Inclusive Elimination: How White Americans Oppose Native Nation Sovereignty Using “Our Land” and “Our Laws” Narratives

Native nations in the United States hold inherent sovereignty. Yet, many White Americans oppose this political authority. Drawing on thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 558 White Americans reacting to 10 real-world sovereignty scenarios, we identify the ideological mechanism through which this opposition works, which we call inclusive elimination. Inclusive elimination dissolves Native nations’ separate political authority not by excluding them from the United States but by insisting they belong to it. It operates through three inseparable moves. Respondents speak from a settler standpoint, a civic “we” entitled to judge Native authority. They invoke national belonging, declaring that Native lands and citizens are part of the United States and therefore subject to its laws. And they invoke harm, framing Native sovereignty as a threat to non-Native people’s mobility, food safety, and finances. Each move sounds like fairness, but together they convert a relationship between nations into a problem of internal disorder, to be managed by the settler state rather than negotiated between sovereigns. We situate this mechanism within theories of settler colonialism, group position, and colorblind racism, and argue that inclusive elimination names something those theories together imply but do not specify, namely how the language of inclusion itself performs the work of elimination.