil rights based approaches to educational equity. In this essay, we think about what decolonization wants.
There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse (making decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances. We think of the enactment of these tropes as a series of moves to innocence (Malwhinney, 1998), which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. Here, to explain why decolonization is and requires more than a metaphor, we discuss some of these moves to innocence:
1 As an Indigenous scholar and a settler/trespasser/scholar writing together, we have used forward slashes to reflect our discrepant positionings in our pronouns throughout this essay.
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i. Settler nativism ii. Fantasizing adoption iii. Colonial equivocation iv. Conscientization v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading
Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation. Actually, we argue, attending to what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonizing projects and other social justice projects will help to reduce the frustration of attempts at solidarity; but the attention won’t get anyone off the hook from the hard, unsettling work of decolonization. Thus, we also include a discussion of interruptions that unsettle innocence and recognize incommensurability.
The set of settler colonial relations
Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of colonialism2. External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to – and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of – the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought ‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset of activities properly called military colonialism – the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as ‘natural resources’ – bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel.
The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of
2 Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects. Racism is an invention of colonialism (Silva, 2007). The current colonial era goes back to 1492, when colonial imaginary goes global.
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particularized modes of control – prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing – to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white3 elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders – ghettos, their policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability – are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery. Strategies of internal colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization, are both structural and interpersonal.
Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts – though they can overlap4 – and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US military still nicknames all enemy territory “Indian Country”). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments.
Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage. 3 In using terms as “white” and “whiteness”, we are acknowledging that whiteness extends beyond phenotype.
4 We don’t treat internal/external as a taxonomy of colonialisms. They describe two operative modes of colonialism. The modes can overlap, reinforce, and contradict one another, and do so through particular legal, social, economic and political processes that are context specific.
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In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place – indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree, forthcoming).
At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5, whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror.
The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species. The settler is making a new “home” and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because “civilization” is defined as production in excess of the “natural” world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor, which he cannot provide himself. The chattel slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment would have to be in the form of property (land). The settler’s wealth is land, or a fungible version of it, and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The settler positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural.
Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous 5 As observed by Erica Neeganagwedgin (2012), these two groups are not always distinct. Neeganagwedgin presents a history of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in Canada as chattel slaves. In California, Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest under the Spanish mission system, Indigenous people were removed from their land and also made into chattel slaves. Under U.S. colonization, California law stipulated that Indians could be murdered and/or indentured by any “person” (white, propertied, citizen). These laws remained in effect until 1937. 6 See Kate McCoy (forthcoming) on settler crises in early Jamestown, Virginia to pay indentured European labor with land.
Decolonization is not a metaphor 7
laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations (See also A.J. Barker, 2009).
Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire – utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces.
Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the US context – empire, settlement, and internal colony – make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires7.
Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these contradictory decolonial desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people in settler contexts. Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.
7 Decolonization is further fraught because, although the setter-native-slave triad structures settler colonialism, this does not mean that settler, native, and slave are analogs that can be used to describe corresponding identities, structural locations, worldviews, and behaviors. Nor do they mutually constitute one another. For example, Indigenous is an identity independent of the triad, and also an ascribed structural location within the triad. Chattel slave is an ascribed structural position, but not an identity. Settler describes a set of behaviors, as well as a structural location, but is eschewed as an identity.
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Playing Indian and the erasure of Indigenous peoples
Recently in a symposium on the significance of Liberal Arts education in the United States, Eve presented an argument that Liberal Arts education has historically excluded any attention to or analysis of settler colonialism. This, Eve posited, makes Liberal Arts education complicit in the project of settler colonialism and, more so, has rendered the truer project of Liberal Arts education something like trying to make the settler indigenous to the land he occupies. The attendees were titillated by this idea, nodding and murmuring in approval and it was then that Eve realized that she was trying to say something incommensurable with what they expected her to say. She was completely misunderstood. Many in the audience heard this observation: that the work of Liberal Arts education is in part to teach settlers to be indigenous, as something admirable, worthwhile, something wholesome, not as a problematic point of evidence about the reach of the settler colonial erasure.
Philip Deloria (1998) explores how and why the settler wants to be made indigenous, even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian. Playing Indian is a powerful U.S. pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to fraternal organizations, to new age trends, to even those aforementioned Native print underwear. Deloria maintains that, “From the colonial period to the present, the Indian has skulked in and out of the most important stories various Americans have told about themselves” (p. 5).
The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants. (Deloria, 1998, p.5)
L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) famously asserted in 1890 that the safety of white settlers was only guaranteed by the “total annihilation of the few remaining Indians” (as quoted in Hastings, 2007). D.H. Lawrence, reading James Fenimore Cooper (discussed at length later in this article), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and others for his Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), describes Americans’ fascination with Indigeneity as one of simultaneous desire and repulsion (Deloria, 1998).
“No place,” Lawrence observed, “exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed.” Lawrence argued that in order to meet the “demon of the continent” head on and this finalize the “unexpressed spirit of America,” white Americans needed either to destroy Indians of assimilate them into a white American world…both aimed at making Indians vanish from the landscape. (Lawrence, as quoted in Deloria, 1998, p. 4).
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Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land – this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all Americans are a “little bit Indian.” These desires to erase – to let time do its thing and wait for the older form of living to die out, or to even help speed things along (euthanize) because the death of pre-modern ways of life is thought to be inevitable – these are all desires for another kind of resolve to the colonial situation, resolved through the absolute and total destruction or assimilation of original inhabitants.
Numerous scholars have observed that Indigeneity prompts multiple forms of settler anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous peoples – who make a priori claims to land and ways of being – is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete (Fanon, 1963; Vine Deloria, 1988; Grande, 2004; Bruyneel, 2007). The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of this anxiety, because it is a premature attempt at reconciliation. The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.
Settler moves to innocence
We observe that another component of a desire to play Indian is a settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting (see Tuck and Ree, forthcoming, on mercy and haunting). Directly and indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve. In her 1998 Master’s thesis, Janet Mawhinney analyzed the ways in which white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organizations.8 She examined the role of storytelling and self-confession – which serves to equate stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural racism and exclusion – and what she terms ‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination” (p. 17). Mawhinney builds upon Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s (1998) conceptualization of, ‘the race to innocence’, “the process through which a woman comes to believe her own claim of subordination is the most urgent, and that she is unimplicated in the subordination of other women” (p. 335).
Mawhinney’s thesis theorizes the self-positioning of white people as simultaneously the oppressed and never an oppressor, and as having an absence of experience of oppressive power 8 Thank you to Neoma Mullens for introducing Eve to Mawhinney’s concept of moves to innocence.
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relations (p. 100). This simultaneous self-positioning afforded white people in various purportedly anti-racist settings to say to people of color, “I don’t experience the problems you do, so I don’t think about it,” and “tell me what to do, you’re the experts here” (p. 103). “The commonsense appeal of such statements,” Malwhinney observes, enables white speakers to “utter them sanguine in [their] appearance of equanimity, is rooted in the normalization of a liberal analysis of power relations” (ibid.). In the discussion that follows, we will do some work to identify and argue against a series of what we call ‘settler moves to innocence’. Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. This discussion will likely cause discomfort in our settler readers, may embarrass you/us or make us/you feel implicated. Because of the racialized flights and flows of settler colonial empire described above, settlers are diverse – there are white settlers and brown settlers, and peoples in both groups make moves to innocence that attempt to deny and deflect their own complicity in settler colonialism. When it makes sense to do so, we attend to moves to innocence enacted differently by white people and by brown and Black people. In describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework of excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization. We discuss some of the moves to innocence at greater length than others, mostly because some require less explanation and because others are more central to our initial argument for the demetaphorization of decolonization. We provide this framework so that we can be more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence, which we discuss in the final section of this article.
Moves to innocence I: Settler nativism
In this move to innocence, settlers locate or invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have had “Indian blood,” and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples. There are numerous examples of public figures in the United States who “remember” a distant Native ancestor, including Nancy Reagan (who is said to be a descendant of Pocahontas) and, more recently, Elizabeth Warren9 and many others, illustrating how commonplace settler nativism is. Vine Deloria Jr. discusses what he calls the Indian- grandmother complex in the following account from Custer Died for Your Sins:
9 See Francie Latour’s interview (June 1 2012) with Kim Tallbear for more information on the Elizabeth Warren example. In the interview, Tallbear asserts that Warren’s romanticized claims and the accusations of fraud are evidence of ways in which people in the U.S. misunderstand Native American identity. Tallbear insists that to understand Native American identity, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework.”
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During my three years as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians it was a rare day when some white [person] didn’t visit my office and proudly proclaim that he or she was of Indian descent… At times I became quite defensive about being a Sioux when these white people had a pedigree that was so much more respectable than mine. But eventually I came to understand their need to identify as partially Indian and did not resent them. I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone. Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother’s side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear. It doesn’t take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian-grandmother complex that plagues certain white [people]. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer… While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many white [people]? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for the treatment of the Indians? (1988, p. 2-4)
Settler nativism, or what Vine Deloria Jr. calls the Indian-grandmother complex, is a settler move to innocence because it is an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land. Deloria observes that settler nativism is gendered and considers the reasons a storied Indian grandmother might have more appeal than an Indian grandfather. On one level, it can be expected that many settlers have an ancestor who was Indigenous and/or who was a chattel slave. This is precisely the habit of settler colonialism, which pushes humans into other human communities; strategies of rape and sexual violence, and also the ordinary attractions of human relationships, ensure that settlers have Indigenous and chattel slave ancestors.
Further, though race is a social construct, Indigenous peoples and chattel slaves, particularly slaves from the continent of Africa, were/are racialized differently in ways that support/ed the logics and aims of settler colonialism (the erasure of the Indigenous person and
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the capture and containment of the slave). “Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society,” Patrick Wolfe (2006) explains:
Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black. (p. 387)
Kim Tallbear argues that the one-drop rule dominates understandings of race in the United States and, so, most people in the US have not been able to understand Indigenous identity (Latour, 2012). Through the one-drop rule, blackness in settler colonial contexts is expansive, ensuring that a slave/criminal status will be inherited by an expanding number of ‘black’ descendants. Yet, Indigenous peoples have been racialized in a profoundly different way. Native American- ness10 is subtractive: Native Americans are constructed to become fewer in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time. Our/their status as Indigenous peoples/first inhabitants is the basis of our/their land claims and the goal of settler colonialism is to diminish claims to land over generations (or sooner, if possible). That is, Native American is a racialization that portrays contemporary Indigenous generations to be less authentic, less Indigenous than every prior generation in order to ultimately phase out Indigenous claims to land and usher in settler claims to property. This is primarily done through blood quantum registries and policies, which were forced on Indigenous nations and communities and, in some cases, have overshadowed former ways of determining tribal membership. Wolfe (2006) explains:
For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. (p. 387)
The racializations of Indigenous people and Black people in the US settler colonial nation-state are geared to ensure the ascendancy of white settlers as the true and rightful owners and occupiers of the land.
In the national mythologies of such societies, it is believed that white people came first and that it is they who principally developed the land; Aboriginal peoples are presumed to be mostly dead or assimilated. European settlers thus become the
10 Native American, then, can be a signifier for how Indigenous peoples (over 500 federally recognized tribes and nations in the U.S. alone) are racialized into one vanishing race in the U.S. settler-colonial context.
Decolonization is not a metaphor 13
original inhabitants and the group most entitled to the fruits of citizenship.” (Razack, 2002, p. 1-2; emphasis original.)
In the racialization of whiteness, blood quantum rules are reversed so that white people can stay white, yet claim descendance from an Indian grandmother. In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which enforced the one-drop rule except for white people who claimed a distant Indian grandmother – the result of strong lobbying from the aristocratic “First Families of Virginia” who all claim to have descended from Pocahontas (including Nancy Reagan, born in 1921). Known as the Pocahontas Exception, this loophole allowed thousands of white people to claim Indian ancestry, while actual Indigenous people were reclassified as “colored” and disappeared off the public record11.
