Settlement is an everyday process, constituted not only by the initial clearing of the land but the ideological reiteration of the geopolitical and spatial self-evidence of the terrain on which political struggle occurs – disorientation is necessary, a political strategy that makes this space alien to us

As opposed to the sense of withdrawal into a space divorced from contemporary political economy, the text also proposes a reframing of perspective, altering the physical sense of relation to one's surroundings via a suspension of their givenness. In this vein, Ahmed suggests, “If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails” (11). These moments in the text suggest how the self can become the site for an imaginative break with routine that produces a sensuous reorientation (getting “turned round”). The critical project of the text appears here less as locating a space apart in which to discover the fullness of the self than as the making alien of an already occupied place, such that “we should not recognize” it. The act of turning round, of shifting one's orientation and redirecting the momentum by which one previously was impelled, offers possibilities for perceiving differently, for seeing and engaging in ways that less take for granted the jurisdictional matrix of the state and in which contemporary Native peoples can be acknowledged as themselves important “inhabitants of New England” whose indigeneity compels a reconceptualization of the terms of occupancy for everyone.¶ Becoming conscious of the everyday enactment of settlement involves relinquishing the notion of an autonomous, extra-political selfhood existing in a place apart, instead opening onto a recognition not only of enduring Native presence within contemporary political economy but of the effaced history of imperial superintendence and displacement that provides the continuing condition of possibility for the sense of settler escape into the wilderness. To be clear, the absence of a declared set of imperial commitments does not suggest non-Natives' exoneration from continuing histories of violence perpetrated and perpetuated by the settler-state. Returning from a different direction to Nicoll's critique discussed earlier, there may be an absence of sentiments hostile to Native peoples in non-Natives' speech or writing, or non-Natives may adopt a particular viewpoint supportive of Indigenous sovereignty on delimited plots of land when considering Native peoples as such. However, that absence of malice or declaration of support does not address the ways quotidian experiences of space (with respect to jurisdiction, occupancy, and ownership) and subjectivity (as modular, self-identical, and extralegal) affectively register and iterate settler sovereignty in ways that shape the generation of, for example, ethics, ideals, and political projects that do not take Native nations, voices, and lands as their direct object. While arguments about the structural quality of settler colonialism – its scale, density, duration, and centrality to US life – remain important, their very insistence on its pervasive and systemic operation can create the impression of an integrated whole. However, as Latour observes, if “the body politic” is taken “to be virtual, total, and always already there”, then “the practical means to compose it are no longer traceable; if it's total, the practical means to totalize it are no longer visible; if it's virtual, the practical means to realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view” (162–3). How is the settler body politic composed, collected, and realized in everyday ways through the experiences, perceptions, associations, emplacements, and trajectories of non-Native bodies? How do settler jurisdiction and governmentality shape the material possibilities available to non-Natives in scenes and sites apparently disconnected from Native peoples and Indian policy, and how do non-Natives in their quotidian feelings and interactions (and the cultural productions for which ordinary sensation serves as background) actualize the political and legal geographies of the settler-state? Attending to settler common sense in this way does not so much bracket Indigenous self-determination as draw on it as ethical inspiration to investigate the ways it is deferred through ordinary action whose aim is not such but whose effect is to reiterate the self-evidence of settler geopolitics. Reciprocally, such analysis also seeks to suggest how non-Natives might disorient and reorient themselves, how they might come to understand not only that Indigenous peoples remain part of the social landscape of life in the US but that the very terrain non-Natives inhabit as given has never ceased to be a site of political struggle.