Demonic settlers enable heavenly ones: Marc James Carpenter, ‘Settler colonial sin-eaters: disavowal of atrocity and its uses, in and beyond the late 1800s American Pacific Northwest’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Demonic settlers enable heavenly ones: Marc James Carpenter, ‘Settler colonial sin-eaters: disavowal of atrocity and its uses, in and beyond the late 1800s American Pacific Northwest’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

03Jan25

Abstract: Although attention to continuing and continuous structural elements of settler colonialism remains central to understanding the harms inflicted on Indigenous communities, there is always a risk that overfocusing on ‘a structure, not an event’ can leave little air for Indigenous actions and dynamism amid colonial systems of elimination and appropriation. Settler colonialism is not a monolith but a set of overlapping structures. Even with broad shared goals of appropriation, settlers have seldom agreed on the means or extent of elimination to be used in pursuit of those goals. In the late 1800s American Pacific Northwest (and elsewhere), Euro-Americans unwilling to face the extent of the genocidal violence their community used to seize land sometimes attempted to isolate the atrocities they could not ignore to a few fringe actors – turning them into what I call ‘settler colonial sin-eaters,’ and thus absolving the broader settler society of crimes in which nearly all were complicit. But in a context where many other Euro-Americans wanted their acts of genocide foregrounded and celebrated, some Indigenous people used these disavowals as a wedge to push against ongoing physical genocide and continued land theft. Disavowal of genocide is dangerous, but avowal of genocide is even more so.

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