Chapter 3 Networking the Nation

Analyzing and Challenging Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism names a worlding technique as much as it names historically specific flows of power and possession. Although this work focuses on U.S. settler society, it indicates only one of many areas marked by violence: settler colonial societies share common characteristics.1 The characteristics noted here do not represent an exhaustive list; rather, they should be understood as rationales and functions that take different shapes in different geopolitical contexts. They all guarantee the same outcome, however: the establishment and dominance of a settler society. This pattern of practices includes the acquisition of territory, resource and labor extraction, the legal codification of private property, and the erection of a network of legal and administrative settler state legal structures used to manage subordinate populations. Such practices are predicated on the production of raced and gendered hierarchies, which strengthens the dominance of settler supremacy.

The imposition of a solipsistic, self-authorizing juridical and administrative settler state legal structure is crucial to the colonial project. Alyosha Goldstein describes modern U.S. colonialism as the “administration of populations [which] operates in tandem with the juridical, political, military-strategic, economic, and cultural production and control of property, territory, and resources” (8). Similarly, Goeman argues that within the settler configuration of land as an exploitable resource, Indigenous peoples are flattened into “flora and fauna” (18), turned into objects to be managed. Managerial techniques are evidenced in reservations, residential schools, and in the enslavement of Native women and children as domestic labor (Estes, 29, 55). As the settler state’s formation solidifies, the mechanisms for discipline and “the logic of elimination” oscillate between the overt targeting of racialized communities, resulting in death, and a range of techniques including the use of carceral spaces and methods of slow death (Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387; Razack, 916). Here, the settler state paternalistically deploys itself to manage targeted communities under the guise of “civilizing” projects. Settler invasion and the construction of settler supremacy are iterative, performative processes that must be enacted and reenacted to establish and entrench their legitimacy. Globally, nation-state structures function to affirm the formation of the nation-state and its authority. Settler colonialism is understood here as a foundational structure to globalization.

Settler property regimes are intimately linked with settler geographic knowledges, or ways of coming to know and understand place and space. We see this in spatial metaphors that reveal underlying assumptions and reify forms of spatial and geographical knowledge. The pervasiveness of the frontier narrative in the United States is a testament to its effectiveness and malleability; it has endured because the notion of a “frontier” is an established but also evolving national myth. Consider the framing of cyberspace-as-frontier space. In the 1990s, when such phraseology emerged, the language did the dual work of representing a land that promises to be conquered by an already-triumphant settler society and reflecting a now-familiar spatial order.2 The term invokes the memory of an unruly land and peoples that pose a threat to settler order but will ultimately be ordered, catalogued, and transformed. Constituent forms of spatial and geographic knowledge are displaced and erased. White Earth Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien terms this practice “firsting,” which “asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice” (xiv). This myth-making process permits settlers to perpetually supplant and/or evacuate Native and Indigenous peoples from narratives of social, cultural, and technological development.

Possession and ownership are inherently racial logics in settler property regimes. The possession of private property names a relationship with land. Cheryl Harris’s formative work, “Whiteness as Property,” traces the development of chattel slavery and the consequences of racialization in which whiteness is legally associated with property and whiteness itself becomes a form of property by exercising the rights of exclusion (1726, 1736). In the making of racial categories, whiteness was codified as settler law and guaranteed its primacy and social and legal protections. Quandamooka scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson uses the concept of “possessive logics” to understand the link between the assertion of property rights by people with white, patriarchal settler identities and the project of establishing and maintaining the settler state. The possessive logic serves as an orientation and rationalization to name settler investments in “reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership . . . and circulate sets of meanings about ownership of the nation as part of common-sense knowledge” (12). Settler colonialism constitutes the fabric of social, economic, and political worlds so much that settler common sense displaces and replaces any constituent modes of relation and posits the dominance of settler society as inevitable.

The formulation of an ideal settler citizen-subject is accomplished through settler colonial epistemes and ontologies. Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd argues that the scope of settler knowledge production is enabled through an Indigenous identity rendered as an interpretable body that no longer exists in the real. It is through this malleability that a settler colonial society can simultaneously “forget” the violence done to Indigenous peoples even as it, at other times, uses the figure of “the Indian” as a hypervisible character in a celebratory historical narrative (19). Tiffany Lethabo King combines Black and Indigenous feminist work to “illuminate the ways that white humanity and its self-actualization require Black and Native death as its condition of possibility” and names this “conquistador humanism.” Here, Black and Indigenous peoples are “transformed into lesser forms of humanity—and, in some cases, become nonhuman altogether” (King, 16, 20). The violence of this transformation cannot be overstated because it authorizes the invocation of terra nullius and the enslavement of lesser nonhumans. Shiri Pasternak argues that land is viewed as unoccupied and available for seizure and settlement precisely because these racial Others do not register as human, nor do they enact administration over territory in a manner reflecting settler notions of private property (155–56). Settler citizenship is predicated on dispossession, and this violence is continually referenced and sanitized. Consider the desire for home ownership as a mundane part of a settler statecraft.

Settler colonial legal structures are consistently organized around a raced and gendered construction of the category of the human. This malleable construction defines who will have social and legal recognition within the settler state juridical system and can own property. Wolfe understands racialization as a central, organizing logic in which racial hierarchies are established to center white supremacist settler societies and produce both Indigenous dispossession and Black enslaved labor (“Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88). It is important to note that that Wolfe’s narrow structuring of racial categories obfuscates both the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and the dispossession of African peoples from Africa (Kelley, 268). Heteropatriarchy is codified within the logics of property and settler state law based on male inheritance. For example, the 1887 Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, which required naming a male head of household, radically altered tribal relationships and care networks and divested Native women from political representation (Goeman, 2013, 91–92). Interpreting settler colonialism as a gendered project also highlights the extensive intellectual genealogies of Black and Indigenous feminism. This work attests to the gendered racial violence of chattel slavery, sexual violence, and role of blood quantum, all of which rely on horrific violence visited upon racialized women’s bodies.3

More recently, a significant body of work addresses how settler violence continues through a language of logistics. Deborah Cowen notes that “the supply chain of contemporary capitalism resonates so clearly with the supply line of the colonial frontier” and the “old enemies of empire—‘indians’ and ‘pirates’—are among the groups that pose the biggest threats” (9). Racialized communities, intentionally divested of resources, are continually represented as antagonistic to the project of modernity and liberal progress. Pasternak and Dafnos argue that “Indigenous rights are increasingly problematized as threats to the existing infrastructures of supply chains, as well as to their future expansion” (747). We see this reflected in the sustained protective demonstrations by Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and Aboriginal communities globally over land, water, mineral, gas, and oil rights.4 The strategic denial of basic human needs to communities targeted by the settler state represents ongoing settler colonial violence. As Wolfe notes, settlers “come to stay; invasion is a structure, not an event” (“Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388). Rather than understand colonial contact and violence as a singular event in the past, settler colonialism as a methodological framework connects our imperial, colonial, and settler colonial past to our settler colonial present and extends our critique of the nation-state.

Electronic and Digital Colonialism and Settler Colonialism

Settler colonial studies’ emphasis on territoriality and the violent mechanisms used to sustain settler invasion and ensure settler supremacy nuances the formative and growing body of work in digital colonialism. It is worth noting some foundational assumptions here. Rather than conflate capitalist privatization with colonialism, I note that these are linked social and economic projects, but not equivalents. My use of the term “violence” is deliberate in its naming of a scale of violence bound up in colonial conquest and intentional erasures of brutal histories. Furthermore, settler colonialism names an ideological investment that many people uphold, including people of color, although the concept is associated with the primacy of a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and male/masculine subject. It is also important to acknowledge that conceptions and experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and settler colonialism shift according to the geopolitical context. Finally, although representative in important ways, the United States should not be understood as a proxy for all settler societies or a stand-in for specific and complex imperial and colonial histories. In India and Africa, the terms postcolonial and decolonial often have different meanings than in the U.S. context. In the United States, the use of the term postcolonial to describe sociopolitical issues is contested, as settler colonial studies claims that we live under occupation and postcolonial theory was originally oriented toward the critique of colonialism (Byrd, xxxiii–xxxvi). None of this terminology (or its application) is free from debate; language is fraught as we try to describe our specific histories and name the deep and lasting impact that colonial occupation created and maintains.

Marxist approaches to information studies often focus on disparities of socio-economic power via critiques of ownership and infrastructure in the First World/Global North and Third World/Global South and can be strengthened by settler colonial studies’ critique. Herbert Schiller’s foundational work highlights the use of communication infrastructures to disseminate Western ideologies in media; for example, he argues that this form of cultural imperialism was part of a deliberate effort undertaken by U.S. military-communication conglomerates to maintain dominance commercially and politically (9). His characterization expanded to describe media domination and Third World dependence on First World communications infrastructures. This relationship entrenches economic dependence on First World governments, which dictate the consequences of use as the infrastructure’s owners both surveil and profit from the data, which ensures perpetual market dominance. Contemporary discourse follows a similar approach; in “Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Dispossession,” Thatcher et al. argue that data colonialism “occurs through asymmetrical relations between data producers (end-users) and data collectors and owners (corporate entities) that mirror processes of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession that occur as capitalism colonizes previously non-commodified, private times and places” (7). I am wary of the use of colonialism as a metaphor for capitalist privatization or definitions that are bloodless, are inattentive to raced and gendered violence, or assume equivalence between Indigenous dispossession and broad practices of data exploitation. Problems also exist with definitions that assume that occupation and dispossession are largely historical issues. Many authors are quick to note the existence of sustained colonial legacies, but they are less likely to consider how contemporary rulings undermine tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction—functioning in similar ways to the land grabbing techniques of “historical colonialism” (Couldry and Mejias, 70–4).

Recent work on digital colonialism grapples with a legacy of colonial and settler colonial ways of interpreting, cataloguing, and owning data that dehumanize racialized communities. Roopika Risam identifies colonial archival violence by noting the way that data is circulated through colonial ideologies and ontologies, thus reaffirming colonial structures (48–49). Similarly, Morehshin Allahyari defines digital colonialism as “a framework for critically examining the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations” and stipulates that the term refers specifically to the use of digital technologies and is differentiated from “material or object-based colonialism” (Sharma et al., 201). Allahyari critiques the use of three-dimensional (3D) printers and scanners by “Western institutions and digital archaeology spaces in Eurocentric countries and North American countries . . . [who] go to the Global South and [3D] scan historical and cultural sites. Their claim is that they will save cultural heritage that we all share” (Sharma et al., 197). This enacts the same colonial violence that many institutions now repudiate by offering “less invasive” methods of sacred site and grave desecration. Such practices are part of a long continuum of the settler colonial violence that King terms “conquistador humanism” (16). In the violent cataloging and categorizing of subhuman and nonhuman flesh, knowledge is bound up in conquest, and violence is sanitized, as institutions claim that the work is for the public good.

Settler Colonialism as Method: Reapproaching Telecommunications Infrastructures

Understanding the central logics of settler colonialism allows us to grasp the historical foundations and political stakes of telecommunications structures in the United States. My work borrows from scholars tracing the relationship between technologies and empire, and builds on work interrogating the relationships among the nation-state, the military-industrial complex, and surveillance technologies.5 State-created telecommunications infrastructures and technologies in the United States have fundamentally enabled and been realized through frontier violence and continue to be used to surveil communities of color.6 As an exhaustive history is impossible, I briefly touch on specific areas of telegraph, telephone, and early internet development and consider how the infrastructure and deployment of these technologies sustain the racial hierarchies that are integral to settler colonial societies.

Telegraph infrastructure represented westward colonial expansion visually, materially, and ideologically. James Schwoch’s Wired into Nature positions telegraphy as a form of electronic communication that was central to the development of national security frameworks. The work describes the role of the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps and the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the establishment and maintenance of telegraph technology and the completion of the transcontinental telegraph system. Schwoch notes the connections between the collection of bioinformation and the use of the telegraph as a “military asset to wage long-term low-scale continuous asymmetric warfare against Native Americans” (10). The U.S. military and settler state was absolute in its recognition of the importance of communications infrastructure to accomplish this targeting. So critical were telegraph structures to the state that when Native peoples sabotaged telegraph poles in response to the Sand Creek Massacre, the army led a scorched-earth campaign and set a wildfire in January 1865 (122–23).

Settler geographic knowledge was codified in no small part due to environmental and climatological surveys. Sara Grossman’s Immeasurable Weather examines how climatological knowledge understood as “multiregional settler data was key to the story and enactment of settler environmental dominance” and entrenched a settler relation to land and nature bound to ownership and mastery (39). Critical geographer Nicholas Blomley argues that army surveys, like the ones that guided the construction of the telegraph system, function as a mechanism to establish settler legitimacy. Blomley notes that “space is simultaneously a means of disciplining the performances that are possible within it. These social performances are citational, reiterating past performances and thus reproducing dominant norms and practices at the same time as they diverge from them” (122). The coupling of “nature” and “Native” as things to be surveilled and tracked constitutes the epistemological violence that Goeman mentioned; Native communities were cast as part of the landscape, simultaneously objectified and transformed into natural history. Schwoch notes that the telegraph helped to establish geodetic knowledge and the codification of increasingly standardized latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, which “enhanced the ability of the federal government to contain Native Americans within the perimeters of geodetically plotted boundary stakes” (32). Today, reservation boundaries remain policed and Native women continue to be murdered and missing. Settler colonial surveys attempted to upend Indigenous geographic knowledge and relationship with place, and represent a pattern of violence long enacted by the state.

The importance of such communications infrastructures is well documented in the legal language of acts that cede right-of-way to the federal government. The 1862 Pacific Railway Act and the Dawes Act were central to the act of dispossession and the systematic diminishment of Native lifeways and sovereignty. The creation of public lands through federal power appears in legislation from the Land Ordinance of 1785 and well into the late 1800s, with the Homestead Act of 1862. Section 2 of the Pacific Railway Act granted right of way through tribal lands and codified the state’s right to “extinguish as rapidly as may be the Indian titles to all lands falling under the operation of this act” (National Archives). Similarly, the Dawes Act stated that the federal government maintained the “right of way through any lands granted to an Indian, or a tribe of Indians, for railroads or other highways, or telegraph lines, for the public use” and pairs it with the demand that allotted Indigenous peoples “[adopt] the habits of civilized life” (National Archives). We see here the entwined demands to diminish Indigenous lifeways and ensure settler domination by shoring up the power of the settler state and its public. Equally important to note is how foundational such legal precedent remains in lawsuits, including the Keystone XL pipeline project, which was eventually terminated (Native American Rights Fund). Viewed through the lens of Moreton-Robinson’s possessive logics, the erection of the telegraph pole functioned as a representation of a unified nation. Like railroads and roadways, telegraph poles marked the land as part of the project of colonization and offered the visage of national unity and security.7

Telephone poles represented a different moment in the settler colonial project, though no less violent, and can be viewed as a way station toward digital communication infrastructures. The relationship between telegraph and telephone infrastructures echoes the eventual use of telephone lines for dial-up internet: the technological and conceptual structures were grafted onto each other. Where telegraph lines were sought as a means of protecting settler safety, telephone poles were regarded as aesthetically displeasing; however, once the increased speed of communication was realized, the telephone infrastructure flourished. While dispossession remained coded in the infrastructure, telephone poles also functioned as gallows in the lynching of Black people. Eula Biss notes that her search for the phrase “telephone pole” in The New York Times archives from 1880 to 1920 resulted in 370 results showing these instances of racial terror (89). As the telephone infrastructure grew more robust, so did the U.S. government’s ability to surveil. This is glaringly apparent in the use of wiretaps and phone calls by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the COINTELPRO files, which targeted Black communities organizing against social and state violence.8 As the telegraph supplied the state with information on surveilled communities, so would the telephone. Although it is important to remember the historically situated context of telegraph and telephone infrastructures (there are discontinuities as well as continuities in their respective histories), it is important to acknowledge the inequitable deployment of telecommunications technologies and the way that they have helped to ensure that settler hegemony remains intact.

A substantial body of work traces internet history from its bourgeoning moments within the military-industrial complex through to its commercialization. Abbates’s Inventing the Internet describes the military roots of internet and computational technologies. As dial-up internet evolved to its current state, the nation-state and commercial entities guided the development of online protocols and extended the reach of private property law to infrastructure. Dan Schiller’s Digital Capitalism traces the expansion of the internet network toward a for-profit model, noting that business networks effectively drove policy agendas with the Federal Communications Commission that allowed them to build proprietary systems and utilize extant telecommunications structures. He reports that “some 60 percent of the internet’s host computers in early 1997 were located in the United States” (35). It is perhaps no surprise, then, how heavily governmental and commercial interests shaped international policy in the United States—all the way to outer space. After all, how do we convert outer space into the property of a nation-state without the parallel extension of communications infrastructures? Settler state expansion never ceased; now it needs to adapt legal language from airspace and outer space. James Hay sketches out such legalities, noting how the eventual legal constructions of outer space can be traced to precedents over airspace and the related industry of radio (26–29). Christy Collis’s work traces the fraught legalities of the Geostationary Earth Orbit, otherwise known as the most expensive piece of outer space due to the position it guarantees satellites (61). As terra nullius undergirded the doctrine of discovery, res nullius undergirds the creation of territory in outer space.

When settler colonial studies are applied to critical infrastructure studies, the networked settler logics manifested and managed through telecommunications infrastructures become apparent. Dan Schiller’s Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications examines how the establishment of the Post Office facilitated information flows and exchange “among dispersed and typically small units of capital . . . Thus the Post Office functioned as a two-stroke engine, firing on behalf of both territorial conquest and market intensification” (21). In many ways, these technologies are doing exactly what they were designed to do: advancing settler state interests and security. Schwoch offers an insightful reflection when he writes that “when the Transcontinental Telegraph relayed the messages that triggered the Great Prairie Fire, the Transcontinental Telegraph presaged the ultimate (but never issued) prime directive of ARPANET: relaying messages to deploy American weapons of mass destruction” (124).

Our work can refuse to pull a curtain before the historical colonial and ongoing settler colonial violence. Settler colonial studies as a method reminds us to look back and draw out these complex and violent histories and their many iterations.

Confronting and Refusing the Settler State

Methods attentive to settler colonialism ask us to reorient our analysis and address the limitations of state-based interventions. Where neoliberal approaches may address, for instance, how women also contributed to settler state projects, an approach attentive to settler colonialism enables an analysis that does not treat gender as an additive component of labor analysis. Instead, a robust analysis considers how the use of raced, sexed, and gendered labor is itself part of a settler colonial nation-building project. Rather than treat legal constructions of private property and ownership as givens, these become additional areas to be interrogated. More pointedly, we can see the limits of proposed solutions like increased information accessibility or open-access data and transparency when the settler state is tasked to be an arbiter. Solutions realized through settler state intervention reentrench the centrality of the state and allow it to act as a paternalistic benefactor. Hupa abolitionist feminist Stephanie Lumsden reminds us that settler law “must be understood as a tool of colonization rather than an instrument of justice. This means that the law has been implemented to maintain the violent settler colonial hegemony that undergirds the state” (86). Neoliberal approaches are inherently limited by their reliance on settler state juridical interventions, and the limited critique fails to address the systemic oppression and violence that so characterize U.S. settler society.

In practicing self-reflexive work, we must ask ourselves how our projects may perpetuate and sustain harm in a settler society. This allows us to address what Tuck and Yang term “settler moves to innocence,” which “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (3). We see this resuscitation of the settler in discourses that cast the internet as a “public good,” which assumes a shared set of cultural values and structures of equality and access that simply do not exist in the settler state; rhetoric that joins “democracy,” “freedom,” and “equal access” demonstrates an investment in upholding settler hegemony. Embedded in the notion of “the commons”—a category that presumes settler citizenship as its normative identity—there remains a refusal to grapple with settler violence. Extant frameworks do not always “look back” to consider how racial, spatial settler, colonial histories so intimately shape our settler colonial present. Instead, theorists attempt to salvage a colonial project through re-packaging; if a project can equally serve all populations, then there is no need to address the violent dispossession that made its very advent possible nor is there precedent to address ongoing settler colonial violence.

What if, instead of a worlding practice that is predicated on death to preserve settler subjectivity, we ask ourselves how we can create a world that promises protection and life to those currently rendered most vulnerable? Native, Indigenous, and First Nations communities are working on data sovereignty and data protocols in response to settler colonialism and digital colonialism. Cheyenne scholar Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear claims that “the data sovereignty revolution in Indian country is going to be built tribe by tribe and community by community. Reclaiming the right to understand the diverse realities of our peoples on our terms and to chart sustainable courses for future generations is a matter of contemporary survival for indigenous peoples” (268). Rather than seek sweeping or broad settler state legislative reforms, these approaches ask for nuance, specificity, and directives delineated by the communities themselves. There is no shortage of extant models for working toward a just future, beyond the state. Such mobilizations are part of a long continuum of Indigenous resistance. Beyond this, we can actively work toward decolonization, including the return of the land to Indigenous and ancestral relations, which is at once possible and necessary. This insistence is not born of naive idealism: in 2022, significant tracts of land were returned to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, the Wiyot, and the Rappahannock Tribe (Kunze, “After 350 Years, Rappahannock Tribe Gets Land Back”). Covid-19 and the supply chain crisis continue to show us the profoundly precarious status of all settler states. New methods can herald new ethics.

Notes

1. 1. For more on settler colonialism in varied global contexts, see Veracini’s Settler Colonialism and The Settler Colonial Present; Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology; Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear; Barker’s edited collection, Sovereignty Matters; Shigematsu and Camacho’s edited collection, Militarized Currents; and Kanji’s “Settler Moves to Innocence.”

2. 2. The use of the frontier metaphor is associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), founded in 1990. The invocation of the frontier in an American context was intentional, as the EFF sought to garner support from the public. See “Across the Electronic Frontier” by EFF cofounders Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow.

3. 3. For more on gendered racial violence, see Haley, No Mercy Here; Snorton, Black on Both Sides; TallBear, Native DNA; and Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape.

4. 4. For more on Indigenous and Native demonstrations and protection movements, see Estes and Dhillon’s edited collection, Standing with Standing Rock and the Wet’suwet’en land and water protectors at Raventrust.com.

5. 5. See Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks; and Voyles’s The Settler Sea and Wastelanding.

6. 6. See Benjamin, Captivating Technology; and Dubrofsky and Magnet, Feminist Surveillance Studies.

7. 7. For work focused on the role of the telegraph in nation building, settler colonial religious imaginaries, and its impact within the Oneida Nation, see Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission.

8. 8. See “Black Extremist” in the COINTELPRO archive.

Bibliography