The logic of settler colonialism (literally): Scott L. Pratt, ‘Logic and Colonization in North America’, The Pluralist, 20, 1, pp. 17-28 | settler colonial studies blog

The logic of settler colonialism (literally): Scott L. Pratt, ‘Logic and Colonization in North America’, The Pluralist, 20, 1, pp. 17-28

28Feb25

Excerpt: In 1672, The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof was published at the first North American press housed at Harvard College, where several of the printers were also members of local tribes. The book was written in English and Wôpanâak, the Native language spoken in the area of Boston and the Plymouth Colony, by the famed New England missionary John Eliot, with considerable assistance from Native interpreters including a number of Native preachers (mostly trained by Eliot). This volume represented one of the first uses of logic as an instrument of colonization in North America. Alongside disease and guns, logic served the larger mission of removing North American Indigenous people and replacing them with European people and culture—an effort that continues to the present day. Eliot’s primer is a key example because it illustrates both the means of conveying the dominant logic to a non-European world and the complexity of the borders where Indigenous and European worlds meet.

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