On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

by Adam Kirsch

In the meantime, there is critique. Because invasion is a structure, not an event, one way to combat it—perhaps the only way actually available today—is to deconstruct the social order founded by settler colonialism. This requires a double struggle: a public one against political and economic institutions, and a private one against the assumptions and behaviors that make us individually complicit, often in ways we hardly suspect until they are pointed out. These baleful legacies constitute “settler ways of being,” a totalizing yet nonspecific term that makes it possible to blame virtually anything one objects to in modern American life—from selfishness to strip mining to the scientific method—on the original sin of settler colonialism.