Settler colonialism and indigenous resistance : from Little Big Horn to today

On 25 June 1876, 150 years ago, forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes led by military chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall—and inspired by Sitting Bull’s overall spiritual guidance and leadership—overwhelmed invading forces of the United States Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Greasy Grass.1 Up to 200 Native Americans were killed or injured “defending the Indian way of life”, as a memorial stone now says. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who led the US forces on the day, was killed alongside 268 troopers. A further 55 were injured. The battle, more commonly known as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was the most serious defeat for the US army in the “Indian Wars”.2

The US was in the middle of celebrating its centenary year, and the news of Custer’s defeat shattered national self-assurance. In the following weeks, months and years the myth of “Custer’s Last Stand” was constructed. Custer’s death, the consequence of his arrogance, tactical mistakes and a racist underestimation of the enemy, was reshaped into a story of American heroism. The mythical Last Stand was, as Brian W Dippie writes, “forged…into a glowing affirmation of American ideals”.3

As Western European states began to colonise the world, its soldiers, traders, missionaries and settlers encountered different Indigenous peoples. This encounter was brutally violent and genocidal. The Indigenous victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn was a temporary defeat for US westward expansion. The legacy of Western colonialism continues in places such as Palestine. A new generation of activists and academics is trying to understand the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, dispossession and genocide. Important here is the theoretical framework known as settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism, as a set of ideas, arose out of the experiences of oppressed peoples, particularly in Palestine. In recent years, settler colonialism as a concept has been brought out of academia by the mass movements inspired by Indigenous resistance and the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine. Activists around the world now use “settler colonialism” as shorthand to understand the way that colonial and imperialist power has destroyed Indigenous societies and left racist and apartheid states in their wake. Countries as varied as the US and Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Israel are understood as settler-colonial states. Although this framework offers many insights into the historic role of colonialism and modern capitalism, it contains some problems.

This article will primarily focus on North America. In doing so, I hope to draw out some of the insights that settler colonialism offers to those struggling against imperialism, racism and oppression today. I also want to explore some of the limitations of the theory. Part of these limitations arise from the way settler colonialism is frequently used as a blanket term. However, as Joseph Choonara argues, “there are differing varieties of settler colonialism”.4 These varieties reflect different historical processes and need to be analysed separately. In my view, they arise out of the different historical processes that saw the development of capitalism in colonial societies. A particularly important factor in this is the resistance of Indigenous people themselves, as well as the practice of the organised working class—which usually includes a majority of non-Indigenous workers. Although historians of settler colonialism celebrate and acknowledge the ongoing importance of resistance by Indigenous people to the settler state, it is my contention in this article that the potential role of workers from non-Indigenous backgrounds to unite with Indigenous people is often downplayed or neglected. Analysing why such unity has been infrequent is crucial to understanding the sort of struggles that can win justice for Indigenous people and freedom for all the oppressed and exploited in settler-colonial states.

Custer’s arrival at the Little Big Horn was the latest in a set of military incursions and betrayals of treaties by the US. For Native Americans, it was an episode in a genocidal war against their people, fuelled by hunger for land and justified by white supremacy and racism. It was part of a coordinated plan by three separate armies to destroy Native American presence in the area.5 One account, based on Éše’he Ôhnéšesêstse’s recollections, describes the initial attack by Major Reno on the Cheyenne part of the camp:

The Cheyenne camp was located across from the mouth of Medicine Tail’s coulee. In the village that morning, there was talk of holding another dance and the people began to paint themselves, cook, cut tobacco and get ready. They thought the white men were far away and they did not expect to fight that morning. Two Moon went to the ponies, which were kept east of the river and north of the camp. Back in the hills he looked up the valley and saw a great dust cloud. Puzzled as to its meaning, he continued to drive his family’s forty horses to the river and washed them down with cool water. Finally nearing his camp, Two Moon again looked up the valley where the dust now looked like a whirlwind. Lakota horsemen came running into camp shouting “Soldiers come! Plenty white soldiers”.6

The camp was thrown into chaos as “women were hurriedly packing for flight. Soon the old men, women and children began to appear, running through the camp, and then came the young men, rushing to prepare for battle”.7

The Lakota and their allies had already been pressured by white settlers from the east coast. This colonial pressure was forcing people off their traditional lands. As historian Pekka Hämäläinen writes:

That swell of American imperial ambition reached the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ [the name for the alliance of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples, known as the Sioux Nation] in 1857 when US agents began pressuring Yanktons [part of the Lakota] to cede their lands between the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers. The Big Sioux Valley is “of unusual fertility,” noted the superintendent of Indian affairs and recommended negotiations to buy it. By then squatters were already moving into the valley, and a delegation of Yankton leaders traveled to Washington where they signed a treaty that gave them annuities for 50 years and transferred about 96 percent of their lands to the United States—“their entire country,” as their disillusioned agent noted. Hundreds of miles west in the Upper Platte Agency, [Indian Agent Thomas] Twiss saw similar prospects in that area’s “exceeding fertile” land. He pressed the federal government to carry “into effect, with all means and force at its command, the colonisation of these wild tribes on military reservations”.8

A few weeks after the battle, the US secretary of war, J Donald Cameron, reported to president Ulysses S Grant that the Lakota “have for centuries been pushed westward by the advancing tide of civilisation”.9 It was a racist myth designed to justify the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.10 What concerned the US government was the level of Indigenous civilisation and its permanence. Various methods had been utilised to try to destroy them. The so-called “Five Civilised Tribes”, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole, had been supposedly “civilised” by US-Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. Hawkins’ two-decade project in the aftermath of US Independence was to “instil Euro-American values…including the profit motive, privatisation of property, debt, accumulation of wealth”, and it allowed settlers to take the land and assimilate the Native Americans.11

Lakota historian Nick Estes shows how conventional historians have portrayed the Sioux “as a pillaging band of expansionists who violently expelled their Indigenous neighbors”. He continues, “these attempts to classify the Sioux as imperialist newcomers—a label that more accurately describes the United States—marked the Sioux as nomadic, rootless, unsettled and malicious, which made their removal, genocide and colonisation more palatable”.12 In fact, as Estes points out, the Sioux were not expansionist, as their oral history and records show.

The years before 1876 saw constant expansion by the US. In 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Black Hills were sacred to the Lakota Sioux and other Indigenous peoples, an area of unprecedented cultural and spiritual importance and a source of food and resources. For the US to expand into the Black Hills and other areas of the Plains, the Indigenous peoples had to be destroyed.

When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, they encountered a land with numerous civilisations organised in a myriad of ways and spread across a wide variety of environments. There were about 100 million people living in the Americas at this time, about two-fifths of these lived in what we now call North America. By comparison, 50 million people lived in Europe up to the Ural Mountains.13 The following centuries saw a genocidal process that catastrophically reduced the number of Indigenous people in the Americas. Today, the US census recognises about nine million people identifying as Indigenous, in a total US population of around 342 million.

All too often, this demographic collapse in the Indigenous population of the Americas is attributed to the diseases that arrived with European settlers, starting with Christopher Columbus’s first visit in 1492. However, to simply attribute the death of millions of people to disease is to ignore the deliberate policies of extermination and enslavement implemented by Europeans in the Americas. This includes the artificial spreading of diseases. Moreover, military action, massacres and the destruction of the economic and ecological base of Indigenous societies destroyed millions of lives.

Genocide in North America

The initial arrival of European settlers in the Americas was an imperialist struggle for power. European powers formed alliances with various Native tribes, as isolated forces far from European support sought to undermine their opponents using Indigenous allies. Such alliances did not benefit Indigenous people in any lasting way. The struggle to see which European power would dominate the eastern coast of North America was marked by continual violence against Native Americans. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes a sequence of conflicts between settlers and Indigenous peoples as settlers tried to steal land. The Virginia colony provides multiple examples, such as the war against the Powhatans in the early 1600s and the 1644-6 Tidewater War, when settlers raided “Indigenous villages and fields with the goal of starving the people out of the area”. During Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), “Anglo settler-farmers along with landless indentured servants—both Anglo and African—took into their own hands the slaughter of Indigenous farmers with the aim of taking their land”.14 These examples from one part of the eastern seaboard serve as an illustration of a wider process.

With the consolidation of the US state in the aftermath of the Civil War, western expansion saw a renewed encounter between Native Americans and settlers from the east. In order to manage this, and displace the Native Americans from prime agricultural land, the US government forced Native American tribes to sign numerous treaties. These gave settlers access to resources and land, while confining Indigenous people to smaller and smaller areas. The treaties were portrayed at the time, and sometimes today, as agreements between equals. For instance, in 1851, the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota were signed by the four Dakota nations and the US government. This “ceded all Dakota land claims except for a narrow twenty-mile strip”. Yet, as Estes shows,

there is no doubt that the Dakota leaders were coerced into making such disastrous concessions. To force signatures, treaty commissioners threatened military force and the withholding of rations… When the treaties went through the Senate for approval, amendments were attached that left the Dakotas without any legal title to the land, essentially making them homeless or trespassers in their own homelands.15

The 1668 Treaty of Laramie, signed between Lakota and other tribes and the US, was supposed to protect the Native Americans, set up “unceded lands” and create the “Great Sioux Reservation”. It also “gave” the sacred Black Hills to the Native Americans, which as we have seen was violated after the discovery of gold in 1874.

Not everyone in the US bought into the myth of Custer’s heroic last stand. In a letter to the Nation dated 10 July 1876, the anthropologist Lewis H Morgan, whose work would influence Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote:

General Custer, at the head of 300 cavalry, rode into an Indian encampment, men, women, and children, and killed all who resisted without hesitation and without remorse. Unfortunately for General Custer and his men, they encountered the bravest and most determined Indians now living in America. They were surrounded and defeated, so that not a man escaped. They experienced the precise fate they intended for the Indians. We admire the gallantry of General Custer and his men; we mourn their loss; but who shall blame the Sioux for defending themselves, their wives and children, when attacked in their own encampment and threatened with destruction? This calamity is simply a chance of war—of a war waged by our Government upon these Indians, nothing more and nothing less.16

Morgan went against the grain in explaining the defeat of Custer, but he saw in the Native Americans a “race, whose gradual destruction seems to be the inevitable result of American progress”. Morgan certainly did not believe in the forceful eradication of Indigenous people of North America, but he did believe they had an outdated society that needed to be induced into new ways of life. According to him, “What we need at the present time is a factory system for the tribes on reservations…and a pastoral system for the wild tribes of the Plains”.17

Custer’s defeat in 1876 was a magnificent victory for the united tribes of the Plains. Yet, it was a short-lived success. Immediately after the battle, the tribes disbanded. The unity that had defeated Custer was never repeated. What followed was a renewed offensive by the US government aimed at destroying Indigenous power in the American West and concentrating Native Americans on reservations. They were forced to assimilate into white culture: taught to farm through adopting Western agriculture or risk starvation from inadequate support and food on reservations run by corrupt and racist US representatives.

The destruction of Native Americans took place at multiple levels. One of the most obscene examples of this was the use of “Indian Boarding Schools” in the US or “Indian Residential Schools” in Canada to destroy Native American culture and assimilate children into white society. These schools separated children from their parents, forced them to learn English, banned their languages and religions, and imposed Christianity. Everything from traditional clothing to hairstyles were prohibited, and this was backed up with violence. Captain Richard Pratt, who had taken part in the wars against the Plains Indians, established the first Indian School in 1879. His infamous slogan “Kill the Indian and save the man” and the practices he implemented in his schools arose out of his experience treating Native American prisoners of war. Eventually, they became the blueprint for treatment of Native American children across the country.18

Another part of the Indigenous genocide in the US was ecological. Before European settlers could exploit the American plains, Alfred W Crosby argues, they had to “disassemble an existing ecosystem” by killing the millions of bison that roamed the plains. The bison, a keystone species to the Plains’ ecology, was a barrier to farming and ranching due to its herds.19 The extermination of the bison removed a key food source for the Native Americans of the Plains, destroying the basis of their way of life and undermining their ability to resist the US Army. In 1874, US secretary of the interior Columbus Delano said:

The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization.20

Over millennia, Indigenous peoples had carefully constructed ecological systems throughout the Americas. Native Americans were known to constantly burn woodland and prairie to encourage particular plants and animals. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they marvelled at woodlands reminiscent of English parkland.21 William Cronon, in his account of Native American life in New England and the arrival of European settlers, notes how the patchwork landscape of woodland, grassy areas and marsh was cultivated over hundreds of years. Indigenous peoples were not so much hunting but “harvesting a foodstuff, which they had consciously been instrumental in creating”.22

The ongoing transformation of American ecology continued as European capitalists sought for wood, furs and other natural resources. Capitalism changed how Indigenous peoples related to the natural world. Writing of the Muscogee Creeks, a Native American tribe in the southeast of the contemporary US, John F Richards explains how their prowess at hunting quickly attracted European deer-skin traders:

Although the Creeks adapted quickly and successfully to the new incentives of the deerskin trade, they…faced a basic contradiction. Economic and political forces made it imperative that they deliver a maximal number of deer skins every year. They became market hunters linked into the world market who used muskets to avidly pursue as many deer (and bear) as possible.23

He continues:

Once Indians were touched by the stimulus of market demand, any restraints they had previously maintained eroded rapidly. Pursuit of the material rewards offered by the fur traders forced Indians to hunt preferred species steadily, despite declining numbers… What they became were commercial hunters caught up in the all-consuming market.24

The murder of Native Americans, combined with the undermining of their traditional way of life, was part of a conscious strategy. It was inseparable from racist views of Indigenous cultures. Writing about the “Peace Policy” of president Grant, begun in 1868, Hämäläinen notes:

Reservations would rid the Natives of nomadism, polygamy, and “barbarous dialects,” and tribal nations would dissolve into “one homogenous mass” of Christian, English-speaking homesteaders… The Peace Policy was designed to do to Indigenous America what Reconstruction was to do to the South: swiftly modernise its people and absorb them into a single national body.25

The failure to comprehend just how the Native Americans used the land made it easier to justify taking it from them. Settlers used to European agriculture saw Native American farmers as lazy. One colonist wrote that they “inclose noe Land, neither have an settled habitation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have noe other but a Natural Right to those Countries”. Another settler wrote, in justifying the dispossession of existing inhabitants from their land, that “a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is”.26

The response to the US government’s genocidal policies was resistance on the part of Native Americans. This took various forms. In 1889, Estes observed “a new political movement” spreading rapidly through Native American people, “promising Indigenous rebirth”. The Ghost Dance movement arose out of a prophecy by a Paiute holy man named Wovoka, who saw a “vision that assured the restoration of Indigenous peoples to their rightful place in a world taken from them”.27 This future would see the bison return and the disappearance of the settlers, with the world returning to its state prior to European arrival. Although the primary means were communal dancing, feasting and trance-induced visions, Estes emphasises the political nature of this movement: “Once the land was cleansed life would be free of disease and colonialism, and correct relations between human and nonhuman worlds would be restored.” The visions, he continues, “were not escapist, but rather part of a growing anticolonial theory and movement”. The solution to the Native American situation was the destruction of the regime that had destroyed their livelihoods and forced them into reservations. Mass participation in the Ghost Dance terrified the US government. It saw growing resistance, with various forms of protest:

Its tactics included complete withdrawal from reservation life; opposition to reservation authorities; the creation of resistance camps in remote areas far removed [from] the influence of the agency; the pilfering of annuity distribution centres [and sometimes white settlers’ cattle and crops]; the destruction of agricultural equipment; and the refusal to send children to school, to speak English, to participate in censuses, and to attend work, church or agency and council meetings.28

Other actions included refusing to cut hair, wear US style clothing or to farm the designated allotments—it was, as Estes says, a “comprehensive challenge to the colonial order of things”.29 The Ghost Dance message was spread by activists educated at the notorious “boarding schools”. When authorities tried to stop the movement, they were met by armed resistance and deployed a massive military force to contain it. As part of this, Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull, one of the most important figures opposing the US government, was murdered. Many of those who followed the Ghost Dance fled to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Here, on 29 December 1890, harassment by the Seventh Cavalry led to the Wounded Knee massacre. Troops from Custer’s former regiment fired heavy repeating Hotchkiss guns into an unarmed crowd, killing over 300 Lakota, most of whom were women and children. American Horse, an eyewitness to the massacre, described some of the horrors:

There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.30

Nineteen soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honour for their role in the massacre. A recent campaign to get these medals rescinded was stopped in September 2025, when Donald Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth decided that the soldiers would keep the medals. In his words: “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate”.31

Settler Colonialism

In his introduction to settler colonialism, Sai Englert argues that the concept must be understood as being distinct, if related, to the better known “franchise colonialism”, which sees colonial regimes ruling colonised people via a “mixture of military power, colonial administrators and collaborating local ruling classes”. British rule in India is the classic example of this. Crucially, such regimes “do not try to permanently transfer citizens from the metropole to the colony, in order to establish a new colonial society on conquered lands”.32 In contrast, settler-colonial societies transfer populations onto lands owned by Indigenous peoples, dispossessing, displacing and murdering them. Similarly, for Michael Burawoy, settler colonialism is an “invasion of a foreign land, supported from an imperial centre, by settlers who permanently subjugate an Indigenous people”.33

Although some Indigenous people in the Americas were enslaved, this happened on a smaller scale than in South America and, often, Indigenous slaves were “deported and sold in the Caribbean in order to avoid their escape or rebellion and replaced by Africans”.34

Central to this process of dispossession was racism and white supremacy. Europeans considered Native Americans inferior. The justification for this began with the 15th century “Doctrine of Discovery”, which allowed European nations to claim ownership of lands by discovery and possession. In 1823, the US Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous people only had “occupancy rights”. As Estes explains, “Indigenous title to the land could not be extinguished where it did not exist”.35 This gave legal cover to the idea that Indigenous peoples could be dispossessed. According to Englert, “Innate difference and inferiority represent the emergence of an ideology of conquest, subjugation and colonisation”.36 However, once such military repression began, it fuelled further radicalisation of racist ideas. The barbarity of the repression of Indigenous people in the areas that would become the US fuelled racist views of Native Americans. Dunbar-Ortiz quotes military historian John Grenier:

Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after 17th and early-18th-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of “Indian haters”, men like [US President] Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.37

In turn, racism further justified the dispossession of Native Americans and the position of the Europeans as the new rulers of the land. As Cheryl I Harris explains: “The racialisation of identity and the racial subordination of Blacks and Native Americans provided the ideological basis for slavery and conquest. Although the systems of oppression of Blacks and Native Americans differed in form…undergirding both was a racialised conception of property implemented by force and ratified by law”.38

For theoreticians of settler colonialism, such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, it is precisely the question of land, or rather the ownership and control of land, that is the central ambition of settler-colonial powers: “The history of the US is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used”.39 Similarly, Mahmood Mamdani sees the “conquest of America” as “the key social and political encounter in the making of America”.40

In displacing the original inhabitants of the land, the settler-colonial state frees up the land for use by settlers, giving them both a means to generate wealth for the new state and a stake in the new state itself. It is an inherently genocidal project. In the words of J Kēhaulani Kauanui, “settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of Indigenous peoples”. In the Americas, this process required both the murder of millions of people and a process of erasure, which included twisting scientific and historical evidence to suggest that those Indigenous people who survived were no longer “truly Indian” because they had “mixed” with settlers.41

Famously, Patrick Wolfe describes settler colonialism not as an event but as an ongoing process of dispossession and extermination: “settler colonisers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Crucially for settler colonialism, the process does not end with the destruction of Indigenous societies or peoples:

Elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society. It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonisation a structure rather than an event.42

Dunbar-Ortiz looks at the process of dispossession in North America:

The United States created a unique land system among colonial powers, including Britain. In the US system, land itself—not just what was produced from the land, such as agriculture, mining, logging, grazing, and so on—was the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building the national treasury. In order to comprehend the apparently irrational genocidal policy of the US government toward the presence of Native nations on the land, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US capitalist system must be the frame of reference.43

The land itself was divided up and sold. The 1862 Homestead Act, for instance, distributed 1.5 million homesteads (300 million acres) west of the Mississippi to settlers. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, this was, in part, to move people from the east to the west, and “served as an “escape valve” for the ruling class, lessening the likelihood of class conflict as the Industrial Revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labor”.44

This redistribution of land, as well as the seizure of land for railways, involved an enormous dispossession of Indigenous lands. It also saw the US government running roughshod over dozens of treaties. As we have seen, these treaties themselves were usually made on the basis of fraud and subterfuge. Vine Deloria Jr notes that treaties were often made in ways that left Indigenous peoples in ignorance of their content. For instance, the 1826 treaty with the Chippewa tribe stated that they “grant to the government of the United States the right to search for, and carry away, any metals or minerals from any part of their country.” However, the tribe was not aware of the mineral resources under their land at the time. In 1800, a Joint Resolution of the US Congress “authorised the President to determine whether Indian title to copper lands adjacent to Lake Superior was still valid and if so, the terms on which Indian title could be extinguished”.45 In Canada, when tribes made agreements with the government, the negotiators sometimes added clauses ceding land to which the First Nations had not agreed.46

To contain displaced Native Americans, the US government introduced a system of reservations. In the reservations, the government offered protection, resources and food. In practice, this was often delayed or stolen by unscrupulous agents of the government. Moreover, “as Indigenous resistance was weakened” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the “concept of the reservation changed to one of land being carved out of the public domain…as a benevolent gesture”. By 1934, Native Americans had only 50 million acres of land left.47

During the Second World War, the US government took half a million acres of land for military use.48 Alongside this were constant attempts to force Native Americans to assimilate into ways of life that were considered appropriate by the US government. The 1887 Dawes Act, for instance, known as the General Allotment Act, broke up reservation and communal land into allotments on which Indigenous people were expected to farm. Surplus land was made available to non-natives for purchase. The introduction of private property and the subsequent fragmentation of Indigenous lands further undermined traditional society and culture, dispossessing them further. In the 1950s, Termination policies were introduced. This set of policies was designed to encourage the assimilation of Native Americans into American society and the “termination” of their tribes.

In his book Our History is the Future, Lakota writer and activist Nick Estes documents, how, through the 20th century, Native American lands were lost through seizure for their use for mining, drilling, water use and dams. The 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan, a massive engineering project ostentatiously in response to Missouri River floods in 1943, sought to construct a series of dams on the Missouri. These dams were supposed to irrigate the Plains, but as Estes concludes, “all of the risks, and none of the rewards, of cheap hydroelectricity and irrigation, were imposed on generations of Indigenous people”.49

Indigenous Resistance after the Second World War

The armed struggle by Native Americans against the US ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. However, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new generation of Native American activists began to mobilise. This was a response to the Termination Policy, described by Deloria as the “first shot of the great 20th century Indian war” and “the beginning of a systematic attack on every tribe in the nation”.50 Indeed, hundreds of tribes were “terminated” through the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, the process of campaigning against Termination led to its official disavowal by President Nixon in 1970 in favour of self-determination—and the campaign created the basis for another generation of Native American activists, closely linked to the Civil Rights movement.

Radical Native American activism gained renewed prominence in US politics thanks to two major struggles. The first of these was the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-71), which demanded its return to Native American ownership. The second was the 1973 armed occupation of the town of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota by the American Indian Movement.51 Both these struggles made headlines around the world and saw solidarity from the wider Civil Rights movement before the US government violently suppressed them.

Both struggles also reflected the development of a new set of radical ideas around Indigenous liberation that built on the movements of the 1960s. A key figure was Deloria, whose book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto proposed a strategy for Native American liberation. Written in 1969, the manifesto was clearly influenced by the wider Civil Rights movement, though Deloria chastised Native Americans for not developing their ideas in the same direction as the most radical of the black civil rights activists:

Indian Affairs today suffers from an intellectual stagnation that is astounding. Creative thought is sparse. Where the younger black students were the trigger to the Civil Rights movements with sit-ins in the South, young Indians have become unwitting missionaries spreading ancient anthropological doctrines which hardly relate to either anthropology or to Indians. The young blacks invented Black Power and pushed the whole society to consider the implications of discrimination which in turn created racial nationalism. Young Indians have barely been able to parody some black slogans and have created none of their own.52

Deloria went much further than most in the Civil Rights movement, arguing that liberation was not about legal equality but socio-economic transformation:

When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majority of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it. A socio-economic rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.53

One of the inspirations for Deloria was the way that Indigenous societies had survived despite the genocidal policy of the US. He discusses the case of the Tiguas, who won recognition as an Indian tribe after having seen a steep social and economic decline. This demonstrated, he argues, that Indigenous culture would not decline inevitably and vanish. Instead, it could “maintain traditions, socio-political structure, and basic identity within an expanding modern American city” and, ultimately, the “recolonisation” of “the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists”.54 He goes on:

Where ordinary white corporations serve to produce income from capital invested, corporations will not do so in the new Indian scheme. Rather they will serve to coordinate community life. Earnings will be used to provide services ordinarily received from various governmental agencies. As economic independence becomes greater, independence in other areas of life will follow. Indians can thereby achieve a prosperity not seen since the landing of the white man.55

If Deloria’s expectations seem naive in hindsight, it is only because racist oppression of Native Americans continues to ensure that reservations remain some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the US. Nonetheless, Deloria’s book and his ongoing activism demonstrate the influence of a set of ideas that is, as Estes points out, inherently revolutionary, “going beyond the facile settler politics of liberal versus conservative”:56

Deloria’s calls for peoplehood…were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governance and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system.

Deloria’s radical and influential politics would lay the basis for many subsequent investigations into Indigenous liberation and inspire many activists around the world. However, liberalisation has not yet been realised.

Ending Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism is an integral part of Western nation states such as the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Israel. Understanding and accepting this history and its contemporary reality is part of challenging the ongoing nature of settler-colonial powers. Indeed, not acknowledging this reality risks perpetuating it. This is true even for those who are oppressed by the existing system. As Dunbar-Ortiz explains: “In a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behaviour of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants”.57

In the US, the expansion of the western “frontier” constantly dispossessed Native Americans and freed up land for settlers engaged in re-shaping the Americas in the interest of the white ruling class. Yet, key questions remain: do the descendants of settlers retain an ongoing interest in this dispossession? Do they obtain material benefits from this process? Here we must consider each colonial case in terms of its history.

Englert argues that “all settler classes” continue to enjoy and rely on the ongoing process of dispossession. He writes:

In both Palestine and South Africa, intense and sometimes violent clashes emerged between settler classes over the nature of settler rule. These could be resolved, and indeed were, on the backs of Indigenous workers and communities, through the intensification of their dispossession, exploitation and/or expulsion. Both examples point to the specific character of social relations in a settler-colonial context and their importance in making sense of the development of colonial policies. They further point to what has been called “settler quietism”…the fact that all settler classes, despite their internal social tensions and conflicts, depend on the Indigenous population’s continued dispossession, as well as on the settler state to impose their dominance and distribute the colonial loot. Even when the situation escalates to internal military confrontation, peace can be re-established not through structural change but through the intensification of colonial violence, to the settler population’s collective benefit.58

If Englert’s argument is correct, then the project of human self-emancipation is rendered impossible in settler-colonial states as there is no possibility for unity of interest or purpose between settlers and Indigenous people. I disagree with this position. History demonstrates that in different settler-colonial states, people from settler backgrounds and Indigenous people can, and do, unite to develop common struggles. Indeed, capitalism brings together workers from different backgrounds. Because of the nature of exploitation in the workplace, these processes have the potential for united struggles.

This is not to say that there are no barriers to unity. The legacy of colonialism and dispossession, and ongoing racism and oppression towards Indigenous people, constantly undermines such unity. In fact, there have been numerous examples where unity between the workers’ movement, Indigenous people and oppressed groups has been undermined by racism.

White supremacy was influential in 19th-century US trade union and workers’ movements. John Swinton, chief editor of the New York Tribune in the 1860s, was a “prominent labor organiser” and “argued that labor must unite with capital to fight the scourge of the Chinese”. In 1905, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, said that “Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others”.59 Bill Fletcher Jr concludes:

[US trade unions] took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, conceived that the unions were to exist to serve the “legitimate” population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population… The official labor movement ignored—at best—the wars against Native Americans and the securing of land for settlers.60

There are more recent examples. In 1981 in Nova Scotia, Canada, non-Indigenous fishers attacked Mi’kmaq lobster fishers who were trying to defend their legal rights to fish. These rights had been granted by 18th-century treaties between the Mi’kmaq and the British Crown but were challenged by non-Indigenous fishers who saw them as hampering their livelihoods. The violent confrontations between Mi’kmaq and settler fishers were encouraged by large fishing corporations for whom the treaty rights were a barrier to their ability to make profit. The violence exploded again in 2020. Canadian socialist John Bell described the events at the time:

Sipekne’katik First Nation, at the centre of the violence, has granted seven licenses to boats using 50 traps each. According to treaty rights they can fish outside the established commercial fishing season. White fishers make the bogus argument that the Mi’kmaw fishers will deplete the lobster stock, ignoring the fact that Indigenous people have been sustainably harvesting from the sea since before European incursion.61

As one Mi’kmaw activist points out, Nova Scotia has granted 985 licenses and each of those commercial boats can use between 375 and 400 lobster pots. One boat belonging to a white settler hauls in more lobster than the entire Mi’kmaq fleet. The conservation argument is a smokescreen for a racist attack on Indigenous rights.62 The divisions between settler and Mi’kmaq fishers have been encouraged by big business and the Canadian state as part of their agenda to undermine First Nations’ rights.

Although there are many similar examples of divisions between Indigenous peoples and settler workers, these divisions are avoidable. According to Australian socialist Paddy Gibson, “in every Australian colony, pastoral capitalists controlled the new settler-states. They seized Aboriginal land and flooded it with sheep or cattle. State troopers, or supported settler-militia, annihilated any Aboriginal people who got in their way.” However, the development of an urban working class saw Aboriginal people join the workforce. This helped undermine the potential for racism to divide white workers against Aboriginal workers. Gibson points out that many of the earliest Aboriginal political leaders were trade union leaders, “including Fred Maynard, founder of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association in 1924, a lifetime member of the Waterside Workers Federation, and Bill Ferguson, founder of the Aborigines Progressive Association in 1936, an Australian Workers Union organiser in the shearing industry”. In 1931, the Australian Communist Party printed a manifesto for Aboriginal liberation, and there have been multiple examples of trade union action in defence of Aboriginal rights and land and against racism, “from the Cummeragunja strike against a brutal reserve manager in 1939 to the 1979-80 Noonkanbah dispute, when the entire union movement banned drilling for oil on sacred Aboriginal land”.63

What is more, the formation of settler-colonial states based on the destruction of Indigenous peoples is also the formation of modern capitalist states with their need to exploit workers. Simultaneously oppressing the Indigenous people and exploiting workers meant use of the same state forces against both groups. In 1877, 80,000 US railworkers took part in the Great Railroad Strike and up to 500,000 workers in other strikes.64 The strike spread across the US, provoking fears among the ruling class of revolution. US military forces, which had been deployed on the Plains against Native Americans, were mobilised to deal with the striking workers. General Philip Sheridan, a Union general during the Civil War who infamously said that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”, was in Chicago during the strikes and ordered US troops to shoot down strikers.

Historian Robert Ovetz notes that the US president’s “powers to intervene” with military force against threats against the state is closely linked to the war against Native Americans:

It is no accident that one of the powers to intervene is found in the revised Statutes of the US Section 2118 that authorises the president to intervene against Native Americans. It is a short path from deploying the military to suppress Native American resistance to colonialism and genocide to an insurrection of railroad workers. The use of the military in both the 1877 and 1894 strikes deeply linked the workers’ struggle against the railroad companies to the struggles of both blacks during Reconstruction and Native Americans. Revised Statutes of the US Sections 5297–5299 made the linkage clear by extending the President’s authority to use the military to suppress “as he may deem necessary for the suppression of such insurrection, domestic violence, or combination”.65

The fact that both workers and Indigenous people are oppressed due to the same capitalist system means that there is potential for them to unite. Gibson rightly argues that, while the Australian state was founded on vicious repression of the Aboriginal people and racism against them continues to be central to the politics of the Australian state, “there is a material basis to successfully challenge these ideas because the working class are not settlers who benefit from Aboriginal dispossession”.66

Whether this is a practical possibility everywhere depends on the particular historical context. For instance, the situation in the US, Canada and Australia, where the Indigenous population was nearly eradicated, is different to South Africa, where the Indigenous population was exploited. For Marxists, each case needs to be examined in the light of historical processes and specific realities of exploitation, rather than trying to create a generalised example.

Some theorists of settler colonialism argue that all descendants of settlers living in a settler state benefit from ongoing oppression. For instance, Dunbar-Ortiz quotes the historian Alexander Saxton. According to her, he “observed that Euroamerican workers in the US were organised in the nineteenth century through their competition and confrontations with three racialised groups: Native Americans, African Americans and Chinese Americans”. These white workers, Saxton continues, “suffered economically” from the competition from non-white and Indigenous workers but also “benefited by that very exploitation, which was compelling the non-whites to work for low wages or nothing”.67

Yet, she ignores that one group of workers does not benefit from other workers being paid lower wages. Indeed, the racism that leads to difference in wages tends to undermine both white and black workers’ wages and conditions. As the US sociologist Al Syzmanski concludes from a study of black and white workers in 50 US states, “white workers appear to actually lose economically from racial discrimination”. The same conclusion was reached by the US economist Michael Reich in his study of incomes in US cities. Reich found that “the greater the racial income gap, the deeper are the divisions between black and white workers and the weaker are unions and class solidarity.” Reich added that racism undermines public services for the same reason as it lowered wages overall: it undermines the collective ability of the multicultural workforce to struggle.68

Do white settlers benefit from the continued dispossession of land from Indigenous peoples today? Sai Englert emphasises that “settler workers participate in securing their continued exploitation, in exchange for land and comparatively better working conditions”. Although he acknowledges that “nothing is automatic in this process and…there are examples of settlers joining forces with Indigenous workers and fighting for decolonisation”, he assumes that “the agency to end colonial rule lies…firmly in the hands of Indigenous people and their liberation movements”.69

Dunbar-Ortiz asserts that, in the US, “‘Free land’ presented possibilities for white workers to own property”.70 However, a worker becoming a small-holder or farmer through land ownership or rental transforms their relationship to the means of production and hence is no longer part of the working class. As Fletcher explains, where the left fought a conscious battle inside the trade union movement to bring together workers, it was possible to challenge racist oppression, even if that did not go all the way to developing a radical challenge to the system itself:

Left-led unions, overall, had a much better track record in taking on racist oppression in the working class, as a result of both a more sophisticated analysis but also the active inclusion of activists of color in the membership and leadership. In general, left-led unions recognised the importance of building alliances with other social movements—including within communities of color—and taking on racist oppression in the workplace. But even in most left-led unions, there remained a tendency to see the official union movement as the focal point or gravitational center, rather than an instrument in constructing a movement that, even implicitly, was challenging the assumptions of the settler state.71

One of the great struggles of US working-class history, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes, demonstrates this. These strikes, led by Trotskyist revolutionaries, saw a historic series of battles that defeated a conservative, anti-trade union, grouping of employers and politicians. This strike took place only 58 years after Little Big Horn, and leading strikers included Native Americans such as Ray Rainbolt, a Sioux Nation trucker. Members of the Chippewa Nation also participated, one of whom wrote to a newspaper, to counter redbaiting, they were a “Chippewa Indian and a real American…not a communist”.72

Today, attempts to dispossess Indigenous people from their land is most often associated with the interests of big business. In the last decade, there have been a series of struggles fought over access by corporations to Indigenous lands. The 2016-7 battle at Standing Rock against the building of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) is a well-known recent example. Other examples are the struggle to stop the destruction of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site in Australia by the mining company Rio Tinto and the destruction of Indigenous communities’ land in the Amazon by oil companies.

The campaigns have been led by Indigenous communities themselves but have also seen solidarity from trade unionists, environmental campaigners and other activists. None of this is automatic. Estes points out in his account of the struggles against the DAPL, it was “unionised workers” who drove the earthmoving equipment that broke protests and destroyed ancestral lands.73 However, the scale of the solidarity movement with the Indigenous people putting their bodies on the line against DAPL once again demonstrates the potential for solidarity between Indigenous and settler peoples. The most impressive example of this was the 2020 #ShutDownCanada movement.

In early 2020, the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted Coastal GasLink access to Wet’suwet’en land to build a gas pipeline. They were continuing repeated attempts to build such pipelines from the oil-rich area of Alberta to Canadian and international markets. Protests led by First Nations people began immediately:

On 6 February, RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] began arresting land defenders. Within hours, the British Columbia legislature was occupied and ports, railways and highways were blocked across the country. This shut down Canadian National Railways’ eastern network, bringing freight traffic from Halifax to Toronto to a halt. A solidarity blockade on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory stopped travel between Montreal and Toronto, one of the busiest rail corridors in the country. Similar actions took place on Listuguj First Nation territory in Quebec, Kahnawake Mohawk territory south of Montreal, and near New Hazelton, British Columbia.

On 8 February, protesters blockaded the access road to the Deltaport container terminal, staying overnight. This port, located in Greater Vancouver, sees $1 billion worth of goods transported through it yearly. The 300 members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 502 who arrived for the morning shift treated the blockade as a picket line and refused to cross, shutting down the port. On 10 February, police enforcing an injunction arrested 14 protesters. Another 43 were arrested in order to reopen the Port of Vancouver. Mass solidarity actions were organised in cities across the country; 15,000 joined a march in Toronto, and there were bridge, port and road shutdowns in Vancouver.74

The blockades had an enormous economic impact. Perhaps more notable were the trade unions’ statements of solidarity, which explicitly linked workers’ rights and the rights of First Nations peoples. The president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) said, “we would never accept this kind of RCMP behaviour towards striking workers on a picket line”. Ontario CUPE emphasised that “respecting Indigenous sovereignty and the fight for environmental justice is fundamental for all Canadians”. Meanwhile, the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation, with 45,000 members, added:

We stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en peoples and demand that the governments of British Columbia and Canada uphold their responsibilities as laid out in the Supreme Court’s Delgamuukw-Gisday’wa decision of 1997. We stand as witnesses at this historic moment when our governments must make a choice to uphold this court decision or continue the ongoing legacy of colonisation.75

Canadian Marxists Brian Champ and Michelle Robidoux write:

The idea that non-Indigenous working-class people could be won to political recognition of the equal national rights of Indigenous peoples, let alone to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, may sometimes seem implausible because of the grip of racist and colonial attitudes. However, Indigenous lands were not stolen because of racism; rather racism was required for the theft of Indigenous lands.76

Although we must emphasise the potential for workers’ solidarity to overcome racism against Indigenous people, we must also be aware of the very real barriers. The mass movement in solidarity with Palestine following Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has led to thousands of people engaging with settler colonialism as a concept. However, we have to highlight crucial differences between settler colonialism in Palestine and South Africa on the one hand and in countries such as Australia, Canada and the US on the other.

Since the foundation of the Israeli state, Israeli workers have been part of the structures of repression. In 1920, the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour, was established. It consciously worked to exclude non-Jewish labour from workplaces, break down solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers, and exclude socialists and leftists who argued for unity. The Histadrut became a “central pillar of the Zionist enterprise”.77 Today, Israeli workers maintain a material interest in the existence of the Zionist state and the ongoing dispossession of the Palestine people. The Palestinian slogan “Exist, Resist, Return!” captures the understanding that liberation is more than just continued survival; it demands a right to return to stolen lands and homes. This is seen as an existential threat to the settler population. This situation is continually bolstered by the economic and military support Israel receives from US imperialism in order to continue its role as the West’s “watchdog” in the region.78

Settler-colonial states do not fit a single theoretical framework. Understanding their different dynamics requires understanding the different processes of historical development, and the history of the workers’ movements in those countries. This is most obvious in the differing trajectories of settler-colonial states such as those in North America, Palestine and South Africa. For instance, Burawoy notes how, with the defeat of Apartheid in South Africa, the civil war “led to tentative moves toward peace talks between the [African National Congress] and the Afrikaner government, and eventually to a negotiated transition.” Yet why, he asks, is this not possible in Israel?

In South Africa, the centrality of the majority black working class to South African capital’s process of accumulation meant that black workers had enormous power. On the other hand, South African white workers’ “relative privilege rested on racist exclusion of black people”.79 It is not always the case that settler workers are going to play a progressive role in helping end the oppression and exploitation of Indigenous people. Indeed, in South Africa, white workers played almost no part in ending the Apartheid state—that movement was led by black workers. The size and economic role of the black working class gave them enough power to overthrow Apartheid.

In an article that compares Palestine to South Africa, Burawoy argues that the two countries represent two different types of settler colonialism: one based on land expropriation and one based on labour exploitation. He further argues that it is possible for countries to move between the two. In South Africa, “there was a move from the primacy of land expropriation to the primacy of labour exploitation”, whereas in Palestine, “the movement was the reverse”.80 This is misleading. Although Israeli capital has exploited Palestinian labour, it has never been dependent on Palestinian labour. In the face of Palestinian resistance, Israel was able to quickly dispense with Palestinian workers and, today, Palestinians workers are marginal to the Israeli economy. The central feature of the Israeli state has always been the dispossession of the Indigenous population from the land. Closely linked to this project is the role Israel plays for Western Imperialism, first for Britain, then for the US.81

The tragedy of Palestine is that the combination of the stake that Jewish workers have in the Israeli state and the “declining dependence” on Palestinian workers’ of the Israeli economy makes it difficult for them to be agents that can overthrow Israeli apartheid.82 Instead, the potential for Palestinian liberation lies with the working class of the wider Middle East, particularly workers in Egypt.

Bringing equality and solving the historic injustices caused by settler-colonial societies will require challenging the very nature of settler-colonial regimes themselves. The fact that ongoing dispossession is a central part of settler states’ nature cannot be resolved through piecemeal reform. As Mahmood Mamdani writes about the reality of racism in the US: “If the race question marks the cutting edge of American reform, the native question highlights the limits of that reform. The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialise but not to decolonise. A deracialised America still remains a settler society and a settler state”.83 Confronting settler colonialism with a view to liberation of all the oppressed, including Indigenous people, requires a challenge to the system itself. Mamdani continues:

Engaging with the native question would require questioning the ethics and the politics of the very constitution of the United States of America. It would require rethinking and reconsidering the very political project called the USA. Indeed, it would call into question the self proclaimed anticolonial identity of the US.84

The US, as Dunbar-Ortiz explains, “will not decolonise until it is forced to do so”, warning that the project will not be possible “unless colonisation and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding, and all US institutions”.85 Hence, the project to liberate all the oppressed people, including Indigenous people, in the US and other settler-colonial projects will require a conscious decolonisation inherent to those movements. What will this movement look like and, crucially, who will be the agent?

In 1917, during the early months of the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote a series of letters to his comrades from exile. In the first of these letters, written in March 1917, he addressed some of the features of the 1917 Revolution, drawing on the experience of the 1905 Revolution. He noted how the former

deeply ploughed the soil, uprooted age-old prejudices, awakened millions of workers and tens of millions of peasants to political life and political struggle and revealed to each other—and to the world—all classes (and all the principal parties) of Russian society in their true character and in the true alignment of their interests, their forces, their modes of action, and their immediate and ultimate aims. This first revolution, and the succeeding period of counter-revolution (1907–14), laid bare the very essence of the tsarist monarchy, brought it to the “utmost limit”, exposed all the rottenness and infamy, the cynicism and corruption of the tsar’s clique, dominated by that monster, Rasputin. It exposed all the bestiality of the Romanov family—those pogrom-mongers who drenched Russia in the blood of Jews, workers and revolutionaries, those landlords, “first among peers”, who own millions of desiatinas of land [1 desiatina = 2.7 acres] and are prepared to stoop to any brutality, to any crime, to ruin and strangle any number of citizens in order to preserve the “sacred right of property” for themselves and their class.

Without the Revolution of 1905–07 and the counter-revolution of 1907–14, there could not have been that clear “self determination” of all classes of the Russian people and of the nations inhabiting Russia, that determination of the relation of these classes to each other and to the tsarist monarchy, which manifested itself during the eight days of the February-March Revolution of 1917. This eight-day revolution was “performed”, if we may use a metaphorical expression, as though after a dozen major and minor rehearsals; the “actors” knew each other, their parts, their places and their setting in every detail, through and through, down to every more or less important shade of political trend and mode of action.86

Lenin understood the crucial role of workers whose position in capitalist society gave them the power to both destroy the capitalist state and replace it with a new form of society based on mass participation of the working class. He also emphasised that the revolution would draw all the oppressed classes of society into this struggle. This would break down the old divisions of capitalist and feudal society, exposing the reality of the system and encouraging further rebellion. The “deep plough” of revolution was needed because of the centrality of oppression and racism to Tsarist society.

At the same time, the demands for self-determination within Russia came from the oppressed nations themselves. The role of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was to make these demands central to the revolutionary project of the whole working class. There are obvious parallels with the demands by Indigenous peoples within settler-colonial states. Settler colonialism helps to illuminate the processes of dispossession of land in the development of capitalism and its continued existence. Yet, we have to examine each example in context to develop the best strategies for liberation. The ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples have ensured that the question of Indigenous freedom and liberation is seen as an integral part of the struggle against capitalism. The revolutionary left has to ensure that it remains at the front and centre of the struggles of the 21st century.

Martin Empson is the author of Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Crisis (Bookmarks, 2022) and The Time of the Harvest has Come: Revolution, Reformation and the German Peasants War (Bookmarks, 2025).

Notes