Settler-Colonial Structure and Indigenous Agency

Abstract

Settler-colonial theory has become an influential framework in sociology. Yet its central claim—that settler-colonialism is an enduring structure organized by a “logic of elimination”—generates a theoretical paradox. If settler-colonialism is total, how can Indigenous agency be theorized without reproducing the structure it seeks to transcend? I address this tension by bringing sociological theories of structure and agency into dialogue with settler-colonial studies and Indigenous theory. Drawing on William Sewell Jr.’s conception of structure as the coupling of cultural schemas and material resources, I reinterpret two foundational concepts: the logic of elimination and the politics of recognition. Yet Indigenous theorists highlight forms of agency that exceed sociological accounts of action within a shared structural field. I therefore distinguish between interior agency, exercised within settler structures, and exterior agency, which sustains Indigenous worlds beyond them.