Settler colonialism is ecological domination that rebuilds Indigenous homelands into settler ecologies.

Evidence

Settler colonialism, then, is a type of injustice driven by settlers’ desire, conscious and tacit, to erase Indigenous peoples and to erase or legitimate settlers’ causation of such domination. … By seeking to establish their own homelands, settler populations are working to create their own ecologies out of the ecologies of Indigenous peoples, which oft en requires that settlers bring in additional materials and living beings (e.g., plants, animals) from abroad. Consider US settler colonial domination of Anishinaabewaki. Th e US rerouted the hydrology to facilitate its own forms of transportation and water use. Th e US mined, deforested, and industrialized the Great Lakes region. US settlers killed off or decimated many species and intentionally and unintentionally introduced new ones. Th e draining of wetlands, development of commercial agriculture and recreational areas, and building of massive urban areas and military, chemical, oil, and gas industries transformed the ecologies of Anishinaabewaki into a US settler ecology, including states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Minnesota. — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the Legal Systems reading on Johnson v. M’Intosh and Indigenous land law — same settler-land transformation mechanism. — connects to: Interference with other beings’ responsibilities constitutes environmental injustice — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 22; Settler violence and dispossession are ecological harms when measured by relational resilience — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 97; Chief Ayeeta-pepe-tung conceived himself as made of the land — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 17 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Source material for the eco-justice polyad bridging settler colonialism to ecological harm; parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s sense of landscape transformation.
• DEEPTHINKING: Articulates the precise mechanism linking land theft to ecological harm — the conversion of one ecology into another — which is the load-bearing thesis of this reading.

Related

• Settler violence and dispossession are ecological harms when measured by relational resilience (similarity 0.85)
• Kyle Whyte — Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice (similarity 0.83)
• Interference with other beings’ responsibilities constitutes environmental injustice (similarity 0.78)