The American Genocide Against the Temporal Middle

Abstract

The temporal middle is the position of inheriting, continuing, and transforming a tradition without either renewing it wholesale or betraying it. Indigenous peoples occupy this position: they live within and through colonial structures while maintaining intellectual and governance traditions that predate colonialism and continue through it. This paper argues that the American elimination of the temporal middle — documented in the companion paper on the translation of “post-” to “anti-” as a linguistic phenomenon — operates through the same structure as the physical genocide of Indigenous peoples. Patrick Wolfe established in 2006 that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event: invasion continues as long as Indigenous peoples exist on land the settler state claims. This paper extends Wolfe’s argument: the elimination of the native and the elimination of the temporal middle are the same operation running at five scales simultaneously — physical, legal, epistemic, linguistic, and architectural.

1. The Temporal Middle

A person who inherits a tradition, lives within and through the structures that displaced it, adapts what they need, maintains what matters, and continues — that person occupies the temporal middle. They are not “pre-modern” (frozen before contact). They are not “assimilated” (absorbed into the displacing structure). They are not “resistant” (defined by opposition to the displacing structure). They are continuing.

Indigenous peoples across the Americas occupy this position. A Lakota mathematician. A Mohawk steelworker who carries a Haudenosaunee passport. A Wendat governance scholar whose nation’s political philosophy shaped the Enlightenment through Kondiaronk’s dialogues with Baron de Lahontan, published in 1703, read by Leibniz, downstream of Rousseau — and whose descendants still govern according to their own traditions while navigating Canadian federal law.

The temporal middle is the position settler colonialism cannot tolerate, because it proves that Indigenous peoples are not vanishing, not frozen, not defined by the encounter with Europe. They are doing what all living traditions do: continuing.

2. Five Scales of Elimination

Patrick Wolfe argued that settler colonialism operates through a “logic of elimination” that is structural, not episodic: “invasion is a structure, not an event” (Wolfe 2006). The structure continues as long as Indigenous peoples exist on land the settler state claims. Each of the following is an instantiation of this logic applied to the temporal middle.

2.1 Physical Elimination

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations off their territories. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 broke up communal landholding and forced individual allotment: each Indigenous person had to accept a parcel of private property (assimilation into settler property norms) or lose access to land entirely. The act eliminated 90 million acres of Indigenous-held land between 1887 and 1934.

The Dawes Act is the physical instantiation of the binary. Communal land tenure — the material basis for Indigenous governance that is neither individual property (settler fidelity) nor landlessness (elimination) — was the temporal middle. The act destroyed it by forcing a choice: individual ownership or nothing.

2.2 Legal Elimination

Chief Justice John Marshall’s trilogy of Supreme Court decisions (Johnson v. M’Intosh 1823, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia 1831, Worcester v. Georgia 1832) represents the American legal system attempting to find language for the temporal middle and failing.

Marshall coined “domestic dependent nations” in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia — the closest American law came to naming the position Indigenous nations actually occupied: sovereign political entities existing within the territorial boundaries of another sovereign. The phrase is internally contradictory: “domestic” denies the autonomy that “nation” asserts, and “dependent” denies the self-governance that sovereignty requires. American legal grammar could generate the phrase but could not sustain the position it described. Within a decade, Andrew Jackson’s administration had rendered Worcester v. Georgia unenforceable through the Indian Removal Act.

Blood quantum laws completed the legal elimination of the middle. By defining who counts as Indigenous through fractional ancestry measured by the settler state, blood quantum converts kinship — a relational, contextual, and self-determined category — into a binary metric administered by the colonizer. You are Indian enough or you are not. The middle position (I am Lakota because my community recognizes me, regardless of what fraction the federal government calculates) has no legal standing.

2.3 Epistemic Elimination

Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879 and articulated its mission in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The phrase states the binary: Indian or man. You cannot be both.

Boarding schools operationalized this through specific eliminations: Lakota children had their hair cut, their clothes replaced, their names changed, their languages forbidden, their ceremonies punished. These are not incidental cruelties. Each targets a specific carrier of the temporal middle:

• Language carries the grammar in which the temporal middle is expressible. Lakȟótiyapi has registers, kinship terms, and relational structures that encode the continuing relationship between a people and their territory. English, as the companion paper on “post-” and “anti-” documents, has had its temporal prefix captured by the covenant binary.
• Ceremony carries the institutional mechanisms for sustaining continuity across generations — the Lakota equivalent of the Church’s liturgical calendar, communal obligation, and spiritual direction that the Han/Aquinas paper identifies as missing from secular culture.
• Names carry relational identity. The companion paper on Čhiyé Tȟáŋka documents how renaming converts a kinship relation (Elder Brother) into a specimen (Bigfoot). The boarding school naming operation is the same: converting a person embedded in relational identity into an individual with an English name and a student number.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021) documents the deeper epistemic elimination: the systematic erasure of Indigenous peoples’ role as intellectual contributors to Enlightenment thought. Kondiaronk’s critique of European hierarchy, property, and law — transmitted through Lahontan’s Dialogues in 1703 — directly influenced European political philosophy. But the genealogy was erased, and Indigenous peoples were repositioned as objects of European thought rather than its interlocutors. The temporal middle (Indigenous peoples as co-creators of modern political thought, continuing their own traditions while transforming European ones) was replaced by the genre figure of the noble savage: an object of contemplation, not a participant in conversation.

2.4 Linguistic Elimination

The companion paper on the American translation of “post-” to “anti-” documents this scale in detail. The Puritan covenant binary (fidelity or betrayal, nothing between) provides the deep grammar. Louis Hartz’s compressed epistemic field (a political culture born liberal, with no competing traditions to generate dialectical opposition) provides the structural condition. Cold War binary framing provides the historical occasion.

The result: American English has no productive prefix for the temporal middle. “Post-” has been captured as oppositional. “Pre-” is temporal but backward-looking. “Trans-” implies crossing rather than continuing. “Para-” implies alongside rather than through. The position of “inheriting, continuing, transforming” — the position Indigenous peoples actually occupy — is linguistically unavailable in the dominant language of the settler state.

This is the same operation as the boarding school language prohibition, scaled up from punishing individual Lakota speakers to restructuring the grammar of the colonial language itself. The boarding school said: you cannot speak Lakȟótiyapi. The covenant binary says: even in English, you cannot say what Lakȟótiyapi says.

2.5 Architectural Elimination

The companion paper on Winthrop’s covenant as the first social media post documents how the Puritan covenant form — relational cohesion as architecture, visibility as governance, engagement as algorithm — persists as the media architecture of contemporary platforms, universities, and intelligence agencies.

This architecture eliminates the temporal middle by making participation compulsory and continuously visible. The covenant admits only those who perform fidelity through constant moral transparency. There is no position of “I am part of this community and I have thoughts I am not sharing.” The architecture requires full disclosure (the descendant of Lateran IV mandatory confession) and interprets silence as betrayal.

For Indigenous peoples navigating settler institutions — universities, social media, government agencies — this architecture demands that they perform their identity in terms the institution recognizes. Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) analyzes this as the politics of recognition: the settler state offers inclusion in exchange for legibility, and legibility requires performing the binary (assimilated modern subject OR authentic traditional Indian). Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus (2014) documents how Kahnawà:ke Mohawks practice refusal — declining to participate in settler-state categories entirely, carrying Haudenosaunee passports, asserting sovereignty by withdrawing from the recognition framework.

Refusal is the practice of occupying the temporal middle by refusing the architecture that eliminates it.

3. One Operation, Five Scales

Scale	Mechanism	What It Eliminates	Date/Period
Physical	Removal, allotment, land seizure	Communal land tenure as material basis for Indigenous governance	1830–1934
Legal	Marshall Trilogy, blood quantum, plenary power	“Domestic dependent nation” as legal middle position	1823–present
Epistemic	Boarding schools, erasure of intellectual genealogy	Indigenous knowledge systems and role as co-creators of modernity	1879–present
Linguistic	Covenant binary, compressed epistemic field, prefix capture	The grammar in which the temporal middle is expressible	1630–present
Architectural	Covenant media form, recognition politics, platform visibility	The institutional space in which the temporal middle can be practiced	1630–present

Each scale reinforces the others. Physical elimination destroys the material base for Indigenous governance. Legal elimination removes the political standing to contest it. Epistemic elimination erases the knowledge systems that would articulate the alternative. Linguistic elimination captures the grammar that would name it. Architectural elimination structures the institutions so that even if you name it, there is no slot for it to occupy.

Wolfe’s insight — invasion is a structure, not an event — applies across all five scales. The elimination of the temporal middle did not happen once. It happens continuously, at every scale, through mechanisms that have been operating since the covenant was first articulated on the deck of the Arbella in 1630.

4. Closing

The temporal middle is the position of a living tradition continuing through displacement. Indigenous peoples occupy it. The American settler state eliminates it at five scales simultaneously: destroying the land base, removing the legal standing, erasing the knowledge systems, capturing the grammar, and structuring the institutions. These are the same operation. The Dawes Act and the capture of the prefix “post-” are the same structure running at different resolutions. Captain Pratt’s “Kill the Indian, save the man” and Sacvan Bercovitch’s American Jeremiad — which absorbs all critique into recommitment rather than allowing genuine “after” — are the same binary enforced on different substrates. The boarding school that forbids Lakȟótiyapi and the covenant grammar that cannot express the temporal middle in English are the same silencing at different scales.

Audra Simpson’s Kahnawà:ke Mohawks refuse the binary by refusing the architecture. They carry their own passports. They govern their own territory. They do not ask the settler state to recognize them. This is the temporal middle practiced, in a world built to eliminate it.

References

• Bercovitch, S. (1978). The American Jeremiad. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.
• Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Pratt, R. H. (1892). “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites.” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
• Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.
• Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1).
• Wolfe, P. (2006). “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.