Because its power remains naturalized: introducing the settler colonial determinants of health by Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, David Mills

Settler colonialism is to the structural determinants of health as the structural are to the social, fundamentally reshaping the socioeconomic, political, and land-based environments through Indigenous erasure and settler hegemony. As the mode of domination that innervates the structures that overdetermine health (24), settler colonialism also shapes the health systems that are imposed separately on Indigenous peoples in forms that are limited and understaffed such that (69), in their failures, they serve to justify further colonization and sedimentation of hierarchies (70). The degree and specific manifestations of settler colonial encroachment and expropriation relate directly to the Indigenous health impacts. While broadly analogous across contexts, health outcomes inevitably express a specificity that reflects colonial chronicity and the local dialectics of settler invasion and Indigenous resistance. Where expansionary attempts are ongoing, as in the case of Palestine/Israel, the outcome is active settler frontier violence, forced displacement, and the inevitable health consequences that follow (71). In a world where humanitarian values and human rights are lauded and overt Native elimination is illegitimate, frontier violence has in many cases transformed from its original North American and Australasian ferocity to population fragmentation (72), village and property destruction (73), maiming (74), unchilding (75), spatial sequestration (35), and more concealed forms like gentrification (76), assimilation (35) and liberal modes of recognition (32). As we discuss later, the acute and chronic health impacts of such settler colonial technologies and strategies can be observed and analyzed with primary research, and additional modes of elimination can be theorized from Indigenous and settler colonial studies and likewise evaluated.