The Spiritual Rift of Settler Colonialism

Whether in the U.S. or Palestine/Israel, we need to get better at understanding what creates the settler. By Tess GC

Photo by Stephen Hui on Unsplash

This last month’s discourse around colonialism, Israeli settlers, and indigeneity has ties to something I know a lot about – the form of colonialism called settler colonialism, which is also the story of what happened here in North America. 

As we stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and call for as decolonial an approach as possible in Palestine and Israel, I wrote a little about the condition of the settler here in the United States, and how this might apply to the messy situation of Jewish settlers in Israel. I hope that those of us in North America, or other settler places, can develop a critical eye for the process and reality of settler colonialism, while responding to all people caught up in the huge processes of economy, imperialism, and colonialism, with humanity, compassion, and a call for a common resistance to structural oppression.

Settler colonialism in the United States

In 1891, the last band of Bitterroot Salish (Séliš) in present-day Montana marched from their home in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley to a reservation, after years of U.S. government lies and manipulation. With the prompting of settlers who had illegally taken lands in the valley, and in violation of the Treaty of Hellgate, the treaty that prevented settlers from moving in, the government pushed the Salish from the land through forced destitution. I grew up in the Bitterroot Valley, born into a European-American settler family strongly rooted in Montana. When my mom talks about her parents’ and grandparents’ lives, she talks about people “mucking and scrabbling” to survive. We cherish our Irish-American heritage, understanding ourselves to be the descendants of poor, working people who left the British Empire’s economic and political oppression, to make a new life in North America. My ancestors fled the violence of colonization and battling empires, only to become playing pieces in a geopolitical game that saddled their children with the dissonance of loving the land that colonizers and settlers had soaked with blood. 

I knew from a young age that Indigenous people had been the sole inhabitants of my home not so long ago, and I vaguely knew that around the country and in my home state, they had been killed en masse or forced onto reservations. However, I grew up to feel intense belonging to and love for the only place I had ever known. Grant Farred, a scholar of Africana Studies, helps explain the origins of this feeling. He describes settlers’ desperation to sow themselves and their offspring into the land as a way to claim it. Settlement instills a sense of ownership and belonging despite the haunting feeling of unbelonging in a place taken by force, through colonization. As settlers work to belong to their new homes, it becomes an authentic sense of belonging to their descendants, people who know only that place. Unfortunately for settlers, the marks of the previous inhabitants’ lives leave them and their descendants with fractured experiences of belonging, home, and connection with the land. 

In my life, I have seen in myself and those around me a fractured experience, part of a mental, emotional, and spiritual dissonance conditioned into many white, European-Americans’ consciousnesses from our earliest days: First, in the murky sense that the places that we feel belonging to may not, in fact, only be the places that we understand them to be, the places of OUR storytelling; and second, in realizing that our ancestors’ varied reasons for leaving their homelands turned them – and us – into pawns of a colonizing force. 

Across North America, many people’s stories of European diaspora and American settlement mirror my family’s. People’s stories exist within the context of settler colonialism, or the process of colonization where people from the colonizing force or nation settle the land, removing or annihilating the people (and other life) already there. In the case of the United States, European nations started this process, and their colonies eventually became a new nation-state governed by the settler population, the United States. 

Historian Patrick Wolfe points out differences between traditional colonial examples, like many European colonies, and settler colonial situations. In settler colonial societies, the settling and governing forces focus more on killing off Indigenous people and taking their land than exploiting them for their labor. The colonizing force, a country or a people, will remake the land in their own image. The underlying logic of settler colonies positions settlers as the ones who are “indigenous” to the land, not-so-subtly replacing the Indigenous people, and attempting to take on the relationships with the land that Indigenous people have. 

Patrick Wolfe also explains that “[settler] invasion is a structure, not an event” (2). What he means is, settler colonization isn’t just a single event that happens – it’s the ongoing violence, the ongoing process of making the land and place over in the image of the colonizers, whittling down the Indigenous people, and so much more. Every aspect of settlers’ cultures become imposed on the land: In governance, social relationships, labor, settlers’ relationships to land, every part of life becomes shaped by the social and cultural structure of the settler colonial society. The beliefs, moral codes, and laws created in the settler society maintain the structure they have imposed.

The mental and emotional toll on settlers is clear, as we struggle to reconcile the reality we have been brought up in with the reality we see around us, and even learn – usually in fragments – in our schooling. Settler life is full of cognitive dissonance. 

The spiritual rift of the settler position is less clear, and less proveable, but to me is the most important problem to address. How people feel about land, place, and belonging are spiritual as much as they are emotional – in my family, there’s a clear spiritual and religious tie to land and place, as we understand this relationship to the land as a deep part of ourselves – for many people I would even go so far as to say we don’t really understand who we are without a connection to land and place. Land and place are the bedrock of so many relationships with a higher power, a deeper sense of connectedness, or the spirit that connects us to all things. When that relationship is marred by the dissonance of great violence in the taking and settling of the land, it creates a confused spirituality, it creates a rift in our sense of the interconnectedness of all things.

Photo by Matthew Lancaster on Unsplash

Israelis and indigeneity

Israel is a textbook example of settler colonialism. Israel’s supporters will argue that Jewish people are ‘indigenous’ to the land of Palestine, or the Levant. This comic-style article by Solomon Brager on Jewish indigeneity explains how this argument is constructed with three main points: that Zionism is a decolonial movement, returning Jewish people to the land stolen from them by Arab people; that Israeli culture is a distinct, unique Jewish culture; and that Jewish genetic markers prove an inherent indigeneity to the land there.

Solomon Brager writes:

“It seems like just in the past couple years or so, this claim [Jewish indigeneity] has blown up on social media that all Jewish people are indigenous to Israel – that is, that Jews share common ancestry with the historical inhabitants of Israel and therefore have a claim to sovereignty over the land. These claims position Zionism as a ‘decolonial movement,’ meaning that the State of Israel represents a return of the land to ‘Indigenous Jews’ after it was conquered by the Romans 2,000 years ago, and then subjected to many waves of occupation, most recently by the ‘colonizing Arabs.’”

Brager even quotes Theodor Herzl, who is the major figure of modern Zionism and the creation of Israel, saying in 1899 to British Zionists: “The Zionist idea, which is a colonizing plan, should be easily and quickly grasped in England.” Brager explains how in the wake of worldwide decolonial uprisings, Zionists began to contextualize Zionism more as indigeneity than as a colonial project. Brager writes: “They simultaneously attempted to make themselves into ‘natives’ by inventing an Israeli culture largely appropriated from Palestinian foodways, arts, and land-based knowledge.” Sound familiar? 

Brager further explores the genetics argument of Jewish indigeneity, explaining how from the outset, ‘indigeneity’ isn’t an inherent category of person, but a category created in the wake of the modern colonial era. It refers to people in decolonial struggle against modern imperialism, whose land has been taken from them or occupied by modern imperial and colonial projects. Having experienced oppression around the world does not mean that people cannot be settlers and colonists – having been wronged does not erase the very definitions of what a settler is. As far as genetic arguments go, Brager explains how some claim that Jewish genetic markers are more closely related to people in the Levant than elsewhere in the world: “There are distinct genetics to be found in Jewish populations, but once you go back more than seven generations… you’re working with the tiniest bits of genetic information. This speaks to the reality that scientists assign meaning to DNA.”

Indigeneity in general is not a hard and fast category, and people use it in different ways, in different contexts, in different areas of the world. The overarching point of Brager’s article is that there are no clear, scientifically pretty watertight arguments to a pan-Jewish indigeneity, especially Jews of European descent who created Zionism. Zionism presents these ideas in the context of taking over the land other people – Palestinian Arab Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others – have inhabited for a long, long time. 

Coming to terms with the settler

As a settler/descendant of settlers myself, I’ve thought a lot about how to come to terms with this unfortunate (tragic) situation. Left wing rhetoric likes to completely demonize the descendants of settlers – calling them colonizers, etc., only interested in talking about how oppressive they are to Indigenous people. It’s not a bad thing to put the focus on the rights and needs of the oppressed and colonized, and I support that – but I’m not interested in casting the world in black and white, because doing so really makes our political imagination very small. Without understanding the systems of exploitation, domination, and theft that push people – millions of them around the world – into the position of settlers, we really don’t have a very good grasp of “an injury to one is an injury to all,” or deep solidarity. The injury that has pushed many people – Europeans, or not – into seeking better lives for themselves in the United States; that has made settler colonists of Jewish Israeli people after their persecution around the world – is the same economy and imperial system that injures the colonized.

Rabid violence from settlers is inexcusable, but we have to organize at the level of our common interests so people can even understand the accusations of colonialism, oppression, racism, etc. That some stronger unions around the world are able to stop arms shipments to Israel shows how social and political organizations like unions, which hold people together in their common interests, have a power that the rest of us as individuals are helpless to affect.

In my experience, the position of the settler is one that leaves a spiritual rift in people and in a society. It’s the kind of position that many Christian frameworks would call an original sin or something like that – at least that’s what it has often felt like to me. That’s not the argument I want to make, though. In arguing for a structural understanding of the settler, while advocating decolonial approaches to settler societies, I hope we can search for ways forward that allow all people the autonomy of choosing to fight oppression, and stand for what a decolonial approach looks like now, even if they find themselves in the no man’s land of living in a settler colonial nation with nowhere else to go, as so many of us are.

I want us to be able to live free of the guilt and tumultuousness of settler relationships to land and place, and the only way we can do that is by opposing, as much as we can, the colonial processes that kill off and remove the people who live in a place, and usually deeply exploit the land and its creatures as well. I don’t really buy original sin, and I’m no longer interested in the self-flagellation of the settler – so let’s come to terms with what put us here, what our responsibility to our fellow people is, and how we want a better reality for all of us.