Settler colonialism (or settler-colonialism with a dash) is an English-language term that refers to a specific kind of colonialism without necessarily making any comment on the other kinds of colonialism that exist or what they might look like. By itself, colonialism is a very vague concept, like many other terms that are used frequently in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles in the part of Turtle Island occupied and claimed by the Canadian state – and ai will address this vagueness in short order. Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is a concept imbued with much more substance and consistency (which ai will also elaborate upon!), and it is therefore an important part of the anarchist lexicon.

Unfortunately, for anarchists who speak French (on the regular or just once in a while), there isn’t any obvious way to translate it into their language, and that’s because the common French word for “settler” is «colonne». So the straightforward translation is «colonialisme-colon», which both sounds stupid and doesn’t convey anything different about this colonialism versus other colonialisms.

The thing that makes settler colonialism different, of course, is settlement. There is no precise French equivalent for this word, but there is «peuplement», which literally refers to “peopling” an area. Settler colonialism is the culture, the ideology, and the political structure that is produced by, and then serves to reproduce, any society that emerged from the population infusion of settlers – people who are not indigenous to the land, and who are also indoctrinated in the culture, or at least the routines, of a state and a civilization – into territory that, up until that point, was either outside of the state’s control completely or in which the state was only present in a military sense, not a civilian one. The first wave of settlement often served as the society’s great act of foundational violence, as it did in Canada, the United States, and plenty of other places.

Neither the English word “peopling” nor its French correlate are appropriate to describe this particular sort of population infusion from one place to another place. First, this word can just as easily refer to a process of human population growth that did not have a colonial character to it (for example, “the peopling of Thailand“, or even the peopling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the years since 1945) as it can to an influx of European or other settlers into an area. This is definitely a bit confusing, and there is also a fatal flaw: the words “peopling” and «peuplement» imply that there were no people in the area before this “peopling” or «peuplement» began. In a very small number of cases, like some islands in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans (such as Tristan de Cunha, Mauritius, and the Falklands), the islands were uninhabited when they were first sighted by Europeans, but in most other cases, this was not true – yet the historiography and mythology of Western civilization is rife with lies to the contrary, most infamously with reference to the continent of Australia. It seems to me that the use of “peopling” or its French correlate would be a perpetuation, if a very small one, of the pernicious narrative of terra nullius, and that doing so should therefore be avoided. Besides, how the hell would you make «peuplement» into an adjective that could sit alongside «colonialisme» and not have the resulting term look completely ridiculous?

For the record, the word “settlement” itself is rather politically neutral as well, and there’s a reason that we, as anarchists, speak of the colonization of the Americas rather than, as Wikipedia does, the settlement of the Americas. If ai told you ai was gonna settle somewhere else, you might just think ai’m moving to Toronto. If ai told you to settle down, you would take that to mean ai want you to act calmer. A settlement is simply a place where people live, and hell, even onkwehón:we people have their own settlements, like the Unist’ot’en Camp out West, the Zapatista communities in the Selva Lacandona, and the sites of “productive recovery” on the frontlines of Wallmapu and Chile. To properly speak of this process of five hundred years of extermination and assimilation of onkwehón:we peoples (read: genocide), the only term we can really use is “colonization”/«colonisation». These words have been imbued with violence, even if they can still also refer to politically neutral situations (like the colonization of newly exposed volcanic rock by lichen spores). To speak of colonization in a political conversation is to evoke the clash between the colonizer (the invader) and the colonized or would-be colonized (the indigenous).

So, while “settlement” is an inappropriate word for this population infusion process and the corollary war, genocide, enslavement, hierarchization, and displacement, its adjectival form is a necessary prefix to “colonialism” for the purposes of describing the political situation where ai live as well as many other places, from Kurdistan to the Russian Far East, from Tibet to Cascadia, from the Holy Land to Tierra del Fuego.

Personally, ai’d go even further and say that the concept of colonialism is, by itself, actually too vague to say very much about any situation that currently exists on Earth. The situations that have been named as examples of colonialism are incredibly diverse. They range from situations where colonization was led by an imperial state to situations where settlers initially acted in defiance of their own sovereign’s laws, but also to situations where indigenous authorities were vassalized by the more powerful state, or became willing partners in a world economy that generally benefited the people of the imperial centres more than the peripheries, or whatever else – in these latter cases, situations that generally didn’t involve significant population infusions or large-scale displacements of indigenous people with settlers (as opposed to displacements in general, which are probably happening pretty much anywhere that capitalism is happening). In many parts of Africa and Asia, the sovereign state headquartered in Europe was only present in a military sense (and even then, many of the coercive functions of the state would often be devolved to local monarchs and their employees) and wealth extraction activities conducted by state-owned or private firms did not require permanent settlement by Europeans.

This isn’t to say that the word “colonialism” is meaningless – it obviously isn’t – but by itself, it isn’t very descriptive. The word “settler” adds substance to the word “colonialism” by implying a population infusion. Settler colonialism, while looking different in different contexts, is something that seems to have some consistent qualities no matter where you look, although the purpose of this post isn’t to detail these. Instead, the question ai want to ask is what word formation can allow us to speak about settler colonialism in the French language more effectively?

My proposal is «le colonialisme-habitant». This suffix implies continuing to live in a place, as opposed to making reference to the original act of arrival like “settlement” does – but that’s fine, since it is still a colonialism that has successfully infused an area with a population of state subjects that can sustain and perpetuate itself.

The English adjectival form is settler-colonial, which, unlike the noun form, should always use a dash. In French, to take a somewhat more cyberpunk aesthetic approach, ai would propose the adjectival forms of «habcolonial» (for masculine nouns) and «habcoloniale» (for feminine) rather than the somewhat unwieldy «colonial-habitant» and its feminine counterpart. Of course, in many instances, context is going to allow for the shorthand use of “colonial”/«coloniale», or possibly «colonialiste» in French. (The English word “colonialist” is terribly ugly, and ai am pretty firmly against it. Ai’m honestly not a huge fan of «colonialiste» either, but you need it for the rhyme scheme in the chant A – ANTI – ANTI-COLONIALISTE! SOLIDARITÉ AVEC LES INNUES QUI RÉSISTENT!, so it gets a grudging pass in my book.)

A settler, of course, cannot simply be a «habitant» (if male) or a «habitante» (if female) in French; this is, once again, an inappropriately neutral word, for ai am a «habitant» of my apartment, and so are many onkwehón:we people in their own respective apartments. The words that are already being used, «colon» and «colonne», are absolutely fine. Of course, if it was ever necessary to make things more precise for some reason, one could easily write out «colonne-habitante».

Final dictionary entries:

Settler colonialism (alternative form: settler-colonialism) is a noun, usually uncountable but to be counted with the plural form settler colonialisms (or settler-colonialisms) when necessary. The adjectival form is settler-colonial. These words refer to the culture, ideology, and political order produced by, or serving to reproduce, a society whose foundational act of violence was the colonization of an area heretofore outside of a given state’s control by that state’s subjects.

Settler is a noun, countable with the plural form settlers. It refers to any participant, willing or unwilling, in a settler-colonial society, starting with the first settlers and continuing through successive generations.

French colonialisme-habitant (m.) for English settler colonialism.

French habcolonial (or habcoloniale, f.) for English settler-colonial.

French colon (or colonne, f.) for English settler.

French colons (or colonnes, f.) for English settlers.