Excerpt: Modern migration to the “four great Nordic nations” rested on conquest, colonialism, and displacement. These nations were British, or (in the case of the United States) ex-British, settler-colonial societies. They were societies that shared remarkably similar understandings of national space, civilizational origins, and power dynamics associated with labor exploitation and racial classifications. Underlying this similarity was the perception that lands in long-term use by First Nations peoples were empty or unused. Through the processes of settler colonization, race-making, and capitalist exploitation the lands of First Nations peoples were carved up into commercialized packets of private property for new settlers—for people that came to stay.
