Lana Tatour ship. Once displaced, citizenship becomes visible as a (liberal) technology of governance through which settler states control, manage, and contain indigenous peoples and their claim to sovereignty and self-determination. As Glen Coulthard argues, colonial rule has been transformed from an “unconcealed structure of domination to a mode of colonial governmentality that works through the limited freedoms afforded by state recognition and accommodation.”34 Liberal agendas of inclusion, recognition, and reconciliation are not necessarily in contradiction with systems, structures, and relations of domination. They can work in tandem. Citizenship is a deceptive institution that is shaped by ambivalent registers. It enacts domination and conceals it at the same time. It is informed by inclusionary sensibilities and rhetoric while still operating as a disciplinary, regulatory, and exclusionary mechanism.35 As indigenous scholars have warned, citizenship is part of a politics of distraction that works to contain native subjectivities and struggles within the liberal grammar of rights.36 It promises inclusion, but this promise is an illusion.37 And this illusion is central to the effectiveness of citizenship as a governing institution. Even within its most progressive liberal formation, citizenship is still part of settler colonialism, not exterior to it. The very quest to incorporate indigenous people into the settler state through citizenship is itself guided by eliminatory logics. Liberal incorporation is premised on the negation of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests, citizenship is a “weapon of race” that works to legitimate the sovereignty of the settler state and its authority over indigenous people.38 Indigenous peoples are intelligible only within the purview of the settler state, making citizenship part of the wider project of politicide, which aims at eradicating “the political existence of a group and sabotaging the turning of a community of people into a polity.”39 If we follow an understanding of settler colonialism as a structure, then we ought to see citizenship itself as an institution tied to “the idea of the nation” and to processes of nation making.40 In this respect, citizenship functions as an affective sociopolitical construct that produces and reproduces the nation. In settler polities, the boundaries of the nation have been, and continue to be, defined along racial lines. Therefore, naturalizing settlers as proper subjects of rights while rendering nonwhite people outside the scope of civil society—and, at times, humanity—is a structural feature of settler 15 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490