Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principa… - Patrick Wolfe

With no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy. To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream.

When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.

Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.