The logic of settler accumulation in a landscape of perpetual vanishing

Abstract

As Glacier National Park celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2010, a storm of uncertainty loomed on the horizon. The park's signature glaciers, which are vanishing at an astonishing rate, were the greatest source of anxiety. Scientists now predict that all the remaining glaciers will be gone by the year 2020. The intensity of the storm was also fed by the specter of the vanishing Indian, which haunted the centennial, provoking a different sort of (colonial) anxiety. One hundred years ago, the vanishing Indian, not the glacier, served as the park's icon. The specter ruptured a temporal border that had kept the story of yesterday's vanishing Indian separate from that of today's vanishing glacier. In this landscape of perpetual vanishing, this article will focus on the concept of primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession). Of particular interest is how its conventional meaning within political economic theory is modified by settler-colonial studies and indigenous critical theory. Patrick Wolfe, for example, argues that settler colonialism – as “a complex social formation and as a continuity through time” – is “a structure rather than an event”. Like settler colonialism, accumulation by dispossession is also a structure, not an event. As an ongoing process, it cannot be relegated to a pre-capitalist past. The continuity of the vanishing logic in the Alberta/Montana borderlands sheds light on the structural dimensions, often intersecting, of settler colonialism and accumulation by dispossession. Moreover, it raises the question: Is it possible to identity a unique set of processes that we might call settler accumulation? In other words, does a distinct form of accumulation emerge from the dialectic between primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, which cannot be reduced to either of its constitutive elements?