No abstract

This essay examines the present-day conditions of settler colonialism in the United States by focusing on the constitutive force of liberal juridical and proprietary regimes and the historical permutations of federalism. Goldstein argues that white settler colonialism in the United States is articulated with the present-day constellation of neoliberal antistatism and post–civil rights “color-blind” discourse. His argument is developed through an analysis of the U.S. vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the Supreme Court ruling on City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005), and contemporary antisovereignty groups organizing against American Indian self-determination. Antisovereignty activists contend that U.S. federal Indian law confers “special rights” based on race to tribes and that tribal sovereignty not only deprives Indian members of constitutional rights, but also promotes privileged “racial” separatism fundamentally hostile to the principles of U.S. democracy. Attending to the problematic formulations of the antisovereignty movement, Goldstein considers how this rhetoric is both articulated and disarticulated from the broader structures of governance and juridical authority in the United States. This essay considers the role of settler land claims historically and in the present, and studies how contemporary antisovereignty initiatives amplify the history of North American conquest and genocide in order to argue against the legitimacy of current tribal claims to land and self-determination.

The Claims Resolution Act (CRA) of 2010, which brought together and financed a series of historic US civil rights and Native American class-action lawsuit settlements, serves as the lens through which this essay examines debates over accountability, debt, and reconciliation and provides a means to consider how present-day efforts to foreclose the genealogies of historical injustice have been shaped in response to the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and financialization. Focusing on the salience of racialization and settler colonialism, this essay studies how and why the CRA's juridical assemblage brings into proximity discrepant histories of dispossession and racism so as to situate these within an overarching teleology of progress and improvement in the face of contemporary economic volatility and social instability.

No abstract

In 2013 the US Supreme Court effectively granted custody of an almost four-year-old child to adoptive white parents over the opposition of her Cherokee birth father and the Cherokee Nation in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (the “Baby Veronica” case). This essay examines the Court ruling, and the protracted custody and jurisdictional struggles in its wake, in order to show how whiteness in the United States has been historically constituted not only as a form of property but also as the capacity to possess. Against the perspective that colonialism persists in the United States only insofar as indigeneity remains legible as racial difference, this essay focuses on how Adoptive Couple served as a means of reasserting white heteronormative rights to possess and to deny culpability for the ongoing conditions and consequences of colonization and multiple forms of racial violence in the present.