Genocidal settlement is not a one-off event, but a structuring ontological logic of elimination constantly manifested in the everyday reiteration of the very modes of spatial inhabitance and subjective modes of being that define settler identity

If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that “elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded) occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the domination and displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation as a white possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “At an ontological level the structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and manage- ment: “the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix).