Washington, District of Columbia, USA. 18 Oct 2023. A protester holds up two signs condemning settler colonialism at an 18 October pro-Palestine protest organised by Jewish Voice For Peace. Credit: Natascha Tahabsem/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News
A review of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch, 160 pages, W.W. Norton & co. (August 2024).
According to legend, in around 1626, Dutch trader Peter Minuit arranged the purchase of what came to be known as Manhattan by the New Netherland company for “24 dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets.” Historians have long considered the transaction just one—albeit especially significant—item in a long inventory of dispossession and displacement of natives by settlers in the New World. This history has more recently become the focus of public consternation. In its official land acknowledgement, for instance,
New York University acknowledges that it is located on Lenapehoking, ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. We recognize the continued significance of these lands for Lenape nations past and present, we pay our respects to the ancestors as well as to past, present, and emerging Lenape leaders…. We believe that addressing structural Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important and we are committed to actively working to overcome the ongoing effects and realities of settler-colonialism.
Yet attempting to generalise from patterns of European settlement in North America to other regions with distinct histories often produces absurd and catastrophic delusions, as Adam Kirsch argues inhis new book, On Settler Colonialism.
I am a descendant of Protestant Europeans who came to North America in the 1700s. But according to the precepts of settler colonialism, I remain as much a settler as my English and Scotch–Irish ancestors or their German, Polish, and Lithuanian immigrant followers and will bequeath my settler colonialist status to my children and their future offspring….
