The desire to the set the terms of debate around heteronormative standards represents a colonization of politics that bolsters the links.

(Kevin, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)

In the contemporary era, I would include politics itself as among the facets of existence that settler colonialism colonizes. That is, settler colonial assemblage defines and seeks to bound that which is legitimately subject for debate and contestation as it concerns the distribution and role of power, identity, interest and institutions. Before one can even ask the question of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation, the question may be rendered moot, outside the bounds of legitimate, or realistic, politics. In this light, my suggestion here is that the response to such appropriations as that of Geronimo's name should not be to ask the White House for an apology, and thus concede the status of this statist institution. Instead, the association should be embraced, in one key respect. To embrace the association is not to stand in alliance with Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all or the US military, but rather to re-assert the fact that Geronimo was, indeed, an enemy of American statism and settler colonialism. It is to maintain the political posture of friend versus enemy, and to render as important and necessary the status and actions of what political theorist Joel Olson called the zealot or fanatic as an important political category that holds out the possibility for more radical transformation of the political order.27 It is to say that the use of Geronimo's name is not simply the sign of an absence of respect or sensitivity for Indigenous people, but is more evidence of the active presence of settler colonial assemblage in the specific form of US liberal colonialism. In sum, in critiquing the problem with the Codename Geronimo case, we should seek to avoid either reproducing a politics of recognition and multicultural discourse or diagnosing it as a sign of collective amnesia, as if only people knew all the ‘facts’ of history things would be fine, or better. Rather, in this regard, LaDuke and Harjo get it right I believe in emphasizing the persistent posture of American warfare against Indigenous people. While this is a difficult framework to ponder, it is the appropriate one for a decolonizing, unsettling politics which insists on drawing clear lines for and against settler colonialism. In this sense, the unsettling response here is to put settler memory front and center as an active contemporary practice, in which Geronimo's name is utilized by the US military because the invocation of his legend habitually calls forth – possibly unlike any single figure in US-Indigenous history – the appropriative violence of settler colonial conquest that fundamentally shapes, as an active verb in the twenty-first century, the political development and status of American liberal colonialism.