We were settlers once … and still

In fifth grade I played the plucky comic relief in our school play, In Quest of Columbus, at Farmersville Elementary School in Bethlehem, Pa. The plot followed eight members of an adolescent explorers’ club who travel by magic to the Caribbean of the late 15th century to uncover “the mysteries surrounding Columbus’ landing.” Neither we 10-year-olds nor our teachers had any idea what mysteries waited on that shore.

If the magic had worked, we would have stepped off the boat onto Hispaniola. There Columbus ordered every Taíno person 14 and older to bring him a tribute of gold every three months, or cotton where there was no gold. Those who could not pay were whipped, mutilated and executed. Within a generation, a people who had numbered in the hundreds of thousands were nearly gone.¹

We also would have seen children. In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend at court that dealers were roaming the island in search of girls and that children of 9 and 10 were in demand. He wrote it as plainly as a farmer quoting the price of wheat.²

“We appropriated the music of the islands to celebrate one of Christian history’s worst monsters, and no one in the gymnasium thought that anything was wrong.”

Columbus went to his grave convinced he had done it all for God. Near the end of his life, he compiled El Libro de las Profecías (The Book of Prophecies), a collection of Scripture arranged to show that his voyages fulfilled the prophets and would lead to the retaking of Jerusalem and the return of Christ.³

Christian nationalism did not arrive with a recent election. It came on the first European ships.

I still know the words to the songs from that play. They were ingrained in us through calypso and reggae rhythms and the excruciating quasi-rap that only a gym full of white kids in the ’90s could produce. We appropriated the music of the islands to celebrate one of Christian history’s worst monsters, and no one in the gymnasium thought that anything was wrong.

Learning to be settlers

I learned to be a settler before I knew the word. The lessons were everywhere. In computer class we forded rivers and shot buffalo on The Oregon Trail, where the land was always empty and the only danger was dysentery. Every Thanksgiving we ate turkey, watched football and offered thanks, and no one told us the Pilgrims later tried to exterminate the Wampanoag who fed them.

In the backyard we played cowboys and Indians, and everyone wanted to be the cowboy. I watched John Wayne ride heroically across the silver screen while Hollywood’s stock Indian enemies died in the background, as if their deaths were inevitable. My favorite movie was The Last of the Mohicans, a story whose very title promises a people’s disappearance.

Meanwhile, our well-meaning teachers taught us American history from Jamestown to Plymouth and never once mentioned Mystic River or Gnadenhütten. I learned nothing of scalp bounties, land theft, broken treaties, reservations, boarding schools or genocide. I was learning to be a settler from people who loved me, and from the air I breathed.

Years later I discovered the gymnasium where we sang about Columbus stood on land stolen from the Lenape in the Walking Purchase of 1737.⁴ No one at Farmersville Elementary meant to harm or mislead us. And that is what frightens me. The erasure did not require anyone to be cruel. It only required them to be complacent.

“The erasure did not require anyone to be cruel. It only required them to be complacent.”

James Baldwin wrote, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”⁵ For the last decade, the word I have used for that innocence is whiteness. But the more I sit with the story of our fifth grade play, the more I believe whiteness, by itself, cannot tell the whole truth about who I am.

“White” names my relationship to Black and brown people, their stolen labor and the afterlives of slavery. “Settler” names relationship to indigenous people, their stolen land and the afterlives of colonialism. The two words belong together, because each one says something the other cannot.

“Settler” puts the land back at the center of the story, and it grounds me in particulars. Whiteness often floats free of any place, whereas settler ties me to a particular land, a particular treaty, a particular indigenous nation still living down the road.

“Settler” concretizes whiteness in two ways. To be white in America is to be a settler, but to be a settler, one need not be white. Scholars in Hawaiʻi, for example, have described how Asian American communities also have come to occupy a settler position on Native Hawaiian land.⁶

“Settler” also reaches across class in a way whiteness often struggles to do. The poorest white farmer in Appalachia was tilling land that had belonged to the Shawnee or Cherokee a generation before.

The settler bargain never was only for the rich. It was a cross-class alliance, and it still is: The “urban pioneers” who gentrify Black neighborhoods and describe the process of displacement, without irony, as a frontier.⁷ Whiteness is another word for power. Settler tells me exactly where it came from.

Land power

Author J. Sakai argues that whiteness in America always has meant membership in a settler nation built on conquered land and enslaved labor.⁸ America made an offer to European immigrants: You do not have to be a peasant here. You can have land. You can have a vote, a gun and a place above someone. All you have to do is help us take it and ensure we keep it.

Our ancestors did not arrive innocently, simply chasing the “American Dream.” They came seeking land and found themselves willing participants in a scheme to take it from indigenous nations. They were recruited and enlisted as mercenaries in a settler army. Hardship and persecution certainly were present in their lives, and so was the choice to participate in land theft and genocide.

My family held land in Virginia — in Clifton Forge and Lynchburg, in Amherst County and in Norge. I do not know how they got it. This is a confession. Land was simply something we had, the way we had a last name. It seemed to have no beginning. But the beginning had simply been erased.

Norge sits on the land of the Powhatan peoples, a few miles from Jamestown, where the English ships landed in 1607. Amherst County and the hills around Lynchburg are Monacan country, and the Monacan Indian Nation still lives there, at Bear Mountain. Clifton Forge lies in the Alleghenies, in hunting grounds the Shawnee and others were forced to give up through war and treaty. Whatever my ancestors did or did not do, they arrived on ground that had been emptied for them, and they did not leave.

Virginia did more than empty the land. It emptied the record. In 1924, the Commonwealth passed the Racial Integrity Act, and its registrar of vital statistics spent the next two decades ordering clerks to strike the word “Indian” from birth and marriage certificates.⁹ If there were no Indians on paper, there would be no one to claim the land. In those same years, my family’s names were going into the record books. Indigenous people were being erased while our names were being written.

“Indigenous people were being erased while our names were being written.”

White people often call our ancestors immigrants, but Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has shown how the phrase “a nation of immigrants” functions as an alibi.¹⁰ It folds the conqueror and the conquered into one flattering story of brave arrival, as if our ancestors simply moved into an empty house.

But my people did not come to join the Monacan or Powhatan nations. They came to take their land and keep it. Calling them “immigrants” allows me to inherit the land without inheriting the full story.

I notice what my body wants to do with this information. It wants to deny it. I want to say my people were dirt-poor Appalachian farmers. I want to say they came later, or that a great-grandmother on some branch of the family was Cherokee. The scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have a term for these reflexes. They call them “settler moves to innocence.”¹¹ Each one is a small exit door, a way to feel the weight of the history for a moment, then set it down and keep the land.

Indigenous nations had a name for this sickness: wétiko. Powhatan and Lenape scholar Jack Forbes applies the legend of this cannibal spirit, whose hunger grows with every meal —“the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit”¹² — to the collective psychosis that possessed our settler progenitors and continues to bedevil us.

The wétiko does not know it is sick. It calls its hunger “divine,” its theft “progress,” its forgetting “innocence,” its goal “civilization.”

Self-awareness

I recognize the symptoms of this pathology in myself: The reflex to look away, to change the subject, to reach for the story that makes me the hero or at least the bystander. My not knowing how my family got its land does not prove my innocence. It proves how far the sickness has spread in my mind and among our people.

White settlers like to think of ourselves as a people of law and order. But treaties tell a different story. Between 1778 and 1871, the United States ratified roughly 370 treaties with indigenous nations, and we broke every one of them, often before the ink was dry.¹³

For centuries we called the people on the other side of those treaties “savages.” But they were not the ones who tore up the agreements. If a savage is someone who cannot be trusted to keep the law or honor a promise, then that epithet always has described us.

“If a savage is someone who cannot be trusted to keep the law or honor a promise, then that epithet always has described us.”

What does this mean for the church? Recognition of the Doctrine of Discovery barely scratches the surface. Protestants and Catholics not only provided the biblical and theological sanctification for settler colonialism, churches also materially benefited from land theft and dishonest treaties.

For instance, thousands of churches received grants of stolen indigenous lands, and nearly 37% of U.S. duplicitous treaties included direct federal funding for churches to establish missions, schools and other “civilizing” assimilation programs.

This is the white church’s settler inheritance. We did not simply stand by as the U.S. government engaged in expropriation and extirpation. We sanctified savagery. We baptized the land theft, blessed the militias and provided justification for the killing. We named the indigenous peoples as “Canaanites” and wrote a theology that called our actions “providence.”

Describing ourselves as settlers is not a matter of semantics but of theological sincerity.

What to do?

The church cannot atone for this horrific history by making a land acknowledgment. Acknowledgments are merely the first step toward justice, and without action, they are nothing but another liberal performance. In Scripture, repentance always involves restitution. Zacchaeus did not just feel bad; he gave back fourfold.

For a congregation, restitution might mean learning whose land the building stands on and building a relationship with that nation that lasts past the first apology. It might mean returning land, as some churches and denominations have begun to do. It might mean standing with indigenous nations fighting right now for their treaty rights and their water. It might mean joining the Land Back initiatives that indigenous organizers already are leading.

I have come to believe the word “settler” is a necessary description of ourselves. As Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker contend, “settler” is not an insult; it names a relationship, and that is what makes it useful.¹⁵ It is meant to be uncomfortable, because discomfort is where accountability begins. Once I call myself a settler, I no longer can ask what I will be. I have to ask whose land I live on, what happened here and what I owe to the people and the land now.

“Settler” also is a word that points toward its own undoing. Mahmood Mamdani reminds us that settler and native are not natural categories, carved into us by God or blood. They are political identities, manufactured by colonial states to decide who rules and who is ruled. What politics made, politics can unmake.¹⁶ I can only begin to divest from a settler identity that I can admit I have.

“The logic that made me a settler is not a relic. It is alive in the theology of most American Christians.”

The logic that made me a settler is not a relic. It is alive in the theology of most American Christians, the policies of the U.S. government and the land our families and churches hold. Naming myself a settler is not the end of my confession. It is the beginning of a long apprenticeship in learning my own history and living in solidarity with indigenous nations who never stopped resisting, just as we stand alongside Black and brown movements for justice.

Taking responsibility for my white settler reality will require me to learn how to live as a guest who knows whose land I’m on, to face the horrors that happened here, to participate in the ongoing struggles of indigenous nations, and to seek to put right what was done wrong.

I was raised a white settler, and I am still a white settler — continuing to benefit from the lies, theft, violence, lawlessness and savagery of my European ancestors, as are all white Christians in America. The only question left is whether I will keep living in denial of who I am or own up to my history.

Will I help unmake what my ancestors made or keep my head in the sand?

 

Benjamin Boswell is the author of Confronting Whiteness and serves as lead pastor of Collective Liberation Church on the lands of the Catawba Nation, in Charlotte, N.C.

 

Notes

1. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), trans. Nigel Griffin (Penguin, 1992); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. Christopher Columbus, letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, 1500.
3. Christopher Columbus, The Libro de las Profecías of Christopher Columbus, trans. Delno C. West and August Kling (University of Florida Press, 1991).
4. Steven C. Harper, Promised Land: Penn’s Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, and the Dispossession of Delawares, 1600–1763 (Lehigh University Press, 2006).
5. James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” in The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963).
6. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008).
7. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996).
8. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Morningstar Press, 1983; expanded ed., Kersplebedeb/PM Press, 2014).
9. Peter Hardin, “‘Documentary Genocide’: Families’ Surnames on Racial Hit List,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 5, 2000; Samuel R. Cook, Monacans and Miners: Native American and Coal Mining Communities in Appalachia (University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
10. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Beacon Press, 2021).
11. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
12. Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, rev. ed. (Seven Stories Press, 2008), 24.
13. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (University of California Press, 1994); Vine Deloria Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (Delacorte, 1974).
14. Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada (Fernwood, 2015).
15. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press, 2020).