On February 14th, the United States was shaken by yet another mass shooting event at a school in Parkland, Florida. 14 students and 3 faculty members were murdered in the span of just over five minutes, making it one of the deadliest school shooting events in American history. As always, the horrific violence triggered a predictable and public ritual that has grown all too familiar in recent years. The ritual is one of public handwringing, which plays out across television screens and social media feeds; politicians and private citizens alike dutifully announce their dedications of their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, and then engage in heated political arguments with the other side over who or what is to blame. Republicans and democrats deploy familiar buzzwords like “gun rights” or “common sense gun laws” as they argue over competing interpretations of the 2nd Amendment and what Congress should or should not do in response to the violence. Then, inevitably, we move on, having done nothing of substance, and patiently await the next mass slaughter that will surely come.
However, although the familiar ritual is currently playing out, there are also hints of something new emerging from the latest tragedy, thanks to an impressive and immediate political mobilization on the part of surviving students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A youth led movement has quickly taken shape under the slogan of “Never Again,” and activists have already managed to articulate concrete policy demands while also scheduling a national protest to take place next month. Whether this effort will actually grow into any sort of sustained political movement remains to be seen. However, at this emergent stage of mobilization, activists could perhaps better their chances of success by building a movement that is inclusive to indigenous voices, histories, and perspectives, through a recognition of and engagement with the reality that America’s violent gun culture has firm roots within the settler-colonial context.
As is true of most mainstream political movements, public debates about and campaigns against gun violence typically exclude any consideration of indigeneity and settler colonialism. The popular debate over the 2nd Amendment and its exact correct meaning rests on the problematic assumptions of the U.S. Constitution as a legitimate and authoritative governing document and the U.S. government as a legitimate and authoritative governing body over this land and the peoples within it. Additionally, most Americans believe the amendment’s guarantee relates to individual gun ownership for the purposes of hunting, self-defense, or as a protective measure against government tyranny. However, in the book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, which was published last month, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz rejects these assumptions, explaining that the true guarantee of the 2nd Amendment is for “the violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers … as an individual right.”
When viewed through Dunbar-Ortiz’s convincing perspective, the 2nd Amendment can be understood as part of what Wolfe refers to as “the settler-colonial logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2006, 388). Historians like Dunbar-Ortiz and Aviva Chomsky have observed that the settler desire for further expansion and violent appropriation of indigenous lands was a key impetus for the American Revolution. With the Proclamation of 1763, the British government forbade colonial subjects from settling on any lands to the west of the Allegheny-Appalachian mountains. However, the deeply unpopular edict was widely disregarded, forcing the Crown to rely on military assistance for enforcement. In order to pay for the shelter, food, and transportation of the soldiers being called upon to stop the unlawful expansions, the Parliament passed the infamous Stamp Act tax law in 1765. After the Revolutionary War had been won, safeguarding the violent practices that fueled settlers’ westward expansion was an immediate priority, ultimately realized through the creation of the 2nd Amendment.
Early gun legislation in the original colonies (and, later, states) reflected the territoriality discussed by Wolfe (388) and the logic of elimination that accompanies it. Laws in Virginia and New England mandated gun ownership for all households and required all men to remain armed any time they ventured into public. Through these laws and the 2nd Amendment, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations.”
Writing about the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, indigenous journalist Sarah Sunshine Manning has articulated the need for activist movements to support the “[rematriation] of indigenous spaces and realities, or reconnect to matriarchy and the egalitarian roots of this land.” Manning identifies rematriation as a process involving the recognition of indigenous lands and the first women of particular lands. She explains that, “with rematriation comes the deepest recognition of all abuses against humanity, beginning with the indigenous peoples of that land. Each space is recognized as the beloved homelands of the first human beings nearly annihilated for the greed of the American man.” Although Manning’s discussion of rematriation focused specifically on feminist activism, the ideas she has discussed could also be applied to the movement against gun violence. This is supported by Manning’s claims that “the understanding of all abuses fans out from [the place of rematriation],” and that “when [activists] bear down to do the consistent work of recognizing that the land upon which they stand is indigenous land… all social movements will make more movement.”
The prevalence of gun violence in the United States amounts to a public health crisis. While deaths from mass shootings represent a mere fraction of the 33,000 gun deaths that plague this land each year, it is mass shootings, like the one in Parkland last week, that spark the greatest political discussion and mobilization. Even when these shootings occur, however, the political responses that have followed historically have failed to make any progress. The mainstream movements have also failed to grapple with the settler-colonial context at the heart of American gun culture and have constricted themselves and their potential to the confines of a narrow, liberal approach that assumes the legitimacy and authoritativeness of the U.S. government and Constitution. A more inclusive movement that recognizes the ongoing settler-colonial context and the role of violent and ongoing land theft through indigenous elimination over many centuries in the shaping of our present gun crisis might overcome the limitations that have doomed its predecessors to failure.
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