On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
By Adam Kirsch.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
Hardcover, 160 pages, $24.99
Reviewed by Daniel J. Fischer.
The term “settler colonialism” has exploded in popularity. According to the Google Books NGram Viewer, which measures the use of words, it first appeared in trace amounts in 1941. It languished in obscurity for decades, enjoyed a hilltop moment in 1979, and declined again. But the use of the term began to rise quickly after 2000, and between 2010 and 2022, the line graph of the term’s use goes almost straight up. Settler colonialism was referred to forty-two times more often in 2022 than in 2000—even before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which probably made the term even more popular.
Well-tuned to the moment, literary critic Adam Kirsch has penned On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, a brief introduction to the term. Kirsch clearly defines and thoroughly critiques settler colonialism, but also attempts something more. At a time when the culture wars are largely fueled by debates over the demands the past makes on the present, he ventures into the squirm-inducing parts of the past and attempts to come up with a better way to come to terms with them.
Settler colonialism refers to the form of colonialism that took hold in what became the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel. Contrasting sharply with those who colonized Africa and Asia, colonists in these places did not merely rule native peoples but took their land, made themselves the majority of the population, and seized the culture’s commanding heights. Kirsch focuses on the scholars and activists who use the term to interpret the world through what he calls “the ideology of settler colonialism.”
The ideology of settler colonialism is rooted in a good-vs.-evil interpretation of the past that revolutionized how history was depicted until recent decades. “Nations traditionally took pride in their martial origins,” Kirsch writes. Americans wrote history exalting their nation as an exceptional defender of freedom. American historiography became more critical after the Second World War, but settler colonial history went even farther. Natives lived in their homelands since “time immemorial,” such accounts often say. Then Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas, something that “should not have happened,” says ethnic studies scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Settler colonial history assails “Western vice by exalting Native virtue,” says Kirsch. The American past becomes “an unmitigated disaster.” For example, the “description of the settlers as instinctively and hideously violent” in Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014) “is the mirror image of the way American historians used to write about Indians.”
Atop the reinterpreted past, settler colonial ideology constructs what amounts to a religion. One of its virtues, says Kirsch, is that, unlike older jingoistic views of history, it can confess to historic wrongdoing. But the ideology goes further than that by attempting to update St. Paul. Adherents believe settlers committed “original sin,” Kirsch says, by stealing native land through genocide. People living on land taken from the original inhabitants are doomed to repeat the original settlers’ sins by their mere presence. Thus, the ideology “offers a new, politically timely language for the traditional sense of being what Paul calls ‘a prisoner of the law of sin.’”
How can a settler be saved? “Decolonization,” which, Kirsch says, “is often another name for dying to sin.” Settler colonialism prescribes a variety of acts of devotion: land acknowledgements (“We respectfully acknowledge that Baylor University in Waco and its original campus in Independence are on the land and territories originally occupied by Indigenous peoples. . . .”); uprooting “settler ways of being,” from greed to monogamy to the scientific method; and severing “settler futures”—eliminating settler societies, in other words.
The weaknesses of settler-colonial ideology range from humorous to hair-raising. Guilt-stricken adherents participate in “a rhetorical competition . . . in which the confession of sin earns moral prestige,” an image that seems designed for Tom Wolfe to lampoon, were he still living. Genocide is redefined to mean not only attempting to eliminate natives but also assimilating or even living at peace with them (for that prevents natives from being distinct). Thus, Israel can be blamed for genocide even though there are 50 percent more Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank now than in 2006. Natives were not as saintly as they are often portrayed. After studying bones buried in Illinois a century or more before Columbus came, one archeologist said he found that “about 16 percent of several hundred burials showed signs of having died a violent death, with evidence of decapitation, scalping, blunt force trauma, and arrow points embedded in bone.” The ideology of settler colonialism is prone to delusion. “Its impossible goal,” says Kirsch, “is to turn the clock back to the world that existed before 1788 or 1607 or 1492.” Settlers who have long been in the vast majority in their new homes are not exactly in a hurry to pack up, for “they have no mother country besides the one they are living in.” The longing to bring back a lost world inspired many of the ideology’s adherents to cheer Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023.
Kirsch could have limited himself to serving up red meat to readers weary of the excesses of radical students and professors breathing “theory and invective,” but instead, he challenged himself by seriously wrestling with a real problem identified by the settler colonialists. The creation of settler-colonial countries really did displace huge numbers of natives. What does that do to the legitimacy of these countries?
Kirsch offers insights on dealing with historic sins. No one is innocent. “There is not a single country,” Kirsch writes, “whose history does not provoke horror, if seen through the eyes of the victims rather than the victors.” The only reason we lack a lurid litany of native conquests is that natives were often unable to make written records. “Every people that occupies a territory took it from another people, who took it from someone else,” Kirsch writes. Such history cannot be righted. “A legal system that held out hope of reversing every loss,” Kirsch writes, “would create more chaos and injustice than it remedied.” Both the Jews and the Arabs have historic roots in the land known as Israel or Palestine. Kirsch’s solution is “despair”—as outlined in the Talmud, a practice designed for thorny cases, such as innocently purchased property that reached the marketplace through theft. Because restoring the property would hurt the innocent, the injured person despairs and lets go. Despair in the case of the conflict between settlers and natives would mean refusing “to turn any country into a symbol of evil” while also making big—and very roughly sketched—concessions to natives: creating a Palestinian state and allowing Native Americans “to define and protect their way of life.”
The weakest part of On Settler Colonialism is Kirsch’s opaqueness about the degree to which he shares settler-colonial ideology’s negative interpretation of the history of the four nations in its crosshairs. He sees “injustice” toward native people in the founding of the United States and Israel and calls these countries “a curse to some people.” But he also says they were “a blessing to many others.” To definitively evaluate settler-colonial scholarship, we need a thorough account of what happened in the past that judges—in context—how bad it was. In a book this short, Kirsch could never lay out these countries’ histories with natives in detail, but it would help if he would render a clearer assessment of them.
Failing to do so leaves an open door for scholars to call for a settler-colonial lite outlook. Settler-colonial lite would regard the creation of these nations as regrettable faits accomplis. It would prune the more radical ideals of the ideology of settler colonialism while leaving one of the goals Kirsch notes: “to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.” Since Kirsch also admits that despair can still require the payment of damages, the adoption of despair combined with a particularly grim reading of a settler state’s history might still lead to the bitter restitution he hopes to avoid. Without a more compelling evaluation of these nations’ histories, settler-colonial lite remains a viable possibility for these countries’ predominant scholarship and public discourse—with serious consequences for how these countries live in the present. Still, full-strength settler colonialism is effectively demolished by Kirsch’s book.
Daniel J. Fischer is a writer and copy editor who specializes in working with historians. He has a PhD in history from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is writing a book titled The War on Winter: The Settlement of the Northern West and the Dawn of Modernity. He keeps a Substack called the A La Carte Scholar.
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