Adam Kirsch writes in the WSJ:
The most frequently quoted sentence in the literature of settler colonialism is from the Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe: “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” Wolfe was referring specifically to the British settlement of Australia, but the principle applies equally to the United States and Canada, which were also created by dispossessing the peoples living there when Europeans arrived. That fact is hardly unknown—everyone who grows up in these countries learns about it in elementary school.
What is new in Wolfe’s formula is the idea that this original injustice is being renewed at every moment through various forms of oppression, some obvious, others invisible. The violence involved in a nation’s founding continues to define every aspect of its life, even after centuries—its economic arrangements, environmental practices, gender relations. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler, rather than a legitimate inhabitant.
For the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the goal of learning about settler colonialism in America and elsewhere is not simply to understand it, as a historian would, but to dismantle it. That process is known as decolonization, and the increasing currency of this term is an index of the rising influence of what might seem a merely academic idea. The command to “decolonize” has become almost faddish; guides have been written on how to decolonize your diet, your bookshelf, your backyard, your corporate board, and much more.
