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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“all of the defining institutions of settler colonialism as practiced in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries were first developed in North America. The US tribal homeland was the prototype not only for the South African reserve but also the Nazi concentration camp.”8

all-white Senate expressed concern that genocide charges might result from the history of racial segregation, lynching, and Ku Klux Klan activities. In addition, although the treaty was not retroactive, senators expressed fear that it would be used to define the nineteenth-century US treatment of Native Americans as genocide.

is essential to understand that aggressive white nationalism and settler colonialism form the bedrock of US institutions and historical and continuing white nationalism—a culture of violence, a gun culture, a militaristic culture—and that genocidal policy toward Indigenous nations and descendants of enslaved Africans always looms inside the US and has been extended globally by genocidal US policies and wars in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly in Africa.

The shadow of genocide lies in the Doctrine of Discovery,

which remains a fundamental law of the land in the United States, the legal framework that informs the US colonial system of controlling Indigenous nations. And

2005 in the US Supreme Court case of City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians in denying the Oneida Nation land claim. Although this was the Republican-dominated court of Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, the Oneida case was decided unanimously, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the decision.25

The Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 as a massive slave insurrection achieved