Settler move to innocence is a kind sounding term for weaponised innocence. It is an act of declaring “we didn’t know better” at the time, begging an innocence to acts of violence. It is a move to avoid accountability for ongoing colonialism, especially by denying their implication in the systems that benefited them.

In the use of the term, Invasive Species, the colonial machine has constructed a weaponized innocence in ascribing the acts of colonization, ostensibly an invasion, to non human beings brought here largely out of vanity, and some out of a desire for familiarity, and perhaps mostly out of thinking that there was no recognizable relationships to food, beauty, land stewardships here. There is also a notion that the european plants and ideas are somehow superior to anything that could be garnered from this land – a “white” plant supremacy.

The problematic nature of this extends from the European sensibility of viewing all non-white, non Christianized peoples as burden “white man’s burden” – beasts of burden, dehumanized and zoologicalized. It also beckons the notion of terra nullius, an empty land. 

In this we must dispel the romantic ideals of colonialism – the beleaguered immigrant who was escaping injustice to find a better life. Most colonial peoples were not only paid by the crown to colonize, but were also given a stipend for each child, with increasing stipends for adding members to their broods. Even when this practice ended, the free or cheap promise of land so long as it was thoroughly exploited was a practice through land grants and patents. 

Combine this with a fictions of Indigenous peoples and practices as savage, uncouth, that there was no edible, or palatable foods here. Both the potato and the tomato were seen as toxic upon their introduction to Europe by european colonial expansion, and are now core to most european diets. So even this idea is a mythologized weaponized innocence.

Calling a plant invasive is a move to place the action on the plant instead of on the european colonizer. This a deflection, a scapegoating of the plant as the violent actor instead of the colonizing human invader. The fact that this is used by modern science, and conservation underscores the antagonistic relationship and ongoing invasion of Indigenous lands, and knowledge.

Europeans described much of the land on contact as vast swaths of pastoral spaces, with wide open forests, and a paradise of life. Europeans with their exploitational agriculture based on extraction could not recognise the forest and food gardens (food forests and permaculture) that sat in a harmonious way with the land around them. Several early explorers wrote how they found a “garden of Eden” in the vast wilds of the Turtle Island continent. 

The shock of the first waves of colonial invasion met a generous people with overt violence, germ warfare, enslavement so extreme that the planet fell into a mini-ice age coinciding with the genocides of Indigenous peoples. This was the result of the vast stewarded landscapes turning back into spaces devoid of human care, populating back into what we would now recognize as a “wild” landscape. This very notion of “the wild” is also a deflection from colonizer accountability and lack of relationship with all life. 

European practice is a total violence on the land itself. The underscoring idea of agriculture is to exploit the land, dig it up, turn it over, bring nutrients to the surface through cultivation. This practice will enrich the surface planting area only for a very short time as the important biological organisms that maintain healthy and fertile soil die in the baking sun.

European invasive tactics on the land that strip away all life from cultivated areas are greatly prone to washout, flooding, water and wind erosion. This disturbance of land creating large dead zones then can only grow plants that can exist in disturbed areas. THese are called, unironically, pioneer plants – yet another term indicating settler weaponized innocence. These are almost always the “weeds” and other undesirable European origin plants, not the high economic value crops. 

This notion of plants of lesser value often extends to low yield, high process plants that were often the mark of poverty or necessity by Europeans and previously enslaved Black peoples. The high value agriculture was a market item and penalties were draconian for poaching from agricultural areas. 

These lesser value plants explain the lack of market use of food and medicinal non-native species. 

Most egregious aggressive species that are currently indicated as invasive and of profound concern were plants largely introduced for vanity – ornamental use. Most of these were also justified in their presence and spread as purposeful:

European buckthorn as a hedge plant

Phragmytes, Japanese Knotweed and Kudzu as erosion control

Strangling dog vine and Giant Hogweed as ornamental, for vanity alone

There is a circular logic here – when do we have erosion? When we clear and cultivate the land. The use of these plants represent a thrust into economic justification for their very presence. Consider, Kudzu: a plant that is aggressively carpeting landscapes and decimating entire ecologies was heavily promoted to farmers in the Southern US states in the 1930-1940s as one they must plant for erosion control. Phragmytes was heavily promoted as erosion control to land owners in riparian (water’s edge) areas. These were both promoted in these ways by conservation agencies.

These plants served as vanity first – ornamental plantation, and then degraded to a useful commodity, and now an invasive species, and yet their nature has not changed. Once they are no longer of novelty value, they must be justified as useful, and only when their use escapes economic value does their presence carry the term that indicates the original colonial violence itself – invasive. This shift is based on the plant behaving under its natural way, being considered a nuisance. 

This utter lack of relational intelligence by colonial invaders is a constant attempt to justify the violence mechanism of their very presence against Indigenous peoples and on Indigenous land. The attempts to deflect responsibility lies in defiance of accountability around genocide and destruction of the very knowledge that maintained relationship with the land for tens of thousands of years. It positions Indigenous knowledge still as a childish, animalistic approach, denying the deep genealogy of sophisticate Indigenous scientific pursuit and technologies resulting in a profound ecological balance.

It also denies the intelligence of both the land and the plants themselves. The force of life driven by the organisms that work to build existence under our feet has its own intelligence, as do the plants that come to thrive in these vast dead zones created by exploitationary agriculture. The plants did not invade. They were brought here by the invaders. 

This doesn’t change the responsibility of caring for and persevering Indigenous landscapes with all its relations. It doesn’t change the need to remediate and steward to protect the Indigenous plants and animals that rely on the balanced ecology. But ascribing the act of violence to plants, insects, fish, fungus, animals who are following the natural law that life must continue are merely expressing their original instructions. It is the colonizer who must shed their illusions and turn the term on themselves, through neocolonialism, as long term, constant, and current invaders.