Attending to settler colonialism in Black/Native American histories in I've been Here All the While

Abstract

ABSTRACT In I've Been Here All the While, Roberts provides a definition of settler colonialism as ‘a process that could be wielded by whoever sought to claim land; it involved not only a change in land occupation but also a transformation in thinking about and rhetorical justification of what it meant to reside in a place formerly occupied by someone else’ (2). Central to this definition, then, is that instead of colonialism beginning with an invasion, the settlers in Roberts’ book enter into the literal geographies and colonial process involuntarily, as displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans/Afro-Indigenous people. Within this rendering, she argues that ‘anyone can act as a “settler”, despite previous status as, say, a slave or a dispossessed Indian, as long as they used this process–composed of rhetoric, American governmental structures, and individual action–which may have aided in their efforts to acquire land or protection by which ultimately served the goals of spatial occupation and white supremacy’. The second part of this definition pulls ‘settler’ away from a permanent quality one might be born into (say as a European-American in the US context) into an act one partakes in, thereby dislodging arguments that exclude those harmed by Black enslavement and Indigenous land theft.