ABSTRACT

Chapter 4, Settler Colonialism and The Unsettling of America works to dispel claims that Berry’s focus on the land and agriculture is a sign of his disinterest in questions of racial oppression or taking responsibility for a fundamental “erasure” of Indigenous peoples’ existence and claims to the land. To the contrary, Berry’s particular ideas relative to these complex issues offer important contributions to EcoJustice scholars’ insistence that we begin with a deep analysis of how we have been created as subjects of these logics of domination ravaging our communities. I review a range of settler colonialism theorists to interrogate processes of degradation, dispossession, and disavowal that continue to rationalize the removal and ideological erasure of Indigenous people from their ancestral land and the consciousness of the dominant white culture. Using that lens, I examine what Berry calls a fundamental “unsettling” required by the growth of an extractive and greedy political and economic system at the heart of European contact and plunder of the North American continent and the planet itself.