The Sad Predictability of Indigenous Affairs (original) (raw)

The recycling of debates around welfare, violence and history in Settler-Indigenous Australian affairs involves the circulation of some well-worn perspectives. The authors assert that the entire relationship of black and white Australia needs to be reconsidered, and claim that this should include a critical examination of Australia's political and administrative rationality and (the history of) its intersection with Aboriginal culture. They call for a dialogue between European and Aboriginal political values and systems.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Australian Journal of Political Science, 2018

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.

Repositioning the Racial Gaze: Aboriginal Perspectives on Race, Race Relations and Governance

Social Inclusion, 2016

In Australia, public debate about recognition of the nation’s First Australians through constitutional change has highlighted the complexity and sensitivities surrounding Indigenous/state relations at even the most basic level of legal rights. But the unevenness of race relations has meant Aboriginal perspectives on race relations are not well known. This is an obstacle for reconciliation which, by definition, must be a reciprocal process. It is especially problematic in regions with substantial Aboriginal populations, where Indigenous visibility make race relations a matter of everyday experience and discussion. There has been considerable research on how settler Australians view Aboriginal people but little is known about how Aboriginal people view settler Australians or mainstream institutions. This paper presents the findings from an Australian Research Council project undertaken in partnership with Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a cr...

Australia's Black History: The Politics of Comparison and Transnational Indigenous Activism in Commonwealth Settler States

Both comparative and transnational methods are critical to understanding the historical emergence and impact of indigenous rights activism in Australia in the late twentieth century. Insisting that scholars take the “nation” seriously in telling stories of indigenous activism in order to understand the frames of reference that activists and others were mobilizing in order to change government policy and law-making, this chapter cautions against reproducing nationalist accounts of exceptionalism. We cannot transcend the nation, but we can better historicize challenges to it, such as that from Indigenous rights activists, in a global and transnational context. In fact, by so doing, we can begin to better comprehend the possibilities and limits of Indigenous agency, as activists connected their struggles to those of others in the “fourth world.”

Kowal, E. (2008) The Politics of the Gap: Indigenous Australians, Liberal Multiculturalism, and the End of the Self-Determination Era. American Anthropologist 110 (3): 338-348.

American Anthropologist, 2008

Since the 1970s, "self-determination" has been the dominant trope for expressing national aspirations for Indigenous Australians. Through the principles of self-determination, the liberal multicultural state has attempted to deliver postcolonial justice to its first peoples. In this new century, the sheen of the self-determination era has faded. Once heralded as the antidote to the racist assimilation era, it is now depicted as the cause of social ills. In this article, I draw on an ethnographic study of White antiracists working in Indigenous health in northern Australia to analyze the brand of liberal rationality that dominated the discourse of the self-determination era. By engaging with a "tribe" of White people who identify with the aims of the self-determination era, we can decipher the logic of self-determination as an instrument of the liberal state and better understand the internal contradictions and ambiguities that have led to its recent demise. [

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.