All posts tagged: westward trail of American settlers

The Curious Rise of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Turtle Island’

[ad_1] Recently, I stood on a windswept street corner in Brooklyn and watched a river of pro-Palestinian protesters move past, as police officers tracked their path. A number of demonstrators had heads swathed in kaffiyehs, and some wore face-obscuring black masks. They waved Palestinian flags and placards denouncing Israel in many different ways. Defund the settler-colonialist state demanded one. Another stated Land back!, echoing the Native American movement to reclaim lost territory in the United States. Two women held tight to a Decolonization from Turtle Island to Palestine banner as a gust tugged at it. Turtle Island alludes to the creation story of the Lenape tribe of the Northeast, and some academics and Native activists treat it as a de facto Indigenous name for the settler-colonialist U.S. Settler colonialism—academic jargon for the violent process by which colonial empires empower settlers to push out and oppress Indigenous inhabitants and form a dominant new society—is a term much in vogue among activists and academics on the left. To talk of settler states and oppressed Indigenous people, and …