Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“nation of immigrants” is generally used to counter xenophobic fears.8 But the ideology behind the phrase also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism and the lives of Indigenous peoples.

This idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants was hatched in the late 1950s, and while Kennedy was its ambassador, it came to reflect the US ruling-class response to the challenges of the post-World War II anticolonial national liberation movements, as well as civil and human rights social movements domestically.

“They just aren’t getting what was important about him. It was the intertwining of military force and wealth concentration as almost the definition of nationhood.”44 That’s the fiscal-military state, a capitalist state created for war.

But the “wild west” originated in the Northwest Territory, east of the Mississippi, not in the West. Defining the West as the site of genocidal conquest erases its origins at the very founding of the United States, when and where its leaders were intent on building world power based on land theft, genocide, and slavery, the pillars of the US fiscal-military state.

Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going . . . by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.”51

Indian hating and white supremacy were part and parcel of “democracy” and “freedom,” and central to US foreign policy then, as it is today.

In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement saw the extermination of more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870. Described by scholars as the most extreme demographic disaster of all time, it has also been defined as genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention.49

A Modoc leader, Kintpuash, nicknamed Captain Jack, led his people back to their homeland that included the lava beds area now called Lassen National Park.

Hipolito Salazar, who was of a mixed Indigenous people called Genízaros, was executed for treason, the only person ever charged and executed for treason by the US government.

After more than a half century of litigation, mass struggle, and congressional debate, forty-eight thousand acres of land, including Blue Lake, were returned to Taos Pueblo, land and water sacred to the Taos people that had been appropriated by the United States Forest Service as the Carson National Forest in 1906.

The 1992 Pueblo-made film Surviving Columbus featured a segment on the de Vargas parade in Santa Fé, criticizing the Hispano community’s lack of sensitivity to the Pueblos, who were victims of renewed Spanish colonization following the successful 1680 Pueblo revolt that had driven the Spaniards out.80

Following a protest by the Tricentennial Truth Alliance, a Hispano citizen wrote a letter to the Albuquerque Journal objecting to a quote from the group: “We equate the conquistador Juan de Oñate and his soldiers with Hitler and the Nazis. Both practiced genocide.” Orae Dominguez claimed that the Tricentennial Truth Alliance was “spreading racist lies about Spanish and American colonization” and that “genocide” did not apply.100

Lara finds that many younger-generation Hispanos among her students are acknowledging the settler-colonial stance of Hispano nationalism: “There’s a lot of crying in my classes, with students saying, ‘Here I am in this body, talking about the discrimination my family and I have experienced, but at the same time, historically my ancestry has been involved in the oppression of Indigenous people,’“ Lara says. “We have to have these conversations in a compassionate way, because it’s not so much about the statues. It’s about challenging systems of oppression and its symbols.”107

“the Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.”35

And it is certain that “liberty” was laughable to the captive Geronimo and his people, who at the time were being shipped in chains to a dungeon prison at Fort Marion, Florida, or to those Indigenous nations that had been incarcerated in reservations carved out of their former homelands, learning that Congress was set to divide the reservation lands into marketable allotments, which would end up privatizing three-fourths of the already shrunken Native land base. Or for that matter, those teeming masses of Lazarus’s poem, huddled in the overcrowded slums of the Lower East Side in New York City, who were doubtfully even aware of the festivities celebrating liberty.

immigrant affairs, William J. Carr, referred to Jews as “kikes” and, after a visit to Detroit, complained that the city was full of “dust, smoke, dirt, Jews.” To obstruct the entry of Jews fleeing Germany, the State Department rigidly enforced a law that required immigrants to present a supportive

Fletcher writes, “Whether in openly white supremacist terms or by omission, the ‘official’ [labor] movement situated itself as a movement of white working people in struggle against the white employer class, but joined together by the framework of the white republic against all others.”63

Aware of the Nazi concentration camps, they believed their own project was “an ironic testimony to the value of American democracy.” Historian Mae Ngai writes, “The greater irony, however, is that WRA’s assimilationism led to the most disastrous and incendiary aspects of the internment experience—the loyalty questionnaire, segregation, and renunciation of [their Japanese] citizenship.” WRA workers treated adult Japanese as children, infantilizing them, with the same mindset that prevailed in the US government’s Indian boarding schools.88

“Clinton was Reagan’s greatest achievement. He carried forward the Republican agenda. . . . NAFTA, though, represents the clearest and most consequential throughline.”

Délano Alonso acknowledges that the project of dismantling ICE can’t be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society’s vision of justice and “a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built into the ‘nation of immigrants’ from its very origins.” The words “illegal” and “immigration” must be decoupled in our public and private conversations.133

Mahmood Mamdani writes, “If America’s greatest social successes have been registered on the frontier of race, the same cannot be said of the frontier of colonialism. If the race question marks the cutting edge of American reform the native question highlights the limits of that reform. The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state.”1 Attempts to “include” Native peoples as victims of racism further camouflages settler colonialism and constitutes a type of social genocide. The US polity has been trying to rid itself of Indigenous nations since first settlement. Four hundred years later, multiculturalism is the mechanism for avoiding acknowledgment of settler colonialism. Mamdani correctly observes that the very existence of Indigenous nations “constitutes a claim on land and therefore a critique of settler sovereignty and an obstacle to the settler economy.”2

“The United States has not acted lawfully with other nations, including the Native American nations on its soil, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How can it now expect the human victims of that enormous illegality to obey the laws of the United States and stay home or wait thirty years for a visa to rejoin their families?”6

“As metropolitan multiculturalism and dominant postcolonialism promise the United States as postracial asylum for the world, the diminishing returns of that asylum meet exactly at the point where diaspora collides with settler colonialism.”11

Lawrence and Dua identified five areas that international critical race and postcolonial theory have failed to address. First, Native presence is erased; second, theories of Atlantic diasporic identities do not take into account the fact that they are settling on Native lands; third, histories of colonization are erased through emphasis on writings on slavery; fourth, decolonization politics are equated with anti-racist politics; and fifth, theories critical of nationalism contribute to ongoing delegitimizing of Indigenous nationhood.26 Regarding

2012, she wrote, “A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. . . . We have to be cautious not to replicate the Canadian state’s assimilationist model of liberal pluralism, forcing Indigenous identities to fit within our existing groups and narratives. The inherent right to traditional lands and to self-determination is expressed collectively and should not be subsumed within the discourse of individual or human rights.”30

Hixson writes, “Americans thus internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts. Violence against Indians, replete with demonizing colonial discourse and indiscriminate killing, established a foundation for virulent national campaigns against external enemies across the sweep of American history.”34

But only the United States became an unparalleled capitalist state and military machine, so unlike those other states, whose damage, damaging as it is, remains mostly local or regional while the United States rules the seas that are overheating, with the earth and the future of humanity itself at stake.

This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It’s a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers who were instrumentalized to reproduce white supremacy and white nationalism. It’s a call for those who work tirelessly for workers’ rights and working class solidarity to recognize that it’s not only racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers’ identification as even being working class and worker solidarity in the US and with other workers of the world. The Eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US fiscal-military capitalist and imperialist state has not and will not work. A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism.