ABSTRACT
This body of cross-disciplinary scholarship illuminates the assertion that settler colonialism is not marked by a single historic moment of colonial conquest, but rather is structurally embedded. While settler colonialism is understood by many to centre on land specifically on territorial claims socio-legal analysis reveals that settler colonial power seeks to rework not only relationships to land but all areas of social life. In particular, settler colonialism establishes authority, and naturalizes that authority, by reconfiguring Indigenous life across a range of sites and scales. A central claim made by scholars of settler colonialism is the assertion that settler colonialism operates via an eliminative drive which seeks to kill or erase Indigenous peoples, their claims to land and ways of being in order to assert and naturalize state assertions of sovereignty. However, scholars of Indigenous studies have nuanced this claim by revealing ways in which settler colonialism depends on, and assumes the presence of, Indigenous peoples and their relationships to land.
