Zoltán Grossman on facebook, February 11, 2025
Some Native nation leaders and educators are making the case that because Indigenous rights are not “race-based,” they should be exempt from the backlash against Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They’re absolutely correct that Native rights are based on political sovereignty and cultural endurance, rather than on race.
But the problem is that right-wing media are renewing a distinct line of attack against the “dangers” of settler-colonial studies, and are now focusing their ire on Indigenous rights as a threat to settler states’ entitlement to land, and on Native Studies as a threat to the national narrative. Their message is shifting away from race and toward place, and who controls it.
Part of the reason for this shift is that Indigenous critical frameworks are now being applied to Israel as a settler-colonial state, because they fit so well. But another reason is that they fundamentally question the origins of the United States and Canada, a questioning which the right-wing pundits deem an even deeper threat than the questioning of historic racial policies within those countries.
Their reaction reveals some of the reasons behind Trump’s recolonizing drive in North America that explicitly celebrates “Manifest Destiny,” including changing Denali back to Mount McKinley, and threatening Greenland just as it’s poised to become the first fully independent Indigenous state in the hemisphere.
Jeremy Carl’s 2022 article “A Nation of Settlers,” in the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, tries to counter liberal “nation-of-immigrants” claims by redefining European Christian whites as “settlers,” distinct from later immigrants “of different colors, creeds, and cultures.” Carl asserts that “we did not begin as a nation of immigrants. We began as a nation of settlers….Until 1890, we were still defined as much by exploration, by settling out on the frontier, as we were by immigrations. We weren’t a nation of immigrants. We were a nation with immigrants. And that, I think, is a very crucial distinction.”
Many of you have already seen Adam Kirsch’s ridiculous 2024 article in The Atlantic, titled “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism,” which correctly tied together the analysis of the U.S. and Canada as settler-colonial states to the analysis of Israel as a settler-colonial state, while denying the existence of settler colonialism anywhere. Kirsch never identifies what we should call a colonial project that imports its own people, as opposed to only extracting wealth and labor as in classic forms of colonialism.
Kirsch goes through contortions to avoid mentioning South Africa, whose well-known case contradicts the myth that Israelis will be thrown into the sea, because whites were never ejected from South Africa when the apartheid state collapsed. Trump’s cut-off of all aid to South Africa, for allegedly “confiscating” white lands, is a more recent attempt to thread that needle.
A 2025 article by Samuel Lair in The American Mind, titled “How ‘Postcolonial’ Education Endangers Our Way of Life,” is even more directly applied to the U.S., as Tom Klingenstein notes: “For years, the destructive Left has employed the narrative that ‘America is systemically racist’…Samuel Lair suggests that the narrative that ‘America is built on stolen land,’ while less often discussed, may be no less essential to the efforts to teach our youth to hate — and, ultimately, repudiate — their own nation.” Lair is director of the Center for American Education at the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
Lair asserts, “One of the most underhanded ways to sneak postcolonialism into K-12 social studies is through lessons on ‘tribal sovereignty’ in civics. Ostensibly, these lessons merely inform students about the legal structures of native tribes and their relation to the U.S. government. But although such discussions may seem innocuous, tribal sovereignty is actually emphasized to illustrate that the fight against settler colonialism is an ongoing struggle.” (By the way, Lair is wrong that Native Studies scholars promote the term “postcolonial studies,” because there’s nothing “post” about settler colonialism.)
Lair concludes, “It is this message—that America was stolen, and by extension its existence is inherently illegitimate—that makes postcolonial ideology so dangerous. Postcolonialism is not about creating a colorblind society, achieving equal rights, or advancing social justice. It is an ideology of sedition, which is why it fetishizes indigenous ‘resistance and resilience.’ Under these terms, the calls heard in far-flung corners of the world to ‘kill the Boer’ [Afrikaner farmer] and liberate Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’ are just as much a threat to America as they are to Israel or South Africa.”
“Such a divisive and militant ideology has no place in our children’s classrooms. In confronting this problem, lawmakers must recognize that the proliferation of critical theory in social studies curricula puts to rest once and for all the myth of value-neutral education.”
“The teaching of our national story is inherently political; the question is whether we want our children to cherish or revile their national heritage. If we are to preserve the American way of life, we must purge postcolonial ideology from our education system and emphatically reaffirm the nobility and justice of our political and cultural inheritance.”
This is what makes the white backlash against Native Studies so dangerous in the present moment, as it learns and adjusts its message. Right-wing analysts (and liberals who echo them) are finally beginning to understand that Native rights are not actually based on race, but they now understand that settler-colonial studies threaten the deep underpinnings of settler colonies that were constructed even before institutions of racial hierarchies.
The real battle, they’re starting to admit, was never about race but more accurately about settler-state control over land and natural resources, and they’re more than willing to fight on those grounds. Americans and Canadians who are in solidarity with Indigenous nations should not just condemn this backlash as racist, but as colonialist genocide denial.
Just because Native-centered education isn’t about CRT or DEI doesn’t protect it by any means.
A Nation of Settlers (Jeremy Carl, The American Mind, 9/1/22).
The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel (Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic, 9/20/24)
How “Postcolonial” Education Endangers Our Way of Life (Samuel Lair, TomKlingenstein.com, 2/4/25)