"Ineradicably Ferocious": Settler Colonialism and the Predatory Imagination in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Culture

This article explores the forms and functions of the ‘predatory imagination’ in nineteenth-century U.S. settler culture, a semiotic nexus where distinctions between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’ intertwined with ideas about (specific forms of) animality and human-animal difference in a way that reflected the concerns of an aggressively expanding settler nation attempting to resolve its ‘Indian problem.’ Informed by contemporary attitudes toward predatory animals – wolves in particular – the predatorization of Native Americans as inherently violent, cruel, and cunning turned them into legitimate targets for the settler polity’s own exercise of predatory violence, legitimized as a ‘preventive’ defense not merely against certain groups of Native people but against the malicious alterity of ‘Indianness’ itself. The article further discusses an alternative framing of predatory violence that was tied to social evolutionist thinking and suggested that the predatory propensities of a deep past marked by violent competition survived in remnant form beneath a thin veneer of civilization. Complicating the exclusive association between predatory violence and notions of Indigenous savagery, this perspective nonetheless served the eliminatory purposes of settler colonialism by locating the causes of settler(-Native) violence in an evolutionary longue durée temporality that remained inaccessible to human political and moral agency.