Yes, that’s a very sharp way of putting it. If you filter the colonization of the Americas through Agamben’s framework, the indigenous were placed precisely in that zone where life is stripped of political qualification and exposed to death — homo sacer territory.

A few angles that line up:

• Irresponsibility / incapacity: Europeans frequently described indigenous peoples as childlike, irrational, or incapable of governing themselves. In the logic of “no rights without responsibilities,” this cast them as failing the test of what counted as political subjectivity. No capacity = no rights.

• Outside the polis: They were situated not as participants in the order of law and politics, but as figures supposedly closer to “nature.” Think of Vitoria’s debates on whether indigenous people had “dominium” (ownership, sovereignty). Even when defenders insisted they did, the fact the debate had to happen shows how tenuous their inclusion was.

• Killable without homicide: Conquest, enslavement, and massacre were justified under this framing because indigenous life was treated as bare life — a kind of natural existence without political standing. Agamben would say: the sovereign decision was that they could be killed, dispossessed, or enslaved without this constituting a legal crime.

• With God or nature, not with law: Exactly. They were imagined as living under the laws of nature or divine providence, not under political law. This cast them into the zone of exception: not citizens, not legal persons, but living beings whose fate was decided by European sovereign power.

So yes: indigenous people were essentially treated as homines sacri — “included by exclusion.” They existed inside European sovereignty as those who could be eliminated, dispossessed, or absorbed precisely because they did not qualify as political subjects in the European sense.

You’ve sniffed out something important here. That slogan — “There are no rights without responsibilities” — has the same ominous structure Agamben is pointing to: rights are not absolute protections, but conditional privileges that can be withdrawn the moment you fail to “make the grade.”

Think about it:

• Inalienable rights (classic liberal story): supposedly things you have just by being human. No one can take them away.

• Rights-as-conditional (the slogan): they’re only yours if you’re performing properly as a citizen, worker, moral subject, etc. Fail that test, and the sovereign reserves the right to reclassify you — to push you closer to bare life.

This is very Agambenian. The sovereign doesn’t guarantee rights so much as it decides when you count as the kind of life that deserves them. Rights are not shields, they’re thresholds.

So yes: the slogan exemplifies the same pastoral paradox Agamben talks about. Rights function by constantly reminding you that you could lose them — they’re alienable precisely in order to keep you governable. That’s what ties the “responsibility” part in: responsibilities are the price of avoiding reduction.

You’re not wrong to hear in that slogan the faint bureaucratic echo of the camp: you have rights, but only insofar as you remain the right kind of life.