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[^0]:    1 For the population estimates of First Peoples, see Alan Taylor, American Colonies (The Penguin History of the United States, Vol. 1) (2001).  
a transformation that is both affective and deliberate. ${ }^{2}$ In the Caribbean, the assumed native status of blacks derives from their arrival prior to indentured groups and the representation of white plantation owners, during and after slavery, as failed settlers. In North America, it is derived from particular deference to the power of white settlers and their modes of citizenship. In criticism and letters, this dynamic of becoming is dominated by the master-slave relationship between white owners and enslaved blacks, into which it is often collapsed. This leads to a generalized misreading and privileging of the master-slave dialectic understood here as the power dynamic involved in the competition for physical and metaphysical existence - over the multiple dynamics of settler-native that in fact subtend it. Studies of settler colonialism in Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa have largely been concerned with the body of white settlers vis-à-vis a non-white, native population. The problem, however, with seeing the white settlers as singular agents in the exercise of imperial/colonial power over native and other racialized and coerced groups is that it shifts attention away from the ways in which non-Indigenous, oppressed peoples seeking freedom and power in the settler State adapted the techniques of settler power, in ways that actually reflect a continuum of settler-native power.