Land is life

and it's wholesale expropriation by settler colonialism.

The subject (and question) of genocide is never too far from the history (and discussion) of settler colonialism. Be it North America, Siberia, Australia, South Africa or even Israel. Anthropologist and author Patrick Wolfe has outlined the matter as “Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life.”. But let us be conscious of the fact, that settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide. Call it exceptional or rare, in places like Fiji, Tonga and Hawaii the native society was able to survive, though hardly unscathed, when facing the invaders a.k.a new settlers.

The transformation or call it a socioeconomic system that the settlers introduced were not singular but evolved over time backed by ever new laws, political mandates, based on scientific conclusions, webbed within social hierarchy and racial boundaries. Even in “sites of wholesale expropriation” such as Australia, North America and Siberia, settler colonialism's genocidal outcomes have not manifested the same way across time or space. Each form of settler colonialism that was out to destroy “heterogeneity and difference” did so employing a different set of violent mechanisms followed by development of ethics, racial hierarchy and Eurocentric anthropology.

The following narrative is a synopsis, of entanglements and conflicts that make each type of settler colonialism distinct from the other. Yet the inquest of ‘land and life’ ties up all the spectacular or horrific legacies spread across continents. The settlers and the dispossessed, bound within the logic of global transformation, extraction, expropriation and assimilation. The deeper convictions behind genocide and ecocide.

Welcome to North America! “When the War for Independence was won (a more apt title than ‘Revolutionary War’ because separation from England did not bring about a true social revolution), the colonists were free to move west­ward, a matter they considered their "Manifest Destiny." There fol­lowed almost two centuries of warfare in which the superior military power of the United States prevailed. Piece by piece, the land on which Indians had lived for millennia was gobbled up until they were confined to reservations comprising, in total, something less than 5 percent of their original holdings.” (Introduction by Howard Zinn, ‘From A Native Son’ by Ward Churchill). The above snapshot-history compels us further to understand the twin aspects, of African slavery and the dispossessed indigenous people together as an “oppressed majority” whose integration (natives) and labor (slaves) was fundamental for the survival of the “colonizing minority” - making the latter (colonizer) vulnerably dependent on the former (colonized and enslaved). The distinction here, between the colonization of North America, Australia and Siberia is based on the logic of “frontier homicide” and the forthcoming patterns of land acquisition and genocide. “Genocide of the natives could only be counterproductive, creating 'a void which emptied foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people” (Amil Cabral).

Instead of insights based on the historical records of genocide in North America, Ward Churchill’s critique can be taken as a direct attack on "intellec­tual imperialism" embedded within law, conservation science, governing frameworks and higher education in the United States and Canada. A legacy that Ward Churchill defines in great detail as a set of "false promises". Ingenious as well as grounded is the author’s alignment with the theories of “indige­nous liberation” outlined earlier by Marx and Engels. Settler colonial canons like “Kill The Indian, Save The Man” may still haunt the remaining indigenous of North, South and Meso America, however settler colonialism continues with ever new projects of integration, not just via technological and intellectual superiority but also social and “cultural inquisition”. Post genocide, ecocide, eviction and eventual assimilation, the author tells us about “Indian imagery in sports team names, logos, fashion, tourism as well as current "New Age" attempts to expropri­ate native spiritual traditions and practices turning them into mar­ketable commodities, green vitalism, nature conservation etc” ‘(From A Native Son’ by Ward Churchill).

Unlike Spanish and Portuguese colonization, inquisition, plantation slavery, forced labor and all the forthcoming massacres and genocides (1492 to early 1700CE) the Indigenous counterparts of North American were “cleared” from their land rather than “exploited as slave-labor”. While many scholars debate as to why ‘North American Natives’ were not exploited, their dispossession cannot be situated outside settler colonialism and it’s corresponding projects that include genocide.

David Stannard writes about the “demonization” of the Indigenous over centuries - “Evolution of British racial thought in North America paralleled what had happened previously among the Spanish and Portuguese… Sir Edmund Andros’ (1714) observations about the Indigenous of New England is very much in the same spirit with Oviedo Valdez’s opinion about the Indigenous of the Caribbean (1545).” (The American Holocaust). The Indigenous “place” and connection to land viz-a-viz “modes of production and modes of life” were abolished by the settlers over centuries. Replaced by foreign slaves (predominantly Africans) and later by millions of immigrants rushing into the “New World” from Europe, Russia, Latin America, China, Middle East and beyond.

“Africans who provided the labor to be mixed with the expropriated land, their own homelands having yet to become objects of colonial desire.” (Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and Transformation Of Anthropology). “As celebration and as cult, Columbus became the original immigrant for many Americans including president Theodore Roosevelt” (Roxanne Ortiz Dunbar). What certain scholars like Ortiz Dunbar call “process of Americanization” that stretched for more than 300 years, included several institutions dedicated to framing colonial history and Whiteness viz-a-viz “catholic fraternity” such as the ‘Knights Of Columbus’ (New Haven, 1882). “The acquisition of land, through the word of God or through war and genocide, as historical fact, would be effectively wiped out of migrant memory as well forthcoming generations.” (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Roxanne Ortiz Dunbar).

Colonizer history, be it made of presidents or pioneers, cowboys or puritans, abolitionists or emancipation of African slaves, would converge into the American civil war (1861-1865). A struggle for many things, that has been so thoroughly studied, however negating the question of “Indigenous presence”. Not resolved, nor part of any emancipatory hope or policy. Generations later, still embedded within modern society, be it situated in the West or East is the same disturbing worldview that frames the colonizer’s relationship with the remaining natives. About the same old land, history and “every forthcoming crisis that threatens the continuity of life”.

Welcome to Australia! Wonder why Australia is so diverse in it’s ethnicity? Credit goes first to the British, Dutch, Irish, Scots and Germans who still predominantly rule Australia. Must include the Italians, Greek, Polish, Croatian and Maltese who arrived later. Further down, we meet the working class made of the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Lebanese, Nepali, Korean, Indonesian, Egyptian, Turkish etc. The above ethnic groups make up almost 96% of the Australia’s population. Yet what about the original natives of the continent? To be fair Aboriginal Australians are 2.7% and the Torres Strait Islanders 0.3%. “Aboriginal population of the continent has steadily collapsed over the last 200 years, not just based on European contact but more recently because of increased incarceration, falling birth-rates, addiction to alcohol and drugs.. conditions clearly contrary to what the Australia’s liberal administration wants us to believe.” (Robert Tickner, Justice Reform Initiative, Australia).

In Australia, British dominion was effectively unchallenged by other European powers. Well known is the history of forced migration (1788-1818) made of convicts, murderers, vagrants, trouble makers, women, men and children of the underclass, physically disabled etc, shipped off to populate (and work) in the newly discovered continent. British “frontier homicide” necessitated rapid construction of penal colonies and military garrisons, consequently the widespread eviction of the Aborigines. The fact, Right To Return, Right To Homeland (Victims Of War, 1989) is a “human right” however hotly debated especially within settler colonial societies.

The matter of Aboriginal presence and rights could not be entirely mitigated by outright slaughter or “informal variants based on the European law of “terra nullius” being taken for granted in settler culture”. Terra Nullius is an ancient Latin expression which means "nobody's land" . The same “Terra Nullius” applied earlier by the Spanish to exterminate the ‘Xaragua’ and ‘Chichimeca’ (Hispaniola, 1503-1506), the Dutch massacre of the islanders living in the New East Indies (Banda and Nassau, 1620) as well as the Russians attempting to colonize Siberia (1700-1720). But these lands were never really empty nor did the natives ever hang a ‘welcome sign’ for the outsiders to begin with. Hence any colonized land that promises life or plenitude of resources, must go through a transformation or say an initial treatment.

Peculiar to the “treatment” of Australian Aborigines by the British and other Europeans, was based on the question of ‘Mother Right’. A theory of cultural evolution conceptualized by Johann Jakob Bachofen in 1860. As part of ‘Mother Right’ Bachofen believed in two things fundamentally. One “that originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity” and two “that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent (stock) could therefore be reckoned only in the female line” and consequently ‘Mother-Right’ (Das Mutterrecht). Influenced by the above maxims, several European anthropologists, historians and biologists were convinced that matriarchy was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity, allover the world. And who better than the Australian Aborigines as “living examples” of the aforementioned antiquity, because after all they were the most ancient or primitive for the Europeans. Back then and for a long while, at a foundational level western anthropology was a mix of oppositions and assumptions, or as Patrick Wolfe encapsulates “…Western discourse talking to itself”.

The logic of ‘Mother Right’ was not only abused but eventually upended by the early settlers in Australia, because it was fundamental to “curb the wild nature of the Aborigines” as well as subject the dark-skinned population to various types of laws and reforms that could effectively erase “the female line” and sterilize the “state of sexual promiscuity”. Depopulating Australia first was central, in order for the “civilizing project to roll out with ever increasing power and certainty” (Settler Colonialism And The Transformation of Anthropology). The 1865 Industrial / Reformatory Act legally sanctioned the “incarceration of Aboriginal children for being born to Aboriginal mothers”. Yet such depopulation of the native is not exclusive to North America or Australia or Siberia alone, but also contingent to the formation of countries like Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, Benin, Congo, Angola, Namibia, Sudan etc.

Welcome to Russia! - Picture Siberia and you might imagine countless prisoners enslaved within the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn). One can also imagine “detonator landscapes” (The Feral Atlas) as an outcome of “atomic experiments” or frozen diamond mines, oil fields, huge logging camps, lakes of exposed methane and all such spectacles of documented modernity. Popular history and imagination aside, this humongous region measuring almost 13,500,000 square kilometers also equates to “the world's largest, flattest plain”. So where are all the original people of Siberia? The ones who predated Russia (and Russian presence) by thousands of years? What happened to the Chukchis, Kets, Yughs, Yukaghirs, Nanais, Kereks, Khakas, Sireniks, Koryaks, Khanty, Mansi, Alutors, Itelmen, Nivikh and the Izohrians? Concurrent to the colonization of the “new world” by Europeans was the continuous invasion, resettlement and transformation of Siberia by the Russians. First as expansion of empire and later during Stalin-era USSR, a period stretching from early the 1700s to the mid-1960s. The modern discourse surrounding history of Indigenous Siberia is yet to receive the “Siberian experience and history in the framework of genocide.” (genocidewatchblog.com). But the ecological verdict of “land is life” appears very clearly yet again.

Siberia was never "nobody's land" since Paleolithic times. The vast region nested ancient human beings who spoke various languages classified as “Paleo-Siberian”. The proliferation of the Chukchi and other tribes is foremost linked to domestication of Reindeer. Yet we must include fishing, hunting, weaving, metallurgy and even the art of ceramics as part of their evolution and economics. These Siberians hunted walrus, seal, polar bears and whales on sustainable terms (and numbers) for more than 3000 years. “The Chukchi, Yukaghirs, Koryaks, Mansi and other smaller tribes had no steady contact with European and Asiatic civilizations for eons… is eminent that break-away tribes of West Siberia migrated further north in search of better prospects, crossing the frozen landmass that is now called Bering Sea, towards an entirely new continent.” (Marshall Sahlins). Such new and far-out frontiers were crossed well before “Moses Split The Sea” ushering in some biblical exodus or human beings actually learned how to build huge temples, raise massive armies and big bridges.

Many millennia later, still in search of new land and new resources, the Russians and subordinated Cossacks (not to be confused with Kazakhs) launched a long offensive against the Indigenous of Siberia and outlying regions like Kamchatka and Ural. After total annexation by Russia in early 1700s, it is estimated that close to 150,000 Itelmen, Nanai and Koryaks perished due to infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. What followed during 1710-20 were “mass suicides and the slaughters perpetrated by the Cossack militia throughout the first two decades of Russian rule.” (Circumpolar People’s Study). Over the next hundred years, the collapse of Siberian tribes was eminent facing ever stronger military onslaught and the gradual eradication of their spiritual believes, modes of production viz-a-viz modes of existence. The Bolshevik revolution brought an end to the Siberian genocide, however the oppression and subjugation evolved into codification - erasing indigenous language, knowledge and customs in favor of “Soviet uniformity”.

Symbolic of sustained brutality and degradation, the Gulag system found ideal locations within a nearly depopulated Siberia. The remaining native population had to be assimilated into the labor force of industrial Russia. Stalin’s dream of an united “mother Russia” could never actualize without the forced labor of not just political prisoners, anti-communists and dissidents but hundreds of thousands of Siberians, gradually turning them into the most impoverished and exploited ethnicities of ‘Soviet Russia’. One has to include ethnic groups like the Chechens, Mongols, Kazakhs and Tartars integrated into the Gulag slave-labor system.

How the Chukchis, Kets, Yukaghirs, Koryaks, Alutors, Itelmen and Nivikh have made it to the 21st century is another story, documenting native resilience. But heartbreaking it is to know that most of these ethnic groups and their languages are already in the “endangered list”. For once we can ignore the bogus fearmongering that “modern humans being are up for extinction” when we learn who is it? As part of the species, that has and is actually going extinct.

Welcome to Israel! “Settler colonialism destroys to replace”. Relevant as a definition, a symbolic comment made by Patrick Wolfe is better contextualized with a figure like Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. Especially to emphasize the “destroy” part. In his own words, Herzl backed by a “troubled dream” wrote “if I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.” While many scholars, writers and journalists concur that Israel is the “last chapter of settler colonialism” I do wish to treat the matter in a way that gives light to the uniqueness or say “highest form” of settler colonialism and fanatic desires, as seen and felt in the 21st century. The myth, backed by western imperialism and Zionist colonialism about “a land without people and people without a land” is but a vicious extension of Terra Nullius.

We know well that over the last 70 years Jews were driven from “other lands to fill the created space” a.k.a Israel. But the fundamentalist logic of Zionism was encapsulated way earlier. “If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.” (Theodore Herzl, 1901). More than a hundred years later, many Americans would sustain Zionist imaginaries, like Israelis “made the desert bloom” (Kamala Harris, presidential rally 2024). “The story continues as always in defense of the State of Israel.” (George Bush, 2001). There are a hundred reasons as to why two or more settler colonial societies, are tied up in several projects that include propaganda, censorship as well as war, genocide, weapons trade, forced starvation and continued violation of human rights.

Folks like Ahmad Alnaouq, Jeremy Scahill, Ilan Pappé, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal, Katie Halper and Norman Finkelstein remind us again and again, that Israel is a combination of many things. Such as an “apartheid state” and “exclusionary” settler colonialism, furthermore that Zionism was an “European project to resettle and recolonize a land, that was not empty but home to millions… a diverse set of people belonging to different ethnicities, languages and religious beliefs, as Muslim, Christian and even Jewish” (Lobbying for Zionism On Both Sides of the Atlantic).

“Apartheid in South Africa came to end, it was overcome… Nothing lasts forever and you can’t keep up racism, terror and discrimination forever… Israel can also end. Having said that, Patrick Wolfe also reminds us that the white rulers of South Africa were clearly dependent on the labor and existence of black South Africans from start to end, yet that is not the case with the “settler colonial project of Israel”. The implementation of which is a never ending project. Generations of Palestinians have been effectively excluded from the economy, higher education, treated as second class citizens, dealt under exceptionally unfair rules, limits and mandates in spite of whatever says international law, the United Nations, media and the ICJ. Dozens of streets and narrow lanes within occupied Jerusalem are “Jewish Only” much like the “replacement plans” that manifested as militarized Kibbutzim (intentional communities) dotted across the occupied West Bank. Illegal corridors (Netzerim) that cut through the decimated zones of Gaza. The United Nations is mewling about the tragedy, but the genocide goes on by night and broad daylight. “Thousands of miscarriages, thousands of amputees, a baby is born without brains, no cerebrum, day 580”. (Electronic Intifada).

Many people in Israel, United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, India and elsewhere prefer to identify the land as a “Jewish democracy” and that is truly hilarious if not a total contradiction of terms. As if one can then imagine a ‘white people’s democracy’ or ‘black only democracy’ or even ‘men’s democracy’. Regardless, if such a form of democracy can manage to exclude people, deny them basic human rights, food and medical care, if it can also shoot children in the head, kill doctors, journalists and medics, humiliate and demonize Arabs as “inferiors / animals” and slaughter common Palestinians as “suspected terrorists” it is indeed the ‘highest form’ of settler colonialism, unbridled yet and not any democracy. “Justice for Palestine is imbued with revolutionary consciousness and dire oppression, very much like the international working class and their struggle to stay alive…” (Ali Kadri).

But the “wholesale expropriation” of Palestine is far from over yet the future of Israel itself in danger. The unraveling of a “Zionist settler-colonial project gone horribly wrong…” (Electronic Intifada, 2023). Worse, for every innocent Palestinian child, woman and man that is being slaughtered by Israelis, effectively pushes Israel further out in the open as “a global pariah state” (Chris Hedges). Collective global rage, as expressed by Norman Finkelstein and he does not hold back to say that “Israel is an insane, supremacist society”.

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Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. Not much can be said about people who wish to replace one nation with another, like some people in the past who violently replaced one type of existence with another - to acquire land, corresponding riches and establish dominion. There can be no doubts about the above trajectory, be it at the time of Columbus or during the emancipation of America or during the colonization of Siberia or the ongoing “AI powered-genocide” (Acid Horizon) in Gaza. “The colonizers came to stay”. Settler colonialism or call it invasion is a structure not an event. It is irreversible yet, as we have learned in the past. The colonizer’s logic that denies the native’s very “right to exist”. All settler colonial societies exist upon that vicious and tacit bedrock, of denial.

In contrast, for all the hollow celebration and rah-rah of “decolonization” as a species we sure have a very long way to go, in terms of achieving any real democracy, let alone human rights and security for all. Albeit there are great lessons and insights to be learned from the history of Indigenous resistance, including the remaining Aborigines, the Chukchis and the Palestinians. Two cheers for anti-settler colonialism and anti-racism!

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