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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide. The word and its definition were created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, published in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.13 Lemkin was Polish, of Jewish descent, and a respected lawyer and prosecutor in Poland until the 1939 German invasion. Although Lemkin escaped to Sweden, forty-nine of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Lemkin became an advisor to the chief counsel of the Nuremberg trials, during which his concept of genocide as a crime in international law did not yet exist and was not one of the legal bases for the trials. Then, for two years, with the support of the Truman administration, Lemkin lobbied the member states of the new United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention, which the General Assembly did in the same session as the passage of the Declaration on Human Rights. “Genocide” is a legal term with a precise definition, enshrined in the international treaty the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951. Although President Truman signed the convention, it went into effect in the United States only in 1988 when the US Congress finally ratifi...