Settlers 4 Gog

[Joseph]

Settlersare generally thought of as people who travel to discover new land. Many times in history, it has not been like that. Most of the time in history, settlers are people who travel to a land that already belongs to someone else, forcing them out, and claiming the land as their own.

Settlers are generally from a sedentary culture, as opposed to nomadic peoples who may move settlements seasonally, within traditional territories. Settlement sometimes relies on dispossession of already established populations within the contested area, and can be a very violent process.[1] Sometimes settlers are backed by governments or large countries. Settlements can prevent native people from continuing their work.[2]

In this usage, pioneers are usually among the first to an area, whereas settlers can arrive after first settlement and join others in the process of human settlement.[citation needed] This correlates with the work of military pioneers who were tasked with construction of camps before the main body of troops would arrive at the designated campsite.

In Imperial Russia, the government invited Russians or foreign nationals to settle in sparsely populated lands.[5] These settlers were called "colonists".[citation needed] See, e.g., articles Slavo-Serbia, Volga German, Volhynia, Russians in Kazakhstan.

Anthropologists record tribal displacement of native settlers who drive another tribe from the lands it held, such as the settlement of lands in the area now called Carmel-by-the-Sea, California where Ohlone peoples settled in areas previously inhabited by the Esselen tribe (Bainbridge, 1977).[6]

In Canada, the term settler is currently used to describe "the non-Indigenous peoples living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority," asserting that settler colonialism is an ongoing phenomenon. The usage is controversial to some.[7][8][9]

The reasons for the emigration of settlers vary, but often they include the following factors and incentives: the desire to start a new and better life in a foreign land, personal financial hardship, social, cultural, ethnic, or religious persecution (e.g., the Pilgrims and Mormons), penal deportation (e.g. of convicted criminals from England to Australia), political oppression, and government incentive policies aimed at encouraging foreign settlement.[13][14][15]

There are two types of people who live in Canada. Indigenous people, who have historically been here for thousands of years, and everyone else. The same could be said of all of North America, where there is a combined total of approximately five million Indigenous people.

What kind of privileges do settlers benefit from?

I don't want to blame settlers. I don't blame Black settlers, like people who were brought here against their will on slave ships and other technologies of ownership. I do think that we are not doing enough, for various reasons, to not be as complicit in the occupation of Canada and Canadian lands, which are actually Indigenous. As much as we have nowhere else to go, I think we need to do more to form allies with the Indigenous community because we have a mutual enemy, which is colonialism.

VICE: How do you define settlers?

Chelsea Vowel: Originally I used a binary wherein settlers were all non-Indigenous peoples. However, that approach is reductive, and in some cases, actively harmful in my opinion. I specifically refer to settlers as "the non-Indigenous peoples living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority," aka white people. Now I recognize that other people can come here and "settle" on these lands, and be folded into the settler-colonial project that is Canada, BUT settler colonials, by definition, occupy lands and impose their legal orders on everyone. Immigrants from Somalia, for example, do not do this. It's not a bright line definition.

What kind of privileges do settlers benefit from?

Settlers benefit from the privilege of having their worldview imposed upon the lands and bodies of everyone living in these lands. Their metaphysics, their epistemological and ontological approaches, inform every aspect of their governance and society. This is true even though there may be differences between groups of settlers; the settler colonial project sets aside ethnic or national differences between settlers (flattening Russians and Germans and English together) via whiteness. As the default then, settlers are the "norm", and everyone else, Indigenous or not, must justify their existence, their worldview, through the lens of that dominating settler worldview. That is to say, all those people who are not part of the full settler experience, in dominance, are constant supplicants up against what is seen as immutable and universal (the settler worldview). Settlers benefit from the privilege of not needing to be named, of not needing to justify their thoughts or presence, and this plays out in countless interactions.

Can descendants of slaves be considered settlers?

The descendants of enslaved Africans absolutely cannot be considered settlers. Enslaved peoples could not consent to being brought here, and their presence cannot confer upon their descendants acceptance into the settler colonial system, especially since, being inherently white supremacist, settler colonialism is virulently anti-Black. Enslaved peoples were violently dehumanized and forced to serve settler colonialism, and all remaining ancestral worldviews and cultural innovations among their descendants exist IN SPITE of ongoing attempts to destroy Blackness. No amount of accumulation of wealth or social status changes this, because those things are acquired only through the settler colonial project.

It's important to also think about other Black presence on these lands. A Black person from Trinidad who now lives in Toronto is not, in my opinion, an "immigrant" per se, but rather an internal migrant. The descendants of enslaved Africans did not originate in the Americas, but the Americas are their home. I do not believe that is something that can be turned back or changed, it simply is, and we need to figure out what that means. However, Black immigration from other contexts also clearly exists, for example in Edmonton we have a large Somali population. While they are folded into "Blackness" under settler colonial white supremacy, and while ongoing colonialism and imperialism is a great factor in their presence here, their position is not the same as the descendants of enslaved Africans. They are also not settlers, but their history, context, and presence here is different.

What are some of the similarities between our histories and yours?

Enslaved Africans were Indigenous peoples, as we are Indigenous peoples. The history between us is complex, obscured, in some cases lost. From Indigenous nations who engaged in chattel slavery, to those nations who did not, kinship ties were formed under many different contexts. Both groups experienced metaphysical rupture that altered our connection to land and spirit realms, and we dealt with those ruptures in a multitude of ways, in some cases with similar or aligned resistance, in other cases, by harming one another. Indigenous peoples here were also included in chattel slavery during periods. Both of us are a post-apocalyptic people. Both of us experience the violence of white supremacy, but how we experience this differs in many ways. Trying to understand these similarities and differences requires understanding what Andrea Smith described as the three pillars of white supremacy: slavery/capitalism, genocide colonialism, and orientalism/war.

What can Black people do to stand in further solidarity between First Nations people and ourselves?

Solidarity between First Nations, Mtis, and Inuit (FNMI) and Black people, is something that must be co-constituted. We all have to better understand those three pillars, and how we harm one another with anti-Blackness, Indigenous erasure/displacement, and so on. We absolutely must find a way to hold two truths at the same time: these lands belong (outside of capitalism, in a kinship sense) to Indigenous peoples AND the Americas are the home of the descendants of enslaved Africans. What that means is again something that must be co-constituted, and requires us building deep relationships with one another to fight white supremacy and settler colonialism. It is important for Black people to show up for Indigenous folks, just as it is important for Indigenous folks to show up for Black folks; and what we each need comes from us. So we follow one another's lead and then we make sure to figure out how the work we do can align in ways that lessens and stops the harm we do to one another.

What are some of the similarities between Nova Scotian Blackness and Indigenousness?

I can't think of any because, even though it shouldn't be like this, it's very divided. There are reservations in Nova Scotia, and the Black people are confined to more specific areas. We don't interact that much. Not in this generation at least.

Can descendants of slaves be considered settlers? Whether they were born here, or they're like my parents who were born in Jamaica then came here?

No, I can't even say that because Nova Scotians have Jamaican ancestry. So you guys were already here. Your ancestors were already here.

Three generations ago, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather fled a small village in Western Ukraine in hope of peace, prosperity, and a life free from oppression. They gave up their extended family, language, and traditions as they traveled across the world to settle in the eastern United States in an early twentieth-century steel town built on Lenni Lenape lands, long-ago seized to make way for waves of European immigrants. Three generations are scarcely a blink in the eye of human history, yet the connection with my lineage feels almost irretrievable today. At that moment, I felt the profound loss of my cultural heritage and shame that my ancestors abandoned their responsibility to their people, land, and culture, leaving others to fight while becoming the oppressors on the other side of the globe.

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