Talk of ‘settlers’ no longer makes sense in the American context. The pre-settler America no longer exists, the native nations that constituted it, sadly, no longer exist, the settlers of the 17th century also no longer exist. 400 years of capitalism has created a new nation.

Talk of ‘settlers’ in America is the same as me talking about Norman conquerers. 400 years of capitalism destroyed the native nations, what exists now would be unrecognisable to their ancestors. Similarity the ‘settlers’ are no longer settlers, they are their own American nation.

The settlers were the English, french, Spanish, etc. Those communities haven’t existed in America for centuries. Their descendants are now their own singular nation, a nation now made up of former African slaves, millions of migrants, and what’s left of the native population.

Everyone should read Marxism and the National Question. Today’s natives are about as similar to their ancestors as today’s black Americans are to their African ancestors. Capitalism has completely changed these groups and destroyed their old mode of existence.

Today’s average native or black worker speaks the same language, shares the same territory (aside from the minuscule reservation, but even then), lives in the same way, works for wages, etc as those who were once ‘settlers’. It’s now proletarian/bourgeois, not settler/native.

The US leftists who talk of ‘land back’ or ‘settlers’ are idealists fetishising a pre-colonial America that no longer exists and isn’t desirable in modern conditions. There’s no one to give the land back too—Imperialism left old nations dead and buried. Must go forward, not back.

The ‘settler’ project in America was completed about two hundred years ago. What you are dealing with is not an American made up of separate nations but of just one nation (with various ethnic groups) that is divided between workers and capitalist. That’s the real fight.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to the Black Panthers https://twitter.com/arborerich/status/1355651196501913601