Indigenous Persistence under American and French Settler Colonialism

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American and French settler colonial metropoles installed new governments, laws, and people in the hereditary lands of Native Americans and autochthonous Algerians, but they never successfully replaced all Indigenous peoples with settlers. Native American treaty council notes, French and American diplomatic and military correspondence, and an Algerian leader’s memoir highlight the ways in which both Constantine, Algeria and the American Northwest Territory became important sites of Indigenous resistance and persistence. A comparative analysis of the origins of the United States and French Algeria from an Indigenous perspective illuminates the essential features of settler colonial states and the roles of Indigenous peoples in shaping their development. In so doing, I argue that settler colonial studies cannot be divorced from Indigenous studies, a point of contention among contemporary scholars.

In this presentation, I will compare and contrast the opportunities, limitations, choices, and effects of Indigenous leaders and their actions during the first decade of settler colonization in the American Midwest (1776-1785) and French Algeria (1827-1836). Computational sentiment and discourse analysis, validated through close reading, highlight both Indigenous and colonial leaders’ views, shifting attitudes, and plans of action. Through case studies of specific Native American and Algerian leaders, I show how Indigenous people fled, fought, aided, and ignored settler colonizers, and in so doing, defined the colonies’ evolution.

Juxtaposing these two case studies of grass-roots settler colonialism decenters the nation and relocates metropolitan officials to the margins in order to focus on the Indigenous and colonial actors who drove and negotiated the settler colonial projects on the ground. Using comparative Indigenous studies as a lens through which to view settler colonialism furthers our understanding of the fundamental processes at work and the shared nature of settler colonialism irrespective of metropolitan base.