Settler colonialism does not rely on a single argument. Its justifications often change when an earlier claim becomes difficult to sustain. Indigenous peoples may first be portrayed as nonexistent; then as absent from a particular territory; then as land users without legitimate systems of law, governance, or ownership. Later arguments may deny the continuing force of Indigenous rights, portray remedies as unfair, or reduce Indigenous peoples to individuals without collective political identities.
The following framework identifies recurring rhetorical strategies in settler-colonial denial. It is not intended as a universal sequence or a claim that all colonial states have used every strategy in the same way. Rather, it is a working synthesis for recognizing how colonial power can operate through historical narratives, law, public policy, administration, education, and everyday discourse.
The framework draws particularly on Patrick Wolfe’s analysis of settler colonialism as an ongoing "logic of elimination." Wolfe argued that settler colonialism seeks to replace Indigenous societies with a settler society. This process can involve killing, dispossession, assimilation, child removal, administrative reclassification, and the destruction or containment of Indigenous political institutions -- not only physical extermination
"They did not exist"
Denial of existence, nationhood, or political society
The foundational claim is that Indigenous peoples were absent, extinct, primitive, fictional, or lacking organized societies. This may involve denying their names, nations, languages, laws, political institutions, historical continuity, or capacity for self-government.This strategy is related to -- but should not be equated with -- the concept of terra nullius. The term literally refers to land treated as belonging to no one. It does not simply mean that no human beings were present. Colonial legal systems could treat Indigenous occupation and governance as legally irrelevant even when Indigenous communities were visibly present and politically organized.
The important point is that denial of Indigenous existence often means more than denying that individuals were physically present. It denies that Indigenous peoples existed as peoples with collective rights and political authority.
"If they existed, they were not really here"
Denial of presence and territorial occupation
This argument acknowledges Indigenous peoples in the abstract while denying that they lived, governed, travelled, harvested, traded, or maintained relationships in a particular place.Examples include claims that Indigenous peoples were merely passing through, that seasonal use does not count as occupation, or that oral histories are not evidence. Such claims impose European assumptions about permanent buildings, fenced fields, private property, or centralized government as the only valid evidence of territorial presence.
This approach also treats Indigenous mobility as evidence of absence. In reality, seasonal movement, harvesting routes, hunting territories, waterways, trade networks, and ceremonial landscapes can reflect enduring systems of occupation and governance."If they were here, they did not use the land"
Denial of Indigenous land law, governance, and stewardship
This rationale treats land as "unused" unless it is intensively farmed, privately owned, industrially developed, or permanently settled according to European norms.
The issue is not simply that Indigenous peoples had a different "connection" to the land. Indigenous nations developed systems of law, governance, harvesting, stewardship, kinship, and territorial responsibility. Describing these relationships only as spiritual or cultural can unintentionally weaken their political and legal character.
Indigenous land relationships may involve responsibilities, jurisdiction, reciprocal obligations, access protocols, resource laws, and intergenerational duties. They are therefore not adequately described as the absence of ownership or as merely symbolic attachment to place."If they used it, they did not own or govern it"
Denial of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territorial title
Colonial narratives may concede that Indigenous peoples lived on and used the land while denying that they held sovereignty, jurisdiction,territorial title, or legally recognizable political authority.
This is a particularly important distinction. A people can be acknowledged as present while being denied the authority to make law, regulate territory, enter treaties, control resources, or determine their own political future.
The Doctrine of Discovery helped European powers transform religious and civilizational assumptions into claims of sovereignty and land acquisition. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called upon governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, including the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.
The Supreme Court of Canada has also confirmed that terra nullius did not apply in Canada and has recognized that Aboriginal title can arise from Indigenous occupation before the assertion of Crown sovereignty. That recognition is significant, although Canadian law continues to place Aboriginal title within a constitutional framework that recognizes underlying Crown title. This illustrates how colonial legal structures can simultaneously recognize Indigenous rights and constrain the terms on which those rights are expressed."If they governed or owned it, they did not deserve it
Civilizational hierarchy and racialized entitlement
This argument ranks peoples according to a colonial hierarchy: "civilized" versus "primitive," settled versus nomadic, productive versus wasteful, Christian versus heathen, or modern versus traditional.
It reframes dispossession as improvement, benevolence, development, or progress. Indigenous peoples are represented as incapable of properly using land, governing themselves, or exercising rights.
The language of deservingness is itself revealing. It accepts the colonial premise that an outside power could determine which peoples were sufficiently civilized to possess land, sovereignty, or legal rights."If they had rights, conquest or the Crown took them away"
Legal normalization of conquest, extinguishment, and Crown supremacy
This approach accepts that Indigenous peoples once possessed rights but claims that those rights were extinguished through discovery, conquest, war, treaties, legislation, surrender, or the assertion of Crown sovereignty.
The phrase "right of conquest" should be used cautiously. Colonial powers historically asserted conquest as a justification for authority, but the mere assertion of conquest does not establish a morally or legally legitimate transfer of rights. Nor do colonial declarations automatically erase Indigenous laws, title, treaties, or political relationships.
In Canada, Aboriginal rights are constitutionally recognized under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. Canadian courts have also recognized Aboriginal title as a collective right that includes meaningful control and use of land. At the same time, the legal framework permits the Crown to infringe Aboriginal title in circumstances that meet the constitutional justification test.
This dual character matters: recognition within colonial law is not identical to decolonization. Legal recognition can provide important protection while still leaving the Crown with powers inherited from the colonial constitutional order."If they lost it, the loss is final"
Denial of continuity, remedy, and intergenerational rights
This argument claims that historical dispossession is too old to matter, that treaties are obsolete, or that present-day generations have no relationship to past wrongs.
It treats colonialism as a completed event rather than an ongoing structure whose effects continue through land loss, jurisdictional restrictions, child-welfare systems, language suppression, environmental degradation, economic exclusion, and institutional discrimination.
Indigenous rights are not merely historical benefits granted by the state. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes both individual and collective rights, including rights to self-determination, lands, territories, resources, culture, and redress. It also recognizes rights connected to lands traditionally owned, occupied, used, or otherwise acquired.
In Canada, the federal United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act requires the federal government to take measures to ensure that Canadian laws are consistent with the Declaration."If it matters, equality means treating everyone identically"
Colour-blind or formal-equality denial
This argument acknowledges that discrimination occurred but rejects Indigenous-specific remedies as "special treatment," "reverse racism," or unfair advantage.
It confuses formal equality -- treating everyone identically -- with substantive equality, which may require addressing distinct histories, legal relationships, barriers, and harms.
Indigenous rights are not simply racial privileges. They are connected to Indigenous peoples’ status as peoples, their prior occupation and governance of territories, treaties, constitutional recognition, and the continuing effects of colonization.
Treating everyone identically can reproduce inequality when people do not begin from the same legal, historical, or material position."We have apologized, so we must move on"
Symbolic recognition without structural repair
Governments and institutions may acknowledge past harms while presenting them as completed, resolved, or unrelated to current policy.
An apology, land acknowledgement, memorial, or public statement can be meaningful, but symbolic recognition does not by itself repair dispossession or transfer decision-making power. It can become a form of closure when it is not accompanied by institutional change.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action treat reconciliation as an ongoing process involving law, education, child welfare, language, justice, health, commemoration, and institutional reform -- not simply an apology or commemorative statement.
A useful question is therefore not only, "Has the institution acknowledged the harm?" but also, "What power, land, resources, jurisdiction, or institutional practice has changed?""Indigenous rights are only individual human rights"
Individualization and depoliticization of Indigenous rights
This reasoning accepts Indigenous people as individuals but denies their rights as nations, peoples, communities, or political collectives.
Human rights and Indigenous rights are not opposites. Indigenous peoples hold human rights both individually and collectively. Collective rights are necessary to protect self-determination, culture, language, governance, lands, territories, resources, and political continuity.
The United Nations Declaration expressly recognizes that Indigenous individuals are entitled to human rights and that Indigenous peoples possess collective rights indispensable to their existence, well-being, and development as peoples.
Reducing Indigenous rights to generic individual rights can therefore erase the political identity that colonialism attempted to suppress."We are Indigenous too"
Unauthorized identity substitution or appropriation
This strategy requires particular care. Colonial governments, churches, schools, child-welfare systems, and other institutions have disrupted Indigenous identities through racial classification, name changes, family separation, enfranchisement, relocation, adoption, and the suppression of language and community ties. Indigenous people may therefore have complicated histories of disconnection and may legitimately seek to reclaim identity, family relationships, community belonging, and cultural responsibilities.
That reality is different from an unrelated person asserting Indigenous identity based only on distant ancestry, a family story, personal feelings, a claimed "spiritual connection," or identification with Indigenous political causes.
Indigenous identity is nation-specific and relational. Depending on the people or nation involved, belonging may involve family and historical ties, community recognition, citizenship or membership criteria, language, responsibilities, and accountability to the community.
Supporting Indigenous rights does not require claiming Indigenous identity. Non-Indigenous people can act as allies, settlers, treaty partners, professionals, or community supporters without substituting themselves for Indigenous peoples.
The concern is not that Indigenous identity must satisfy one universal test. The concern is that individuals should not use self-identification to bypass the authority of Indigenous peoples to define their own political and community relationships.
Colonial denial as a shifting structure
These strategies should not be understood as a universal ladder. They may overlap, appear in different orders, or be directed at different Indigenous peoples in different historical contexts.
For example, an institution might acknowledge that Indigenous peoples existed while denying that they occupied a particular territory. It might recognize historical land use while denying title or jurisdiction. It might recognize past injustice while insisting that no present-day remedy is possible. It might support cultural celebration while opposing Indigenous political authority.
What changes is often not the underlying objective but the language used to defend it. When explicit claims of Indigenous inferiority become unacceptable, denial may reappear in apparently neutral terms such as evidence, efficiency, equality, finality, administrative consistency, or individual choice.
Recognizing these rhetorical shifts does not mean treating every disagreement as colonial denial. Good-faith legal, historical, or policy disagreements do exist. The framework is most useful when it asks what a claim does: Does it erase Indigenous presence? Deny Indigenous law? Transfer authority to the state? Treat dispossession as irreversible? Oppose remedies without addressing the underlying harm? Or replace collective political identity with individual preference?
These questions help distinguish ordinary disagreement from arguments that reproduce the structure of settler colonialism.
Sources
Canada. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, S.C. 2021, c. 14, especially sections 4–5.
Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11.
Makdisi, S.(2017). Elimination as a Structure: Tracing and Racing Zionism with Patrick Wolfe. American Quarterly 69(2), 277-284.
O'Brien, Jean M. (2017). Tracing Settler Colonialism's Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History. American Quarterly, 69(2). pp. 249-255
O’Donnell, E.(2023). Water sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Pathways to pluralist, legitimate and sustainable water laws in settler colonial states. PLOS Water 2(11): e0000144.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). Calls to Action. See Calls to Action 45 and 46 concerning the repudiation of concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44. Supreme Court of Canada. The Court recognized Aboriginal title and held that terra nullius did not apply in Canada.
United Nations (2007). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, GA Res. 61/295, especially articles 1–3, 25–28, and 32. The Declaration affirms both individual and collective Indigenous rights.
Wolfe, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4). pp. 387-409
