An extended review of Adam Dahl's book, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (University Press of Kansas, 2018), focused on his discussion of the central contradiction of US settler colonialism: that settler political sovereignty, grounded in the right to self-government based on labor devoted to the “improvement” of expropriated Native land, requires the disavowal of the violence of dispossession and also the denial of Indigenous land rights based not on political reasoning but inherited racialized cultural prejudices.