The meaning of settler colonialism: Annalee Ring, ‘A critical semiology of settler colonial meaning-making: de-naturalizing and re-politicizing contradictory and intertwined mythologies’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The meaning of settler colonialism: Annalee Ring, ‘A critical semiology of settler colonial meaning-making: de-naturalizing and re-politicizing contradictory and intertwined mythologies’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

04Aug25

Abstract: This paper highlights contributions of Indigenous and decolonial scholars to semiology, focusing on how settler colonialism generates systems of meaning that support its establishment, maintenance, and reproduction as well as how intertwined myths contribute to sustain settler colonialism on Turtle Island. These scholars argue that settler colonialism’s longevity requires the naturalization and internalization of intertwined mythologies. These settler colonial mythologies justify violence against Indigenous people and the expropriation and exploitation of Indigenous land, resulting in ongoing social and environmental injustices. Further, settler colonial myths operate collectively even though they seem contradictory or circular. The Myth of the Ecological Savage and the Myth of the Ecological Saint reduce millions of diverse peoples into two stereotypes that promote settler colonial interests. Both myths support the Myth of Wilderness, an inaccurate description of land as untouched before European arrival. This myth was employed to justify genocidal and assimilationist practices beneficial to settler colonial interests. This myth also erases the relationships that Indigenous peoples had with land, justifying land theft. These myths also support the Myth of Wasteland, which claims that Indigenous peoples are wasting the land’s potential, further justifying land theft and exploitation. The Myth of Biological Race and the Myth of the Vanishing Indigene both assume what they supposedly find, and they both obscure the material and health-based consequences of settler colonialism, following a pattern of blaming the oppressed for their oppression. This myth diverts attention and removes responsibility from settler colonial production of racial health disparities, attributing these disparities to Indigenous genetics. These intertwined mythologies obscure Indigenous multiplicity and difference and establish and maintain settler colonialism by naturalizing and these myths and internalizing them into habits of perception. Studying these myths collectively illuminates what I call a settler colonial grammar, or the structural and systemic relationships between multiple myths and how they operate in conjunction. Thus, this paper argues that settler colonial systems of meaning should be de-naturalized and re-politicized as their continuation and materialization is lethal. Furthermore, the paper suggests that practices of radical resistance and refusal, as defined by Indigenous scholars, which can offer strategies for disrupting settler meanings and their correlated material institutions.

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