Neoliberalism relies on the foundational dispossession and is just the modernization of settler colonialism and manifest destiny.

Neoliberalism and settler colonialism Epistemology, economic strategy, and moral code rolled into one, neoliberalism refers to the reliance on market-based relationships to explain how the world works, or how it should work. It treasures both individual self-responsibility and social efficiency, aligning the purposes of public institutions to the primacy of the market. Though many scholars position neoliberalism as recent or emergent paradigm, Indigenous and anti-colonial scholars recognize neoliberalism as only the latest configuration of colonial imperialism. Indeed, neoliberalism is an extension of/ the most recent iteration of (settler) colonialism (Bargh, 2007; See also Postero & Zamosc, 2006; Bhavani, Foran, Kurian & Munshi, 2009). Often overlooked by non-Indigenous scholars, indigenous decolonizing theory is a rich resource for theorizing neoliberalism and dispossession (Tuck, 2012). In settler colonial societies such as the United States, rights of property and occupation rely upon discovery narratives. Settler colonies were/are not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labor, but from land, which required/requires displacing Indigenous peoples from their homelands (Wolfe, 1999, p. 1). Settler colonization is not a fixed event in time, but a structure that continues to contour the lives of Indigenous people, settlers, and all other subjects of the settler colonial nation-state. Because settler colonialism has not only shaped how the US nation-state has managed Indigenous people, but all peoples on presumably valuable land (recast as “property”), indigenous theories of settler colonialism and contestations of that structure are especially relevant to the theorizing of urban space and urban schooling. Settler colonialism is the context of the dispossession and erasure of poor youth and youth of color in urban public schools, and Indigenous responses to settler colonialism provide salient insights for urban school reform. My empirical work has been on how neoliberal logic produces the conditions of school pushout, but an important recurrent theme is how neoliberalization (the insertion of market values into non-market sectors of human activity) has worked defund the public sphere and increase the size and influence of private sectors. Neoliberal restructuring has focused on building a seamless global market, at the same time diminishing the public sphere in ways that make everyday people more politically and economically vulnerable, more fully exposed to the dips and turns of the speculative market, and ultimately, more poor. Maori scholar Maria Bargh notes the ways in which neoliberalism is balanced upon “assumptions about the individual and the market as having particular natural identities,” (2007, p. 12) assumptions which prop up neoliberal arguments as objective (thus scientific) and humanistic (thus progressive). Neoliberalism represents a Translation of many older colonial beliefs, once expressed explicitly, now expressed implicitly, into language and practices which are far more covert about their civilizing mission… A key feature of neoliberal policies is this conflict between not wanting to be or appear paternalistic, wanting to be seen to allow people the ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment to govern themselves, but at the same time distrusting the abilities of some peoples, particularly indigenous peoples, to do so. (p. 13 & 14) Indigenous theories engage neoliberal logic and neoliberalization as part of a very particular trajectory of human thinking (not inevitable) and as reflective of shared aims with logics of settler colonialism and manifest destiny.