Settler moves to innocence are rhetorical and political strategies by which settlers attempt to relieve themselves of the guilt and complicity of living on stolen land without actually returning that land or dismantling settler-colonial structures. The concept was developed by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012).
Tuck and Yang identify several characteristic moves: claiming distant or partial Indigenous ancestry to establish belonging; adopting decolonial language as a metaphor for other social justice goals; treating settler guilt as a psychological problem to be resolved through self-work; equating all forms of oppression with colonization, thereby dissolving the specificity of land theft; and fantasizing about Indigenous adoption or inclusion that would resolve the settler’s illegitimacy without confronting its material basis.
These moves are not individual moral failings but structural features of settler colonialism. The settler state requires ongoing legitimation, and moves to innocence provide it by converting the incommensurable demand for land return into something manageable — a reform, an attitude, a curriculum change. Identifying these moves does not resolve the problem but clarifies what decolonization actually requires and what it does not.