The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago kicked off with words that few American voters were eager to hear: "From time immemorial, our ancestors lived in the Great Lakes region," said Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation Tribal Council vice chairman Zach Pahmahmie. "However, in 1849, an illegal auction by the U.S. government forcibly removed our tribe from our homeland. Since then, we have been working to reclaim it."
A version of this was already printed in the Democratic Party platform, which acknowledged the convention would take place "on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial."
Land acknowledgments are perhaps the most popular, anodyne product of the academic field known as settler-colonialism or, more logically, settler-colonial studies. You’ve probably gotten stuck sitting through a land acknowledgment at some university event or theater performance, but they’re not terribly uncommon at business openings or groundbreaking ceremonies either.
What is uncommon, we learn in Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, is to find settler-colonial ideologues among the indigenous populations of the West. Like other social justice movements claiming to speak for minorities, it’s mostly a white thing. As Kirsch, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section, rightly argues, it’s also dangerous and delusional.
Kirsch writes, "Mainstream advocacy groups like the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund do not use the language of settler colonialism or name decolonization as one of their aims. Instead, they talk about defending tribal rights, enforcing treaties, and holding government accountable—concrete goals that can be achieved with the framework of American law." Which is what Pahmahmie, conforming to Kirsch’s framing, was getting at with his DNC speech, after all. He went on to praise the Department of the Interior for recognizing various tribes and allocating land.
This kind of constructive thinking on the part of Native Americans frustrates true settler-colonial zealots to no end. Kirsch quotes Columbia University’s Mahmood Mamdani, for example, who complains of "Indian activists, tribal governments, human rights tribunals, and scholars of indigeneity" who "fail to see that the colonial relationship endures." What Mamdani and his colleagues are after isn’t a possible resolution or compromise but something that’s plainly impossible: a grand unwinding of history itself. They call this dream "decolonization."
How every settled population in the world would self-deport back to its original homeland, they don’t know. But where answers are scarce, academic jargon fills the void. Settler-colonialism scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write that "‘relinquishing settler futurity’ is necessary if we are to imagine ‘the native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone. … Decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.’"
What exactly is this nonsensical ideology based on? Kirsch does a fine job of detailing settler-colonialism studies logic, such as it is. Its central tenet states that "Invasion is a structure, not an event." This popular quote from the field’s leading Australian scholar, Patrick Wolfe, means that once a people arrive at and settle in a land where there is an indigenous people, the entire edifice of the society is a frozen invasion and rendered illegitimate—until settler "futurity" is vanquished. This sounds comically broad because it is.
Whether the "invaders" have replaced the indigenous people, constitute a majority, or make up a minority, they need to go. And it matters not at all whether the settler-colonialists envision a shared, inclusive, multicultural society to be enjoyed by all. Such an approach is considered merely "transfer by assimilation," one of many categories of destroying indigenous people. What’s more, you are an unwelcome settler-colonialist, whether your ancestors were the invaders or were brought to the conquered land in bondage. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, African-American descendants of slaves "benefit from the settler-colonial system as it stands today," which doesn’t bode well for their futurity. As Kirsch quotes the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "The desire to relieve the non-European migrant or descendants of enslaved Africans from responsibility is understandable but not sustainable if the settler-colonial foundation is to be eradicated."
There’s nothing that settler-colonialist thinkers more urgently wish to eradicate than the State of Israel. The exterminationist rhetoric of the woke jihad on American campuses and streets is not to be taken metaphorically. And in defining Israel as a settler-colonial state, radical academics compound their delusion with perversion. If any people can legitimately claim indigeneity to any piece of land on this planet, it’s the Jews to Israel. The Jewish presence in the land of Israel dates back to the second millennium B.C. Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, are not descended from the Canaanites of the Bible. The Arabs didn’t conquer the Levant until the 6th century A.D., roughly 2,000 years after the Jews were first there. Settler-colonial studies argues that every land dispute should be resolved in favor of the land’s earliest known inhabitants. In Israel, that’s the Jews.
So if settler-colonialism scholars believed what they wrote and said, they’d be the most passionate Zionists on the planet. They don’t, and they’re not. But they do have a simple solution to this paradox: redefining established terms. "In the discourse of settler colonialism," Kirsch writes, "indigeneity has a meaning beyond chronology. It is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom." Radicals pronounce anti-Israel and anti-Western parties to be imbued with these qualities and then anoint them indigenous.
Redefinition permeates the field. The indigenous are settlers, refugees are colonialists, and, according to Damien Short of the University of London, "It isn’t actually necessary for anyone to be killed in order for genocide to take place." To sum up this capsized reasoning: When non-indigenous people are not killed by non-colonialists, it’s still settler-colonialist genocide.
This labyrinth of incoherence raises a fraught question: Is it even profitable to take seriously, as Kirsch’s excellent book does, something so unserious? As an ideology, settler-colonialism studies cannot be invalidated in the traditional sense because its adherents are entirely comfortable with its figments and inconsistencies. A philosophy that disfigures language, history, and morality to bolster its claims is no philosophy at all. It is a religion.
As a fanatical religious movement, settler-colonialism studies can and should be exposed. Its historians are priests, its texts are scripture, and its students are parishioners. What do they worship? At the moment, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—the purveyors of slaughter who work to hasten the rapture that academic journals call decolonization. Terrorists, unlike professors, have an answer for how to reverse history. And it doesn’t involve palaver about "denying futurity." Our Western settler-colonialism obsessives deify terrorists for picking up arms, killing the colonizers, and dismantling the West—while they, the credentialed academics, make land acknowledgments and occupy campuses to expiate their own sin of non-indigeneity. The woke jihad, too, is a structure, not an event.
On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
by Adam Kirsch
W.W. Norton, 160 pp., $24.99
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of Commentary.