Settler colonialism fuels imperialism and drives war.

There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t be figured, that cannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The same yellow pollen in the water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, is the same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2 flashes. The same yellow pollen that poisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war that took a generation of young Pueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko writes, “Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you saw the witchery ranging as wide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where Silko lives, her books are now banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the settler innocence, ingenuity, and right to America may be taught. 
In “No”, her response to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Mvskoke/Creek poet Joy Harjo (2004) writes, “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.” Don’t Native Americans participate in greater rates in the military? asks the young-ish man from Viet Nam. “Indian Country” was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for ‘enemy territory’. The first Black American President said without blinking, “There was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden.” Elmer Pratt, Black Panther leader, falsely imprisoned for 27 years, was a Vietnam Veteran, was nicknamed ‘Geronimo’. Geronimo is settler nickname for the Bedonkohe Apache warrior who fought Mexican and then U.S. expansion into Apache tribal lands. The Colt .45 was perfected to kill Indigenous people during the ‘liberation’ of what became the Philippines, but it was first invented for the ‘Indian Wars’ in North America alongside The Hotchkiss Canon- a gattling gun that shot canonballs. The technologies of the permanent settler war are reserviced for foreign wars, including boarding schools, colonial schools, urban schools run by military personnel. It is properly called Indian Country. Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native, disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964. The management technologies of North American settler colonialism have provided the tools for internal colonialisms elsewhere. So to with philosophies of state and corporate land-grabbing24. The prominence of “flat world” perspectives asserts that technology has afforded a diminished significance of place and borders. The claim is that U.S. borders have become more flexible, yet simultaneously, the physical border has become more absolute and enforced. The border is no longer just a line suturing two nation-states; the U.S. now polices its borders interior to its territory and exercises sovereignty throughout the globe. Just as sovereignty has expanded, so has settler colonialism in partial forms. New Orleans’ lower ninth ward lies at the confluence of river channels and gulf waters, and at the intersection of land grabbing and human bondage. The collapsing of levies heralded the selective collapsibility of native-slave, again, for the purpose of reinvasion, resettlement, reinhabitation. The naturalized disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters laid the perfect cover for land speculation and the ablution of excess people. What can’t be absorbed, can’t be folded in (because the settlers won't give up THEIR land to advance abolition), translates into bodies stacked on top of one another in public housing and prisons, in cells, kept from the labor market, making labor for others (guards and other corrections personnel) making money for states -human homesteading. It necessitates the manufacturing of crime at rates higher than anywhere in the world. 1 in 6 people in the state of Louisiana are incarcerated, the highest number of caged people per capita, making it the prison capital of United States, and therefore the prison capital of the world. The Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers’ delta flood plain was once land so fertile that it could be squeezed for excess production of cotton, giving rise to exceptionally large-scale plantation slavery. Plantation owners lived in houses like pyramids and chattel slavery took an extreme form here, even for the South, beginning with enslaved Chitimachas, Choctaw, Natchez, Chaoüachas, Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa peoples, then later replaced by enslaved West Africans. Literally, worked to death. This “most Southern on earth”(Cobb, 1992) was a place of ultimate terror for Black people even under slavery (the worst place to be sold off too, the place of no return, the place of premature death). Black and Native people alike were induced to raid and enslave Native tribes, as a bargain for their own freedom or to defer their own enslavibility by the British, French, and then American settlers. Abolition has its incommensurabilities. The Delta is now more segregated than it was during Jim Crow in 1950 (Aiken, 1990). The rising number of impoverished, all black townships is the result of mechanization of agriculture and a fundamental settler covenant that keeps black people landless. When black labor is unlabored, the Black person underneath is the excess. Angola Farm is perhaps the more notorious of the two State Penitentiaries along the Mississippi River. Three hundred miles upriver in the upper Delta region is Parchment Farm. Both State Penitentiaries (Mississippi and Louisana, respectively), both former slave plantations, both turned convict-leasing farms almost immediately after the Civil War by genius land speculators-cum-prison wardens. After the Union victory in the Civil War ‘abolished’ slavery, former Confederate Major, Samuel Lawrence James, obtained the lease to the Louisiana State Penn in 1869, and then bought Angola Farm in 1880 as land to put his chattel to work. Cages on wheels. To mobilize labor on land by landless people whose crime was mobility on land they did not own. The largest human trafficker in the world is the carceral state within the United States, not some secret Thai triad or Russian mafia or Chinese smuggler. The U.S. carceral state is properly called neo-slavery, precisely because it is legal. It is not simply a product of exceptional racism in the U.S.; its racism is a direct function of the settler colonial mandate of land and people as property. Black Codes made vagrancy - i.e. landlessness - illegal in the Antebellum South, making the self-possessed yet dispossessed Black body a crime (similar logic allowed for the seizure, imprisonment and indenture of any Indian by any person in California until 1937, based on the ideology that Indians are simultaneously landless and land-like). Dennis Childs writes “the slave ship and the plantation” and not Bentham’s panopticon as presented by Foucault, “operated as spatial, racial, and economic templates for subsequent models of coerced labor and human warehousing - as America’s original prison industrial complex” (2009, p.288). Geopolitics and biopolitics are completely knotted together in a settler colonial context. Despite the rise of publicly traded prisons, Farms are not fundamentally capitalist ventures; at their core, they are colonial contract institutions much like Spanish Missions, Indian Boarding Schools, and ghetto school systems26. The labor to cage black bodies is paid for by the state and then land is granted, worked by convict labor, to generate additional profits for the prison proprietors. However, it is the management of excess presence on the land, not the forced labor, that is the main object of slavery under settler colonialism. Today, 85% of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.