Accumulation of the primitive: the limits of liberalism and the politics of occupy Wall Street

This article examines the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and its basic elision of Indigenous peoples as the first and already " occupied" peoples of this land; illuminating the so-called 99% as not simply united in their collective indignation, but also their settler status. Thus, by deploying the discursive trope and strategy of "occupation" as its central organizing principle, OWS reconstitutes (territorial) appropriation as the democratic manifest and fails to propose something distinct from or counter to the settler state. In so doing, the movement dissolves colonialism into capitalism by courting a limited and precarious equality predicated on (or more pointedly in exchange for) the "elimination of the Native". In contradistinction, critical Indigenous theories disrupt the colonial architecture that frames Indigenous/state relations in ways that not only mark the (Foucauldian) shift from sovereign to discursive forms of power, but also insist upon the conciliatory and accommodationist discourses of liberalism as equally, if not more, effective in reproducing settler hegemony.