۳ - The Stages of Settler Colonialism

Patrick Wolfe, credited with establishing the field of Settler Colonial studies said “settler colonizers come to stay: [and settler colonization] is a structure not an event.”

A simple illustration of how settler colonialism should not be regarded as some past phenomenon, but that it is constantly being reproduced in front of us today. It is a structure that persists over us.

This happens both through new-age colonial projects such as Canada, Australia and Israel. But it also depicts that, though we are often unaware, we find ourselves in the late stages, sometimes the most important and critical stage of settler colonialism.

The first stage is known as Exploration and Initial Contact.

Exploration inevitably led to the colonizers' claim over indigenous lands and resources. It also brought upon the havoc of a number of uncontrollable diseases alongside an era of enslavement, exploitation and subjugation.

Christopher Columbus and his once highly-regarded explorations are now viewed as the first step in a long and destructive process that led to the erasure of indigenous populations in the New World.

The Portuguese explorer Prince Henry is the person credited with the first methodical European exploration and establishment in Africa. This came after the Arabs colonized parts of the North and Western areas and had long established their own Arab Slave Trade on interior of the Continent.

The Dutch soon followed pairing their own vested interests against the Portuguese with this new pursuit, paving the way for other European entities to create outposts to serve the African Slave Trade.

The second stage is defined as Occupation and Settlement.

This is the moment where settlers establish permanent residence on Indigenous lands. Characterized by immense violence, forced relocations and annihilation of entire areas and families: this phase is unforgiving, merciless and downright inhumane.

The forced displacement of millions of Africans from their home across the Middle Passage during the Transatlantic Slave Trade on such example. Another is the Trail of Tears, when 60,000 Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland after the Indian Removal Act in 1830, with thousands of them dying during and after the voyage.

The third stage is regarded as Land Acquisition and Expansion.

Here, treaties are broken, violence is everywhere and chaos ensues. There are practically no rules. All the lies have been swept under the rug, and the rug placed in a new, freshly built home on indigenous land. Over the graveyard of the children who used to play in its grass.

Greed plays a powerful part. Settlers rushing westward, even putting themselves at complete disregard for the dangers that lay ahead, to potentially satisfy their cravings for huge swathes of lands their children would one day hopefully inherit.

Land begins to be divided arbitrarily with no regard for any Indigenous community. This is seen in the Indigenous lands of North America but also characterizes moments like the Scramble for Africa and others.

At this time, segregation is also built into the system to enable the occupier to further their ambitions of total domination.

The fourth stage, called Institutionalization of Control is the moment the occupier systemizes their domination.

Legal and administrative frameworks alike come into play now. Policies such as assimilation, compulsory education, and the reservation system are instituted to destroy indigenous cultures and sovereignty. The communal systems are destroyed and the indigenous, in order to survive by body are forced to die by spirit.

The Indigenous of Canada faced Residential Schools while Black Communities grapple with systemic mass incarceration. Beyond the obvious chains that destroy lives by these means, the trauma passed down in surviving these institutions is unbearable.

The occupier denies the indigenous community their right to continue their way of life, speak their own languages and raise their children in their spiritual and cultural practices.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, “cultural assimilation and suppression were weapons of colonial domination, aimed at obliterating indigenous identity and heritage. The systematic suppression of indigenous languages and ceremonies undermined the very fabric of indigenous societies.”

Here, we also witness pockets of Resistance. A powerful and hopeful stage in settler colonialism. In modern times, we witness these moments as an opportunity for the occupier to say "See! Had we not told you of their savagery. Are we not entitled to protect ourselves? Our children? From these animals, these barbarians?"

The final stage, is one in which the Modern Institution is utilized to consolidate power and hegemony over the indigenous groups.

Policing, schools, social welfare, medical care and foster care are intricately connected to the arms of settler colonization and perpetuate the damage it aims to uphold.

This is where the unbridled mind today wakes up and sees the system at work all around, whereas their counterpart might not really think it's all that bad. They might not really believe it's systemic at all.

This is what keeps the masses asleep. The institutions sold to you as your protectors are indeed your killers.

I leave you with this question to ponder, "Are we able to defeat the system by using the system?"

I've found myself questioning this very idea in relation to the student protests occurring in North America right now. The irony is not lost on me, that students are asking for their universities to divest without being willing to divest from the universities themselves.

That they simultaneously want the institution to risk its future, but are hoping to graduate from said institution in the Spring to cement their own.

As spoken by Audre Lorde in 1984, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”