On Settler Colonialism 

In school, we may have learned that Simón Bolívar proposed expansion into northeastern Colombia in his quest for regional unification. What we may not have learned is that he blithely suggested that “the savages who live there would be civilized and our possessions increased,” using what we call today explicitly settler colonial terms,  Indigenous peoples there perceived Colombian intruders as “Spanish” throughout the 19th century, and the return of Catholic missions at the end of the century followed the logic of state-sponsored religious “Hispanicization.”  James Parsons in 1949 used “colonization” in an unembarrassed mid-century description of Antioqueño Colonization in Western Colombia.

As I look back on this Latin American history, I am beginning to understand it as a reflection of  settler colonialism—a concept that is gaining popularity in the study of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  It has become exceedingly visible—and controversial—in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.  Protesters argue that Israel, like the United States, was colonized through a process that expelled and eliminated the native (Palestinian, in the case of Israel) population, and that justice requires not only halting the genocide in Gaza but also acknowledging and repairing those historical wrongs.

Portrait of Simon Bolívar. Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 10, 2024.

Critics of the term, like the Wall Street Journal’s Adam Kirsch in his new book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, argue exactly the opposite.  Kirsh echoes for “settler colonialism” what right-wing critics claim about “critical race theory,” complaining that the concept is divisive, hateful and dangerous.  Because it denies the legitimacy of existing states including the United States and Israel, it is inherently a call to violence and genocide.  Strangely, while Kirsch acknowledges that settler colonial scholars, from Rashid Khalidi to Mahmoud Mamdani to Lorenzo Veracini, all explicitly reject violence and genocide and advocate, for Palestine, either a two-state solution or one state with full and equal rights for Jews and non-Jews, Kirsch continues to insist that the concept inevitably leads people “into morally disastrous territory.”  He also studiously ignores Latin American movements and projects challenging settler colonialism in their continent.

Settler Colonialism in Latin America?

Although anthropologist Patrick Wolfe did not invent the term, his work on settler colonialism starting in the 1990s, especially his 2006 “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” spurred the field of settler colonial studies. As his title suggests, settler colonialism differs from the more common “franchise” colonialism in that the former aims to replace, rather than rule over, the native population. Mostly it has work inspired in, and about, the “Anglosphere”: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Israel.

Until recently, the concept was rarely invoked with respect to Latin America. Yet as we mentioned in the case of Simón Bolívar, pre- and post-independence Latin American governing elites pursued policies of territorial expansion, Hispanicization, state-sponsored white immigration and settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination” of Indigenous peoples—and Indigenous peoples continue to be subjected to violence and expulsion today.  In both the United States and Latin America, the concept of settler colonialism can make visible how the colonization of Indigenous peoples evolved after colonialism and today’s independent states were founded.  Its power parallels the way “neocolonialism” helped analyze independent Latin America’s subordination in the global arena.

Students of the School La Sagrada Familia. Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Digitized by the Luis Ángel Arango Library of the Banco de la República, Colombia. Accessed October 10, 2024.

State, church and settler policies reveal similarities between the two halves of the continent after independence.  Like the United States, almost every newly independent country in Latin America set out to conquer autonomous Indigenous territories and dismantle Indigenous institutions.  In the United States, Indians were variously enslaved, deported, massacred, removed and forcibly assimilated, and their lands taken over by the new country.  None of these tactics was alien to post-independence Latin America, even if assimilationist policies were more widespread there.  Extermination and assimilation, Indigenous author Gord Hill reminds us in one of the few works from the early 1990s to propose settler colonialism as a pan-American process, constituted “two methods, one goal.”

Throughout the post-independence Americas peripheral, racialized peoples were seen as rural, backward and primitive obstacles to elite projects of progress and economic development. George Washington University historian  Benjamin Hopkins argues that common strategies “ruling the savage periphery” characterized 19th-century states around the world and created the very ungovernability that they claimed to be confronting.  Argentina’s “conquest of the desert” was only one example of a continent-wide phenomenon. 

Thinking about post-independence Latin America in terms of settler colonialism offers new ways of thinking about state-sponsored immigration and racial whitening, and about education and assimilation projects.  University of Nebraska historian Margaret Jacobs’s work on residential boarding schools and other forms of child removal compares settler and other colonial contexts.  In 1902, Colombia ceded its ungovernable Indigenous territories directly to the Catholic church where missions pursued similar policies.  Photographs of Wayuu Indigenous children at Capuchin orfelinatos in the late 19th and early 20th centuries hauntingly recall those of children at the Haskell and other U.S. residential schools.

Titled: Orphanages and Capuchins. (Left) Friar Luís of Bogotá surrounded by children from the San Antonio Orphanage. Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Digitized by the Luis Ángel Arango Library of the Banco de la República, Colombia. Accessed October 10, 2024.

Neocolonialism and Settler Colonialism: Contradictory or Complementary?

Myths of mestizaje, intellectuals’ attention to analyzing Latin America’s neocolonial relations with outside powers undermined potential dialogue on settler colonialism, as did the Anglophone orientation of the field.  As University of Minnesota anthropologist Bianet Castellanos pointed out in a 2017 special issue of the American Quarterly dedicated to settler colonialism in Latin America, there is not even a harmonious translation of the phrase in Spanish.  In the same issue, UCLA anthropologist Shannon Speed noted that “theorizations of the settler state (largely elaborated in the north) have not grappled fully enough with neoliberal capitalism, and theories of the neoliberal state (a primary focus in the south) fail to recognize the significance of settler logics that structure the conditions of state formation, including in its current iteration.”  In a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies in 2021 dedicated to Latin America, the editors reported that in the decade since its founding, the journal had only published two articles on the region.

As early as 1964, Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova had suggested that “The habit of viewing Mexico as an ex-colony or a semi-colony of foreign powers, and of seeing Mexicans generally as subjected to foreign colonization, has blocked the development of the view that Mexicans are colonizers and colonized.” Nevertheless, he wrote in his classic study of Mexican politics, “The Indian problem is essentially one of internal colonialism…  The Indian communities are Mexico’s internal colonies.”  Yet even as González Casanova lamented the divide, his work also suggests potential harmonies.  Latin American thinkers’ attention to neocolonialism constitutes a generally unacknowledged source for settler colonial analysis.

An 18th century caste painting with all 16 combinations of New Spain with the mestizo in frame # 1. Wikipedia. Accessed October 10, 2024.

Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano later reformulated these two colonialisms as connected rather than dichotomous:  the “coloniality of power” referred to Latin American elites’ internalization of ideas about European cultural and racial superiority replicated both domestically and internationally.  In the face of neoliberalism and climate chaos, campesino, Indigenous, peasant and environmental claims acquired new resonance.  As Josefina María Saldaña Portillo, professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, put it, “the Zapatistas made evident to the general population…  that neoliberal reform had turned the entire country into Indians.”—that is, the neoliberal era highlighted the interweaving of neocolonial and settler colonial exploitations. 

Recent scholarship emphasizes these interconnections, showing how Indigenous and peasant movements are at the forefront of challenging the settler colonialism of neoliberal globalization.  University of California anthropologist Giovanni Batz’s 2024 The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Extractivism, and Maya Resistance in Guatemala, for example, traces the ways that the long-autonomous Mayans in the Ixil triangle survived the genocide of the 1980s to fight neoliberal, “green” extractivism in the postwar.  Unearthing the links between settler and neo-colonialism can also help highlight Latin American movements’ and governments’ innovations in anti-colonial practice in the 21st century—something that Kirsch claims is not possible.

Settler Colonialism and Decolonization

Kirsch denounces what he terms settler colonialism’s extravagant and unrealistic demand for decolonization—which he flattens to mean simply that the colonial power must leave.  This worked for the franchise colonies, but is impossible in settler colonial contexts, he argues, because in the latter decolonization would mean the destruction of the state and genocide:  in the United States, the elimination of white people; in Israel, the elimination of Jews.

Kirsch’s decolonization is a superficial one that emphasizes heroes and wars of independence.  But decolonization, as Latin Americans well know, is a more complicated process, with external (neocolonial) and internal (settler colonial) components.  Formal independence didn’t erase existing global structures.  The struggle for decolonization continued in the 20th century with the Non-Aligned Movement, with the push for a New International Economic Order, and pushback against debt, the WTO, and detrimental trade agreements.

Independence likewise did not erase domestic colonial cultures and structures.  New countries saw few alternatives to European models of the nation-state, industrialization and capitalism, and leaders frequently viewed Indigenous and rural people as obstacles to these visions.  Thus they frequently reproduced settler colonial patterns.  Indigenous and peasant-led movements have emphasized the links between neocolonialism and settler colonialism, demanding a deeper rethinking of the nation-state and the nature of economic development.  In the 21st century these ideas increasingly shaped the legal and political arena in Latin America.

Haitian Revolution, Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 10, 2024. From Histoire de Napoléon, by M. De Norvins, 1839

Seeing Latin American states as colonial/colonizing states is nothing new to the region’s popular movements.  Quijano highlighted the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution and the Bolivian Revolution as examples towards “social decolonization” that challenged ongoing “colonial domination of American blacks, Indians and mestizos.”

Even some of the very political/intellectual trends identified above as obstacles to settler colonial analysis–myths of mestizaje, indigenismo, neocolonial approaches—could open as well as close doors to promoting Indigenous rights.  Arizona State University historian Shane Dillingham showed how grassroots Indigenous activism could coopt and reshape official indigenismo.  Generations of leftists built on connections between concepts of internal colonialism and neocolonialism.

Twenty-first Century Decolonization in and beyond the Nation-State

Over the last thirty years Latin American states have embarked on a remarkable series of anti-colonial transformations.  Indigenous and peasant movements played a big role in the election of leftists governments beginning with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1998), with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and others following suit.  The wave ebbed and flowed but did not entirely recede, with leftist Gustavo Petro’s 2022 victory in Colombia as part of the third surge of the century.

Governments challenged the very nature of the nation-state by recognizing Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples as rights-bearing collectivities.  Some adopted plurinationalism, seeking to reconstruct politics and the state in ways that gave meaningful representation and also autonomy or sovereignty to Indigenous and other excluded peoples.

Many challenged the industrial, extractive economic development model that had seduced both capitalist and socialist countries, countering with concepts of food sovereignty, the rights of nature, and buen vivir or sumak kawsay.   Based on Andean Indigenous and peasant, as well as leftist, anti-colonial cosmology, sumac kawsay proposes a profound critique of capitalism and western models of economic development as exploitative and destructive of both humans and the natural world.  It aims at redefining the “good life” away from profit, growth and consumption towards respecting the rights of nature, redistribution and harmony.  New constitutions in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) guaranteed plurinationalism and buen vivir.  Ecuador’s constitution and Bolivia’s 2010 and 2012 Mother Earth Laws  further enshrined the rights of nature.

Furthermore, governments experimented with new forms of radical democracy, from participatory budgeting to free prior and informed consent, that elevated the voices of those most marginalized by earlier forms of economic development.

A march by La Via Campesina in Bolivia, Ian MacKenzie / Creative Commons. Accessed October 10, 2024.

Peasant and Indigenous movements that played an important role in the rise of leftist politics nationally also gained new visibility in existing state-based international forums like the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, and new grassroots initiatives like the World Social Forums, the Via Campesina and the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  The latter’s “People’s Agreement,” signed by hundreds of organizations and governments, offered a sharp contrast to the tepid accords supported by the industrialized countries.  The Agreement’s concrete proposals insisted that the colonizers “honor their climate debt,” including restorative justice to the people and the natural world they have harmed.

The contrast between Latin American countries taking decolonization seriously and the settler colonial holdouts was frequently in evidence in these international fora.  Fifteen of the 24 countries that have ratified ILO Convention 169 on the rights of Indigenous peoples are Latin American or Caribbean.  In 2007, 143 countries voted for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Latin America likewise voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, which passed with 121 votes.  The settler colonial five—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel—stood out as the exceptions refusing to approve any of these.

Without idealizing Latin American attempts to challenge the continuing colonial nature of their states, institutions and societies—many of which are sadly incomplete—, we can acknowledge the strength of Indigenous and peasant movements there, and the creativity with which Latin American states have experimented with structural transformations to un-settle their colonial roots.  Adam Kirsch and his admirers could learn a lot about dismantling settler colonialism by looking at Latin America.