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n February 2017, the Washington Post began regularly using on its website a new slogan, "Democracy dies in darkness." What melodrama for a capitol newspaper of a nation born of and sustained by genocidal "darkness" at home and overseas! One presumes the cherry-picked tragedy that prompted the slogan was none other than the presidential election of Donald Trump. But it is not only explicit white supremacists emboldened by Trump, nineteenth-century Indian killers, or today's CEOs at the helm of resource-extraction companies who have accepted Indigenous elimination as the collateral damage of settler-state development. The evildoers of history, neo-Nazi demonstrators, and oil and gas companies sending dogs to attack unarmed Indigenous people resisting pipeline development are just easier targets for progressive critique. While the foundation of Indigenous elimination is one of white supremacy, it is not only white people in power who work to eliminate or erase Indigenous peoples. Dreaming, even in inclusive and multicultural tones, of developing an ideal settler state implicitly supports the elimination of Indigenous peoples from this place.
Scientists, technology developers, and environmental and social policymakers support alternately extracting or "stewarding" natural and human resources toward the goal of maintaining privilege in the United States and other settler states such as Canada. This has worked to eliminate Indigenous peoples, either explicitly or implicitly, as we and the remains of our ancestors continue to be removed from traditional homelands for both purposes. Whether the settler state wants to farm, build a mine or a city, pump oil, or cordon off a national park, the "resources" used to build these nation-states include the lands, waters, and other-than-human beings with whom Indigenous peoples are co-constituted. Indigenous peoples came into being as Peoples in longstanding and intricate relation with these continents and the other life forms here. Many Indigenous people have been eliminated. And for those of us who remain, our intimate relations with these lands and waters continue to be undercut and our memories relentlessly erased when the extractive nation-state continues to be dreamed. The late nineteenth-century assimilative mantra "Kill the Indian, save the man" implies not simply an attack on our cultures but more precisely an attack on the relations-both human and other-than-human-that make us who we are.
Central to the American Dream and...