A growing number of scholars have begun to use settler colonialism as a lens for US history, especially in the nineteenth century as the United States built its continental empire by dispossessing hundreds of Native nations. Most scholars of North America who have engaged settler colonialism have done so through the work of Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, who analyzed settler colonialism as a distinctive form of colonialism. In contrast to labor-extractive forms of colonialism in which colonizers use indigenous labor to reap profits, Wolfe argued, settler colonialists seek to eliminate indigenous people and take their lands. Wolfe’s notion of settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination” allows for the identification of a range of policies and practices – including outright genocide, removal, and assimilation – all with the goal of taking indigenous lands and replacing Native inhabitants with settlers.