Patrick Wolfe

Patrick Wolfe (1949 – 18 February 2016) was an Australian historian and scholar who is often credited with establishing the field of settler colonial studies.

Quotes

• Acts—usually violent and secret—that have been carried out by people who were not officially commissioned to carry them out ... have generally occurred behind the screen of the frontier, in the wake of which, once the dust has settled, the irregular acts that took place have been regularized and the boundaries of White settlement extended. Characteristically, officials express regret at the lawlessness of this process while resigning themselves to its inevitability.
  • "The limits of Native Title (The 1992 Act and its impact on Aboriginal-White relations)" (2000) Meanjin, 59(3-4), p. 144.

Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (2006)

Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), pp. 387-409

• Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.
  • p. 388

• Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil.
  • p. 391

• Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion.
  • p. 392

• The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse.
  • p. 393

• Settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies.
  • p. 393

• When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.
  • p. 402

Recuperating binarism: A heretical introduction (2013)

Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3-4), pp. 257-279.

• With no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy. To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream.
  • p. 258

• Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives’ consent to their own dispossession.
  • p. 259