Introduction: Settler Colonialism, History, and Theory

Abstract

T his book analyzes settler colonialism over the sweep of Euro-American history. It is neither a simple narrative of conquest nor a study devoted solely to ferret-ing out indigenous agency within the colonial encounter. The narrative instead identifies ambivalences-the myriad ways in which both the "colonizer" and the "colonized" reconfigured their identities as they traded, allied, assimilated, negotiated, resisted, and otherwise carved out "third spaces" within the colonial encounter. Despite these ambivalences, American settler colonialism ultimately drove an ethnic cleansing of the continent. 1 I employ the trope of ambivalence as a framework both to incorporate Indian agency and to address the complexity of the colonial encounter. Borderlands history emphasizes local and regional studies and the distinctiveness of each colonial situation. There was no single "frontier," of course, but rather many borderlands with fluid geographic boundaries. Mixed ethnicities and convoluted identities, contestation over sovereignty, and varieties of cultural, economic, and social change characterized the borderlands. Yet underlying the history of all regions was dispossession of the indigenous residents backed by violence. In the end, settler colonialism was a zero-sum game. Settlers-operating from the bottom up but backed by all levels of government-would accept nothing less than removal of Indians and complete control of the land. As they carried out Indian removal across the breadth of the continent, Americans internalized a propensity for waging indiscriminate violence against their savage foes. Born of settler colonialism, this boomerang of violence would play out over the sweep of US history and help define an "American way of war" in the process. 2 This study flows from the premise that the United States should be perceived and analyzed fundamentally as a settler colonial society. The American "impe-rial settler state" originated in the context of Indian removal and forged powerful continuities over space and time. American history is the most sweeping, most violent, and most significant example of settler colonialism in world history. American settler colonialism evolved over the course of three centuries, resulting in millions of deaths and displacements, while at the same time creating W. L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism