Lana Tatour
approach to the question of citizenship differs. Here I treat citizenship as a
form of domination, in which exclusion is only one part, that is central to
settler colonial frameworks. While overlapping at times, domination and
exclusion are not the same. Exclusion is one form of domination, and inclusion does not necessarily mean the end of domination.23
Much like the story of settler colonialism, the story of citizenship
in settler colonial contexts is also primarily one of domination. Settler
colonialism—including the Zionist project—is, as Patrick Wolfe argues, a
structure guided by the logic of elimination. It is a project of erasure and
replacement: “Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies.
Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base.”24
Citizenship, therefore, did not emerge as an autonomous or neutral institution, or as an institution antagonistic to settler colonialism. Rather, it is
an institution that emerged out of domination, facilitating the elimination
and dispossession of indigenous peoples. After all, as Elizabeth Elbourne
writes, indigenous “citizenship exists because of past [and present] colonial
conquest.”25 Its evolution in modern settler states has been predicated on
the epistemological and historical exclusion of indigenous peoples and on
their ongoing dispossession.26 More than an equalizing force, citizenship
has been an institution constitutive of and conducive to the production of
administrative categories of difference, racial hierarchies, and inequitable
regimes of rights. As Audra Simpson contends, citizenship has been key
to the “process of rationalizing dispossession,”27 working to enshrine and
normalize the settlers’ right to colonize, dispossess, and dominate indigenous peoples, while producing indigenous peoples as subjects incapable
of sovereignty and property rights.28
Indigenous peoples in Anglophone settler colonial states have always been suspicious of citizenship, warning that “citizenship could serve
the political function of reproducing practices of colonization.”29 As Vine
Deloria, a Native American intellectual and activist, pointedly remarked:
“There was never a time when the white man said he was trying to help the
Indian get into the mainstream of American life that he did not also demand
that the Indian give up land.”30 This suspicion is not unsubstantiated. As
history shows, during the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth century, settler colonial citizenship was characterized by unconcealed
modes of domination. It blatantly embodied the eliminatory racial logics
13
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490