Utopian fantasies work to entrench settler colonialism – stories are used to otherize indigenous folk and takes part on the ongoing structure of assimilation and displacement.

Towards this, I maintain that scholarly engagement with utopia deserves an ‘unsettling.’ As such, I intend to argue for utopian studies’ engagement with emergent critical discourses of Indigenous peoples themselves, as well as non-Indigenous work concerned with the phenomenon of settler colonization.2 These discourses represent vital considerations for the potential revaluation of the phenomenon of utopianism as a useful contributor to the destabilization of distinctly settler colonial foundations. The specific and substantial effects that More’s Utopia and, more generally, the modern utopian tradition have had (and, importantly, continue to have) on settler colonial formations offer a clear and compelling basis for scholarly attention to such concerns. ¶ Firstly, there is an etymological dilemma involved in the utilization of More’s neologism “utopia” which may be translated as ‘the no place’ or, more commonly, ‘the good place which is no place’ to describe the social dreaming or expressions of desire for a better way of being by the Indigenous peoples of what is now known as the United States and Canada. While I do not at all wish to subsume the significant differences that have and do exist among Native peoples, the particularity of place is, generally speaking, a fundamental epistemological and ontological referent. It is the specificity of ties to a particular place which, in many ways, defines indigeneity. For example, the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. wrote in God is Red that “American Indians hold their lands—places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind” (Deloria, 1992: 62). ¶ Moreover, the power of non-Indigenous persons (settlers and otherwise) to shape discourse and language in ways that contribute to the ongoing displacement and subjugation of Indigenous peoples should not be understated.3 This is perhaps most (in)famously exemplified by the nonsensical application of the term ‘Indian’ to the original peoples of the so-called ‘New World.’ It follows that it is problematic to utilize a term signifying ‘no place’ to categorize the hopeful practices or traditions of Indigenous peoples. ¶ But aside from the etymological difficulties, the significant contributions of More’s famous text to the ongoing settler colonization of what is now known as the United States and Canada, and the settler utopian tradition itself must be critically evaluated in light of the consequences for Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Jeffrey Knapp has argued that Utopia “contains perhaps the first Tudor attempt to elaborate a theory of colonization,” and, referencing the work of D.B. Quinn, has suggested More was “...the first Englishman to use the word colonia in a Roman [i.e. imperialist] meaning” (Knapp, 1992: 21). Furthermore, there are recognized parallels between Utopia and contemporaneous published accounts of Amerigo Vespucci’s explorations (Logan / Adams, 2002: 10). ¶ However, it is the novel’s narrator, Hythloday, who recounts that the island ‘no place’— Utopia—was originally called “Abraxa” and was not an island at all. But after King Utopus’ invasion was successful, he “... brought its rude, uncouth inhabitants to [...] a high level of culture and humanity.” Furthermore, he ordered his own soldiers, alongside the conquered original inhabitants, to separate the territory from the mainland by digging a channel 15 miles wide to allow the sea to encircle the newly formed island (More, 2002: 42). Later, Hythloday details the philosophical rationale for the Utopians’ expansionist colonial adventures, explaining that when the Utopian population grows too large, they enroll citizens out of every city and plant a colony under their own laws [...] wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied and uncultivated land. Those natives who want to live with the Utopians are adopted by them. When such a merger occurs the two peoples gradually and easily blend together, sharing the same way of life and customs, much to the advantage of both. For by their policies the Utopians make the land yield an abundance for all, though previously it had seemed too poor and barren even to support the natives. But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves and against those who resist them, they wage war. They think it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it (idem, 54). ¶ Thus, as Antonis Balasopoulous has noted, the trajectories of utopian expansionism are clear (Balasopoulous, 2004). For Utopia clearly articulates the settler colonial doctrines of terra nullius [no man’s land], vacuum domicilium [unoccupied home], and inane ac vacuum [idle and waste] which were used by European powers to establish legalistic grounds, via an appeal to the “law of nature” for expropriating the supposedly uninhabited land. According to Knapp, this justification was “repeated time and again in the American propaganda of Renaissance England” (Knapp, 1992: 21). ¶ While the Utopians “acknowledge gratefully the kindnesses of Mother Nature” the soil of the fictional island of Utopia is reported to be less than ideal, requiring “improve[ment] by industry [...] hard work and technical knowledge” (More, 2002: 74-75). Virtue is realized, for the Utopians, in the maximization of human pleasure and welfare through reason so long as it does not hinder “... the welfare of [human] others or the common [human] good” (idem, 74). In other words, the realization of the original modern utopia obliges the instrumentalization of what Daniel Heath Justice describes as the “other-than-human” in the service of humanity alongside the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. For in order that Utopians act in accord with the “law of nature” the rationale holds that Abraxans (Natives) have left their land “idle and waste” and, therefore, the principle of “maximization of human pleasure” commands that lands be expropriated. The extension of (settler) sovereignty over a territory in the service of the maximization of ‘rational’ human interests is dependent upon an “ecological sovereignty,” which Mick Smith argues is foundational to a purportedly ‘progressive’ political modernity (Smith, 2011: xi). This notion of modernity determines who is “fully human,” in part, based upon a notion of human nature reliant upon a break from a “primitive” “natural state” by “hard work and the employment of that unique human faculty ‘reason’” (idem, 66-67). ¶ Therefore, More’s Utopia—the namesake of utopian studies—was articulated in decidedly modernist terms; the Utopians and their ideas are unambiguously representative of a notion of progressive modernity counter posed with Indigenous inhabitants (Abraxans) who are consigned to a backward ‘primitive’ pre-modernity, partly based on their failure to rationally recognize the “law of nature” and proceed to instrumentalize the land on which they lived. The consequences of this rationale were, of course, devastating for the peoples of Turtle Island—the English translation of the term utilized by the Haudenosaunee for what is now known as the continent of North America,4: ... ‘Haudenosaunee’ being the self-identification for the peoples of what is commonly referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy. More’s Utopia must, therefore, be recognized as having been constituted by and, crucially, as simultaneously contributing to the production and perpetuation of modernist epistemologies and ontologies, which were and, importantly, continue to be acutely dystopian for Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, More’s Utopia must be acknowledged as an archetypical modern settler society marked by what Patrick Wolfe terms “a logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2001: 387). ¶ This logic is articulated in the abovementioned passage from More’s Utopia: in short, the original inhabitants of Abraxa are to be assimilated as Utopians (“brought [...] to a high level of culture and humanity”), re-located, or simply eradicated (“But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves and against those who resist them, they wage war.”). Wolfe writes, “Settler colonies were [are] premised on the elimination of native societies [...] colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe, 1999: 2). As expressed by Lorenzo Veracini, this distinction is essential to the project of settlement as differentiated from other forms of colonialism: that remains permanently distinct from it ... as settlers, by definition, stay, in specific contradistinction, colonial sojourners—administrators, missionaries, military personnel, entrepreneurs, and adventurers— return (Veracini, 2010: 10). ¶ The consequences include the ensuing naturalization of the Utopians’ settler colonization and what Veracini calls a process of “settler indigenisation” (Veracini, 2011: 194). Here the foreign colonizers and the indigenous peoples switch places through a variety of one or more means of “transfer”: the modern citizen-subject of the settler society is rendered natural and, in fact, indigenous to the modern nation-state and its territory while the original inhabitant, the ‘Indian’ or ‘Aborigine’ is de-naturalized, made foreign, and per Wolfe, marked for elimination.5 Additionally, Utopia’s discussion of the management of what Veracini refers to as “exogenous Others”—an intentionally broad third category in a tripartite settler colonial order also involving settlers and Indigenous peoples—including foreigners, servants, and slaves (indentured and otherwise) exemplifies a distinctive form of settler sovereignty (Veracini, 2010: 17). In fact, the biopolitical administration detailed in Utopia ought be evaluated in light of contemporary examinations of biopolitics and settler colonial practices.6 ¶ Unfortunately, these processes can be observed as tropes routinely found in the utopian literary traditions of settler societies (Sargent, 2010b: 204). In fact, nearly all of the various expressions or “faces” of utopianism—from intentional communities to radicalized politics— which emerge from such settler societies ought be recognized as being predicated upon and, therefore, implicated in the ongoing naturalization of settler colonization. This resonates with Scott Morgensen’s contention that “[s]ettler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic, and cultural processes that those societies touch” (Morgensen, 2011: 53). ¶ Clearly, recognition of settler colonialism’s contribution to and naturalization within much of the modern utopian tradition is fundamental to utopian studies’ engagement in an ongoing project of ‘unsettling.’ Furthermore, the editors of the journal Settler Colonial Studies opine in their definition of ‘settler colonialism’ that “[t]here is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends” (Cavanagh and Veracini, 2010). Thus, it is apparent that use of the term ‘post-colonial’ is problematic for the utopianism of settler societies or the Indigenous peoples who continue to experience settler colonial realities. This is to say that, in such circumstances, there is a need for a differentiated form of utopianism; “[s]ettler colonisation requires an imagination that is alternative from traditional accounts of decolonizing passages (Veracini, 2010: 114).