ResoluteReader: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a leading historian of settler colonialism in the Americas and the history of indigenous people and their struggles. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a response to one of the most enduring myths of the history of the United States - the idea that the US is made up of immigrants, and immigrants alone, whose struggles and labour has transformed the barren, inhospitable and virgin landscape into a country emblematic of freedom and hope. That myth has taken some battering in recent years from the second Trump Presidency. Nonetheless, the liberal idea (beloved of the Democrats) of a liberal nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures and societies is one held on to by many - perhaps increasingly so as ICE agents arrest and kill on the streets of US cities.

But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it is a myth that needs to be demolished for there to be true equality, freedom and liberation. Rather than a nation of immigrants, we should understand the US as a Settler Colonial power, whose origins were shaped by colonialism and imperialism from the start, and whose legacy of injustice, dispossession and genocide cannot be ignored. As she writes, the US constitution "created a people empwered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired."

She continues:

The history of the US is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide.

She quotes the indigenous historian Michale Witgen who concludes:

The US was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

The scale of the extermination almost defies comprehension. In hte mid 19th century, around 100,000 Native people in California were "exterminated". Not just murered, but the entire ecological system that they had created was destroyed in a few years by people hunting for gold. Though, as Dunbar-Ortiz points out, if it had not been for their resistance "there would be no indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California", because the settler's "objective" was "to eradicate them".

The argument for a "nation of immigrants" is predicated on the idea that Native Americans no longer exist, no longer have any claim to land and that their history is essentially finished. In her book Dunbar-Ortiz shows however that that this is not true. The treaties and laws that dispossed indigenous people of their lands and livelihoods were ones that continue to be used, and must be challenged. A process of decolonisation is required, but this is one that would require the destruction of the settler colonial state itself. The process of immigration to the US has been a process whereby settlers and immigrants have been incorporated into the structures of settler colonialism itself. She says:

The migrant forced into migration to the US or other states structured on settler colonialism - Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel - is susceptible... to the ideology of settler colonialism, which in the US is imprinted in the content of patriotism, Americanism. Without consciousness of and resistance to this pull, the migrant can passively contribute to the settler-colonial order.

She continues:

This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It's a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers... It's a call for those who work tirelessly for workers' rights and working class solidarity to recognise that it's not nly racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers' identification as even being working class and work solidarity in the US and with other workers of the world.

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to reject the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US... state". She says instead "a revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism".

At the core of this argument is one that says the structures of US imperialism and settler colonialism needed the dispossession of indigneous lands. Settlers were able to acquire this land and could reconsitute themselves as the original Americans. The structures, ideology and racism of this setup then shapes the attitudes of millions of people - and unless this is shattered, historic injustices and contemporary ones will continue.

Racism and settler colonialism are at the heart of US ideology - Dunbar-Ortiz shows the horrors of racism towards Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese people, among others. She also demonstrates how ideas of White Supremacy became central for many trade unionists and white workers, against Black and Asian people in particular.

But it is also true that the realities of life in the US constantly create a tension with these ideological realities. Growing numbers of people understand that the US is a society built upon systemic racism and white supremacy. Indeed the very success of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's earlier work, including her brilliant Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, demonstrates this (and shapes it, dialectically). Indeed, the recent retreat of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Minneapolis following major protests by local people, demonstrates this. On ICE, Dunbar-Ortiz has written (quoting Mexican immigration historian Alexandra Délano Alonso):

The project of dismantling ICE can't be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society's vision of justice and "a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built inot the 'nation of immigrants' from its very origins."

It is clear that tens of thousands of people have come to this conclusion as a result of Trump's recent actions in Minneapolis. The task for the US left is to ensure this mood is not diverted by the Democrats into another tiresome electoral strategy that embraces the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric and destroys the potential for generalisation of radical ideas.

But agency too matters. When Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses what she calls the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution" I felt obliged to ask what other alternative there was. What agency exists for the root and branch transformation of US society and the destruction, from the bottom up, of settler colonialism? Here, I think we have to note, that few workers actually gain a stake in the system from settler colonialism. Racism does, of course, divide. But it also disempowers White workers as well as Black workers.

The taking of indigenous land, which is central to the settler colonial project, produces "free land". But not everyone gets that, and when it "presented possibilities for white workers to own property", it also in doing so transformed them from their working class position into that of small producers and smallholders. In turn many of those workers were dispossed by big business and large landowners. Thus few workers have a material stake in the settler colonial society of today. This opens up a contradiction to be exploited. Settler colonialism offers something, but that is out of reach of most workers.

But, I want to emphasis, in concluding this review while these are important debates they do not undermine systematically the importance of Dunbar-Ortiz's central thesis. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project and it must be destroyed. The structures of settler colonialism in the US were emulated everywhere - from Nazi Germany to the racist South African apartheid state and Zionist Israel. Learning the lessons of its history and the resistance to it, are crucial to the liberation project for humanity. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book is a crucially imformative tool in developing our own revolutionary struggles.