American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article outlines and interrogates the neglected settler-colonial discourse of White Appalachians, in particular their construction of a White indigeneity. In order to justify occupation and reconcile themselves to the wider settler-colonial society, influential settler Appalachian scholars and activists positioned themselves as a colonized Indigenous people, advancing the once-paradigmatic Colonialist model of Appalachian exploitation. This discursive replacement of American Indians allows settler Appalachians to assert their own White subjectivity as a form of indigeneity and their ownership of the land as decolonization.