The Fraud of "Settler Colonialism"
NOTE: The following is an entry by Barry Cooper, PhD, FRSC. Some of you will recognize the name from the two COVID books Haultain published in the last couple of years. Cooper is one of Canada's best-known and prolific political philosophers. He is based in Alberta. So, it is a treat and a pleasure to include Cooper exclusives once a month for all our paid subscribers.
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One of the most bizarre and ill-informed symbols employed by the activist and progressivist left is “settler colonialism.” Fortunately, Adam Kirsch, a poet and an editor of the Weekend Review section of the Wall Street Journal, has recently published a brief but incisive analysis of what the phrase means and of the political reality referred to by those who use the term. His On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice (New York, Norton, 2024) is, in addition, beautifully written.
Kirsch began by taking note of a surprising fact: more than half (60%) of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought the Hamas-led Palestinians were justified in seeking to exterminate Israeli Jews. The chief reason they offered for their views involved the term “settler colonialism.” Its meaning was not clear, but emotionally speaking it was highly negative.
In order to discuss this topic rationally, Kirsch shows we must have a high tolerance for inconsistencies and ironies. Usually, for example, “settler” in the Israeli context refers to Jews living in territory occupied after the 1967 “Six-day war.” About 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank today out of a total of nearly seven million citizens. The individuals attacked on October 7, 2023, lived within the internationally acknowledged borders of Israel, usually called the “Green Line.” What nevertheless made these people settler colonists was the expansion of the term to refer to all Israelis because the entire state had been declared a settler colonial entity. This new definition accords well with the Israeli religious nationalists who also declare there is no meaningful distinction between the post-1967 occupied territories and the “Green Line” territories. All Palestine, they say, between the river and the sea, belongs to Israel. To this irony is added its consistency with the Zionist principle that declared that Jews were a people indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. For the advocates of “settler-colonialist” language to ignore this obvious historical reality is, to say the least, inconsistent.
A similar problem occurs with the expansion of the term “settler colonialism” to cover what is often called the Anglosphere, which includes New Zealand and Australia as well as North America, sans Quebec. Most of the time, persons who move to these countries are called immigrants, not colonists. In addition, one would have thought the founding of the United States to be the premier modern anti-colonial event. Not so. For persons who use the term in a negative way, however, Americans are nevertheless “settler colonists.” Why? Because of a statement made by an Australian professor, Patrick Wolfe, who uses the language of settler colonialism in a negative way. He famously declared: “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Wolfe had Australia in mind, but the statement has been adopted by North American critics as well.
The implication is straightforward: invasion of the territory of present-day Canada, the US, and so on, was both unjust and constantly renewed through various forms of continuing oppression. Hence, it’s a “structure” not an “event.” Accordingly, all inhabitants who are not descended from aboriginal inhabitants are forever “settlers,” even if they are fresh off the boat from Vietnam or if their forebears were brought in chains from the shores of Africa. So are mixed aboriginal/European peoples –Métis in the Canadian context—and, in the US, aboriginal/African peoples, though this oddity is seldom mentioned and never emphasized. The purpose of Wolfe’s formulation, as those of critical race theory, is not to provide a perspective on historical events but to change the existing “structure,” and do so right now! This activity is called by its advocates “decolonization.”
For most of us today, “decolonization” takes the form of the land acknowledgement, which is widely construed as mere virtue signalling. It is not serious because it does not refer to a real political struggle. Despite saying the University of Calgary exists on Treaty Six land, which did not exist before real British colonization, there is exactly no chance that the institution will vacate the real estate in northwest Calgary that it blames itself for occupying. Land acknowledgements are doubly hypocritical because everyone in Canada already knows that Canadians live on lands once, but no longer, controlled by First Nations. Beyond that unnecessary and superfluous reminder, “decolonization” is difficult to specify or even to imagine clearly. Unless, that is, one considered following the example of Hamas on October 7.
Let’s see what that entails. The goal of Hamas, evident from their public declarations, is genocide in the traditional sense of killing a genos, a people. Proponents of settler-colonial criticism do not contemplate the extinction of non-aboriginal Canadians. Instead. They redefine genocide by way of such recondite terms as “cultural genocide” (used, for example, by former Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin), the purpose of which is to redefine Canadian culture. The only way properly to undo the injustices of settler colonialism would be for Canada never to have existed. But it did and, arguably, still does. Accordingly, Canada first must be delegitimized, chiefly by denunciation and occasional violent demonstrations to ensure a permanent disaffection, summarized by the proposal that Canada ought not to exist. It never should have happened because it is so evil. This is, of course, a retrospective magical dream, not a pragmatic historical possibility.
Such an observation, however, is not a criticism of settler-colonialism as a vision because the vision was never intended to be connected to actual history. Rather it is intended to inspire political activity in the present to create a future and so far non-existent alternative. This alternative history is distinct from Canadian history both as a series of events and as a narrative. We can start by calling this place Turtle Island, which means “identifying” as Iroquois for whom the term is mythologically significant –but not, however, for the Haida.
Such reflections indicate there is something deeply unserious or profoundly stupid about settler-colonial evocations. Most Canadians do not think they have oppressed First Nations persons for the obvious reason that they never have. It may be that our predecessors behaved badly, but whose predecessors, including indigenous ones, have not? More to the point, we cannot magically restore lost languages and cultures or make so-called settlers disappear or uninvent technologies that destroyed pastoral economies. The buffalo are not coming back, and everyone knows it. All that calls for such restorations in the name of decolonization can achieve is to ensure that what today are phantom barbarian acts recollected from the past are balanced by real barbarian acts today. That is why defacing and destroying the icons of Canada’s past –statues of Sir John A. or of Queen Victoria, for example—are understood by the vandals and wreckers as acts of righteous rebellion.
Magical thinking and undertaking violent acts for fictional purposes are examples of what Victorian legal scholars used to call moral insanity and political scientist today often refer to as spiritual pathology. The perpetrators are not crazy; they are not psychopaths who cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. They know the difference perfectly well and call right what they know is wrong. Hence the spiritual or moral, but not mental, pathology. Moreover, the premise of such activity was expressed in the aphorism Wolfe introduced earlier: “invasion is a structure, not an event.”
Sorry, Professor Wolfe, that is rubbish. Every political border, whether that of a modern nation-state or a migratory hunter-gatherer society, is the result of an event –in fact, of many discrete events. Those events are aggregated as history, a sequence of human activities that are made articulate as stories and narratives. That is why arguments –competing stories—about the future of Canada or of Turtle Island are arguments about the past, about history as events. If we are discontented with the present –and who is not? – we necessarily interpret the story of how we got to where we are. That too is history, history as interpretation. The interpretation offered by advocates of settler-colonialism, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fraud, a magical justification of violence and an attempt to destroy political reality.
Genuine historians are needed to tell adequate stories of past events; the cops are needed to deal with mindless and violent ideological activists.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. He is a senior fellow and Chair of the Board of Advisors at the Haultain Research Institute. He is the author, editor, or translator of 37 books, most recently Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023), and has published nearly 200 papers and book chapters.