Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

This definition comes from Ambrose Bierce’s satirical lexicon, published in book form as The Devil’s Dictionary (expanded from earlier newspaper columns). Bierce, a Civil War veteran and acerbic journalist, used mock “dictionary” entries to expose hypocrisy and brutality in politics, religion, and social life. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, U.S. expansion and settler colonial ideology were often justified through dehumanizing language about Indigenous peoples. Bierce’s entry adopts that cold, utilitarian voice to mirror—and indict—the logic by which colonizers treated Native inhabitants as obstacles to be removed, even turning their deaths into a grim agricultural metaphor.

Bierce’s definition is a piece of savage irony: it mimics the conqueror’s perspective that values land over human life and reduces Indigenous peoples to “cumber” (mere impediments). The final sentence—“They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.”—sharpens the satire by translating extermination into the language of improvement and productivity, exposing how violence can be sanitized as progress. The entry’s power lies in its ventriloquism: Bierce does not argue directly, but lets the moral horror of the implied worldview condemn itself. It also exemplifies The Devil’s Dictionary’s method of using compressed wit to reveal the cruelty embedded in respectable public rhetoric.