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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Stanford law professor and historian Gregory Ablavsky emphasizes the centrality of Indian affairs in creating the Constitution, particularly provisions concerning federalism and the fiscal-military state. He highlights how ratification created a Constitution committed to the violent expropriation of the Indigenous territories bordering the thirteen states. The Constitution created a people empowered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired. For his analysis of the Constitution, Ablavsky borrowed historian Max Edling’s term “fiscal-military state.” Edling took the term from the historical literature on British state formation, in which it refers to “a state primarily designed for war.” Edling writes that the United States did not adopt the British model wholesale, rather the Constitution created a national government that was “light, and inconspicuous,” but which “held the full powers of the ‘fiscal-military state’ in reserve.”33 US historians make much of the fact that the founders did not create a large military, and thereby ignore military history. But the initial importance of the US military was mainly for the gradual taking of the continent, not for engagements with European militaries. The immediate objective of the Washington administration’s policy was to secure the ...