And yet, to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful engagement with the indigenous-as has been the case in how Wolfe’s work has been cited-can (re)produce another form of “elimination of the native.” Because settler colonialism is a land-centered project entailing permanent settlement, as Wolfe points out in this same essay, “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” 6 5 In other words, the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as native. Indeed, this one article of his (although not his first writing on the subject, nor the last) also seems to be the most cited, perhaps because it offers so much in one piece by distinguishing settler colonialism from genocide, contrasting settler colonialism from franchise colonialism, and-through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the United States-showing how the logic of settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of indigenous peoples.Īs Wolfe noted, because settler colonialism “destroys to replace”, it is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.” 3 He was careful to point out that settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide, since there are cases of genocide without settler colonialism, and because “elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous peoples, though it includes that.” 4 Hence, he suggested that “structural genocide” avoids the question of degree and enables an understanding of the relationships between spatial removal, mass killings, and biocultural assimilation.
And although Wolfe insisted on making it clear time and again that he did not create the field of settler colonial studies-that Native scholars did-within the field of American Studies (as just one example), he tends to be most frequently cited as if he had. Wolfe’s essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” 2 is often cited as the principal work representing the concept and theory of the settler colonial analytic. Here I use it in two senses: first, that indigeneity itself is enduring-that the operative logic of settler colonialism may be to “eliminate the native,” as the late English scholar Patrick Wolfe brilliantly theorized, but that indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist and second, that settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, as it holds out against it. I begin this essay 1 by unpacking what I mean by “enduring indigeneity” in my title and what that means to an understanding of settler colonialism.
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