Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives [1st ed. 2020] 978-981-13-9204-7, 978-981-13-9205-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Reconciliation, Recognition, Responsibility (Sarah Maddison, Sana Nakata)....Pages 1-13
Registers of Relationality for Knowing Indigenous-Settler Politics (Morgan Brigg)....Pages 15-31
Settler-Colonial Governmentality: The Carceral Webs Woven by Law and Politics (Thalia Anthony)....Pages 33-53
Writing as Kin: Producing Ethical Histories Through Collaboration in Unexpected Places. Researching F.W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and Lutheran Experiments in Aboriginal Education (Katherine Ellinghaus, Barry Judd)....Pages 55-68
Analysing the Indigenous News Network in Action: IndigenousX, The Guardian and the Wakul App (David Nolan, Lisa Waller, Jack Latimore, Margaret Simons, Kerry McCallum)....Pages 69-86
The Politics of (Dis)Trust in Indigenous Help-Seeking (Bronwyn Carlson, Ryan Frazer)....Pages 87-106
Capitalising on Success: Relationality and Indigenous Higher Education Futures (Nikki Moodie)....Pages 107-123
Preparing for the Gift: Two Educator’s Perspectives on Practicing Indigenous-Settler Relations in the Classroom (Lilly Brown, Dave Collis)....Pages 125-136
Learning to Live Lawfully on Country (Libby Porter)....Pages 137-146
Separatism as a Mode of Relations: Practicing Indigenous Resurgence and Nationhood in the 21st Century (Sarah Maddison)....Pages 147-158

Citation preview

Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World Series Editors: Sarah Maddison · Sana Nakata

Sarah Maddison Sana Nakata Editors

Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World Volume 1

Series Editors Sarah Maddison, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Sana Nakata, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Editorial Board Miriam Jorgensen, Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Sheryl Lightfoot, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Morgan Brigg, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Yin Paradies, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia Jeff Denis, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada Bronwyn Fredericks, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Libby Porter, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The series, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, brings together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-Settler Relations series focuses sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally. This is an important and timely endeavour. In Australia, relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the state are at an impasse. In the wake of the government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement in 2017 there is no shared view on how Indigenous-settler relationships might be ‘reset’, or even if this is possible. The contemporary Indigenous affairs policy domain is characterised by confusion, frustration and disappointment that, despite a seemingly endless succession of policy regimes, efforts to ‘close the gap’ between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other Australians have not resulted in progress. It is into this contested space that the Indigenous-Settler Relations series seeks to intervene with new, agenda-setting research. The series editors are based in a research unit in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne—the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. The series will build on the work of the Collaboration in bringing together scholars and practitioners from around Australia, and around the world—particularly other Anglophone settler colonial societies such as Canada, the United States and New Zealand—whose work is concerned with Indigenous-settler relations across a range of disciplines. The multi-faceted approach to Indigenous-Settler Relations that defines the series seeks to capture how the question of relationality is already being asked by scholars across disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, media, and cultural studies. Readers of this series will look to it for fresh perspectives and new ideas about how to transform Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and elsewhere. They will learn from the leading lights in an emerging field who will connect their rich, multi-disciplinary scholarship to urgent social and political questions at the heart of Indigenous-Settler relations.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16142

Sarah Maddison Sana Nakata •

Editors

Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations Interdisciplinary Perspectives

123

Editors Sarah Maddison School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Sana Nakata School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2524-5767 ISSN 2524-5775 (electronic) Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World ISBN 978-981-13-9204-7 ISBN 978-981-13-9205-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge that many individuals and communities have made this book possible. Many of the chapters in this collection were first presented at a research workshop hosted by the Indigenous–Settler Relations Collaboration at the University of Melbourne. This workshop was made possible due to the funding support of the Social and Political Sciences Workshop Funding scheme and the Faculty of Arts, which funds the Indigenous–Settler Relations Collaboration. Other contributions benefited from the support of the 2018 Trinity College Indigenous Higher Education Conference. And other contributions still have been forthcoming due to their collegiate enthusiasm and intellectual commitment. Ilaria Walker first commissioned the book series, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, of which this title is our first offering. We are grateful for her vision and trust during these early stages and to Nick Melchior who has sustained that commitment. We acknowledge Prof. Yin Paradies who reviewed the full manuscript and offered valuable criticism and constructive advice to all our contributors. Our research assistant, Tristen Harwood, has calmly and steadily overseen the production of this volume from the earliest stages of workshopping and submitted drafts across the review process, resubmissions and now to this polished endpoint. Most importantly, this book has been made possible due to the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nations upon whose unceded territories the Parkville campus of The University of Melbourne resides. Our occupation of their land is an injustice that will possibly never be made right. These words alone do very little to provide deserving reparations for that irreparable loss. We sit with that discomfort daily while working toward better relations between our institutions and First Nations peoples everywhere.

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Contents

1

2

3

4

5

Introduction: Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Reconciliation, Recognition, Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata

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Registers of Relationality for Knowing Indigenous-Settler Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morgan Brigg

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Settler-Colonial Governmentality: The Carceral Webs Woven by Law and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thalia Anthony

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Writing as Kin: Producing Ethical Histories Through Collaboration in Unexpected Places. Researching F.W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and Lutheran Experiments in Aboriginal Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katherine Ellinghaus and Barry Judd Analysing the Indigenous News Network in Action: IndigenousX, The Guardian and the Wakul App . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Nolan, Lisa Waller, Jack Latimore, Margaret Simons and Kerry McCallum

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The Politics of (Dis)Trust in Indigenous Help-Seeking . . . . . . . . . . Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer

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Capitalising on Success: Relationality and Indigenous Higher Education Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Nikki Moodie

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Preparing for the Gift: Two Educator’s Perspectives on Practicing Indigenous-Settler Relations in the Classroom . . . . . . . . 125 Lilly Brown and Dave Collis

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Learning to Live Lawfully on Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Libby Porter

10 Separatism as a Mode of Relations: Practicing Indigenous Resurgence and Nationhood in the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Sarah Maddison

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Sarah Maddison is a Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne and co-Director of the Indigenous–Settler Relations Collaboration. She has published widely in international journals and is the author or editor of eight books including the new book The Colonial Fantasy (2019), which argues that the Australian settler state cannot solve Indigenous problems because the settler state is the problem, and The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation (2016), Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation (2015), Beyond White Guilt (2011), Unsettling the Settler State (2011) and Black Politics (2009). Dr. Sana Nakata is a Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, an ARC Discovery Indigenous Research Fellow (2016–2019) and co-Director of the Indigenous–Settler Relations Collaboration. Sana’s research centres on developing an approach for thinking politically about childhood in ways that improve the capacity of adult decision makers to act in their interests. Her 2015 book Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy examines children’s rights and citizenship in the USA, UK and Australia and analyses the policy, law and sociology that govern the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Contributors Thalia Anthony University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Morgan Brigg University of Queensland, Saint Lucia, Australia Lilly Brown University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Bronwyn Carlson Macquarie University, North Sydney, Australia

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Editors and Contributors

Dave Collis University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Katherine Ellinghaus La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia Ryan Frazer Macquarie University, North Sydney, Australia Barry Judd Charles Darwin University, Alice Springs, Australia Jack Latimore University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Sarah Maddison University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Kerry McCallum University of Canberra, Bruce, Australia Nikki Moodie University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Sana Nakata University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia David Nolan University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Libby Porter RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Margaret Simons Monash University, Clayton, Australia Lisa Waller Deakin University, Burwood, Australia

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

Indigenous Course Award Completions (2001–2016). Note Adapted from “Award Course Completions (2016)—Table 14: Award Course Completions for Indigenous Students by Level of Course (2001–2016)”, by the Department of Education and Training (2017). Retrieved from https://docs.education.gov. au/node/45246. Copyright 2017 by the Department of Education and Training, Australian Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indigenous Doctorate by Research Completions (2005–2016). Note Adapted from “Award Course Completions (2016)—Table 14: Award Course Completions for Indigenous Students by Level of Course (2001–2016)”, by the Department of Education and Training (2017). Retrieved from https://docs. education.gov.au/node/45246. Copyright 2017 by the Department of Education and Training, Australian Government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disrupting narratives of Indigenous disengagement . . . . . . . . . . . Year 9 National Minimum Standards (2008–2015). Note Adapted from “Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2016,” by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, Productivity Commission, Australian Government. Data extracted from Chap. 4. Attachment Tables: (1) 2015 NMS data: Table 4A.4.13, Table 4A.4.14, Table 4A.4.15. (2) 2014 NMS data: Table 4A.4.25, Table 4A.4.26, Table 4A.4.27. (3) 2013 NMS data: Table 4A.4.37, Table 4A.4.38, Table 4A.4.39. (4) 2012 NMS data: Table 4A.4.49, Table 4A.4.50, Table 4A.4.51. (5) 2011 NMS data: Table 4A.4.61, Table 4A.4.62, Table 4A.4.63. (6) 2010 NMS data: Table 4A.4.73,

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109 111

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Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

List of Figures

Table 4A.4.74, Table 4A.4.75. (7) 2009 NMS data: Table 4A.4.85, Table 4A.4.86, Table 4A.4.87. (8) 2008 NMS data: Table 4A.4.97, Table 4A.4.98, Table 4A.4.99 . . . . . . . . . . . Indigenous human rights violations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supporting Indigenous wellbeing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

114 115 118

List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Progress on Closing the Gap targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metalanguage for Indigenous education research . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Reconciliation, Recognition, Responsibility Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata Abstract This book is the first in a new series devoted specifically to understanding and transforming Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world. The series aims to bring together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-settler relations series will focus sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally. The multi-faceted approach to Indigenous-settler relations that will define the series seeks to capture how questions of relationality are already being asked by scholars across disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, media, and cultural studies. As the first volume in the series, this book seeks to define this emerging field. In the chapters that follow, both Indigenous and nonIndigenous authors explore Indigenous-settler relations in terms of what the relational characteristics are, who steps into these relations and how, the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect, where these relations exist around the world and the variations the relations take on in different places, and why these relations are important for the examination of social and political life in the twenty-first century.

On 26 May 2017, a group of well-known Indigenous people stood in the red desert sand near Uluru to read the ‘Statement from the Heart’. Broadcast by national media, this was the culmination of months of deliberation among Indigenous peoples in S. Maddison · S. Nakata (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Maddison e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_1

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specially convened dialogues around the continent. It was a stunning moment. The statement produced during the convention at Uluru asserted the enduring nature care and custodianship of Indigenous sovereignty over Australia’s land and seas for millennia. It diagnosed the ‘torment’ of Indigenous powerlessness and called for structural change in the relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler Australia. The two key proposals advanced in the statement—for a constitutionally enshrined ‘Voice to Parliament’ and for the creation of a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of agreement-making and truth telling—rested on the desire for Australian First Nations to be heard by the settler mainstream. The authors of the statement described Makarrata—a Yolngu word meaning ‘the coming together after a struggle—as capturing Indigenous aspirations for ‘a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.’ The statement concluded with an invitation for all Australian people to join in a movement to achieve the enactment of these proposals, and the creation of a new chapter in Indigenous-settler relations in Australia (Referendum Council, 2017). For many around the country—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—the statement was a moment of surprise and hope. Having been asked to consider what form of constitutional recognition would most satisfy Indigenous peoples, the Referendum Council process had produced more expansive proposals for structural reform than many had expected. For others (see for example Mansell, 2017; Murphy, Graham, & Brigg, 2017), the moment produced only disappointment and cynicism—disappointment that the Australian Constitution, seen by many Indigenous people as an illegitimate document, was still at the centre of proposals, and cynicism about both the process and the political response. Certainly, the initial response from the political class was muted, and as the year rolled on the divide between public support for the statement and political obfuscation seemed to grow. Eventually, in October 2017, the then prime minister Turnbull (2017) rejected the statement, claiming that the proposed ‘Voice’ would amount to a third chamber of parliament that would undermine parliamentary sovereignty. Turnbull ignored the proposal for Makarrata altogether. Here, then, was another defining moment in Indigenous-settler relations in Australia. Contemporary settler colonialism such as that found in Australia produces what non-Indigenous political scholar Brigg (2016, p. 342) describes as a ‘uniquely tangled politics.’ Despite an undeniable claim as the First Peoples of this continent, Indigenous peoples remain dispossessed and displaced minorities on their own territories, governed by an invading power and caught up in ‘settler projects of identity and belonging’—still seeking, as the Statement from the Heart made clear, to be heard. Settlers, meanwhile, try variously to evade responsibility for the harms of colonialism, seeking redemption from colonial violence and reconciliation in the present, but without relinquishing any of the power, property, or privilege that colonialism has provided. While these relations are not monolithic, they are structured into the very foundations of our society. The challenge of transforming these relations then is complex, multi-faceted, multi-generational, and—in the case of scholarship—most definitely multi-disciplinary.

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This book is the first in a new series devoted specifically to understanding these challenges, and to transforming Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world. The series aims to bring together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-settler relations series will focus sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally. The multi-faceted approach to Indigenous-settler relations that will define the series seeks to capture how questions of relationality are already being asked by scholars across disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, media, and cultural studies. As the first volume in the series, this book seeks to define this emerging field. In the chapters that follow, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors explore Indigenous-settler relations in terms of what the relational characteristics are, who steps into these relations and how, the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect, where these relations exist around the world and the variations the relations take on in different places, and why these relations are important for the examination of social and political life in the twenty-first century. The editors of this series and of this book are a non-Indigenous Australian scholar, Sarah Maddison, and Torres Strait Islander scholar, Sana Nakata. Together, they co-direct a research unit, the Indigenous-Settler Relations Collaboration, at The University of Melbourne. An early key piece of business for the new research unit was to open the field of ‘Indigenous-settler relations’ study to critical discussion from across a number of social science and humanities disciplines. This critical discussion, which took place through a two-day research workshop in late 2018, is captured—in part—by the chapters in this volume. Despite being co-located in the discipline of politics, Sarah and Sana came to the work reflected in this volume from very different perspectives and at different stages of their career. Prior to her academic career, Sarah had worked as a youth worker in the inner-Sydney suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo—a hub of Indigenous politics and activism. This work forced her to confront the deep silences about Australian settler colonialism, in both her education and her family that had left her poorly equipped to navigate contemporary Indigenous-settler relations. Addressing her own ignorance became a priority and, years later as an academic, she committed to engaging with these silences in a professional capacity. As a result, Sarah has spent most of the past 15 years researching and writing about Indigenous politics and Indigenous-settler relations. For Sarah, transforming the politics of Indigenous-settler relations remains an urgent task. On the other hand, Sana had spent much of her studies and early career avoiding Indigenous research. This should not be interpreted as self-loathing, but a strategic response to the ways in which tertiary institutions continue to stereotype and

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subjugate the contributions of Indigenous students in the classroom. Sana’s research through her politics and legal education came to rest strongly upon an interest in the politics of childhood. However, in order to be rigorous and diligent about this research trajectory and emerging expertise, it quickly became apparent that one cannot research the politics of childhood in Australia, and not take seriously the many ways in which Indigenous Australian children’s lives are governed, regulated and controlled. For Sana, the politics of childhood is deeply bound up with questions of Indigenous-settler relations. The work of the Indigenous-Settler Relations Collaboration takes place in a context where, for settlers, settler colonialism tends to be naturalised and invisible, operating in the background of a nation widely regarded as a successful, multicultural liberal democracy. One of the key dynamics of settler colonialism is the settler desire to locate colonialism in the past, as an terrible but necessary process that has now been completed through what might be identified as ‘a moment of political break’ (Strakosch, 2015, p. 21). Such moments often centre on ideas of Indigenous recognition and inclusion, involving much of the discourse and practice we have come to associate with a process of reconciliation. Where recognition has been understood by Indigenous critics as ‘the governing impetus of settlement’, used to ‘regulate, administer and discipline’ the Indigenous subject (Simpson, 2014, p. 13), reconciliation has often seemed more relational. Reconciliation proposes a focus on ideas of historical trauma and healing as a means of mending broken relationships, a necessary step in any move to greater justice and equity. In practice, however, a focus on past trauma can function to further erase the complexities of Indigenous life in the present. Settlers tend to have only ‘ruptured understandings of Indigeneity’—Indigeneity as geographically and historically positioned in ways that belie the complexity and multiplicities of the contemporary lives of Indigenous peoples—and limited capacity to embody responsible, ethical and just relations with Indigenous peoples (Daigle, 2019, p. 6). The actions of settler states toward reconciliation often remain symbolic in intent, more concerned with a desire for national unity than with ‘actually transforming the conditions that perpetuate violence, domination, and denial of rights’ (Whyte, 2018, p. 280). Settlers, it seems, desire redemption more than transformation. The reality of course is that no such redemption is possible. Settler colonialism, both as an ongoing practice and as a memory in possible decolonised futures, puts in place modes of relationality between Indigenous peoples and settlers—whatever form these relations might take. Our use of the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler’ as central to the framing of this work is intended to convey the reality of the power relations that produce, and are reproduced in, settler colonial societies. Any binary such as this is inevitably problematic, and never quite as rigid a division as might be assumed—many Indigenous people share settler heritage and many settlers share Indigenous heritage, all of our identities are complex and layered. But as political signifiers these terms make it clear that Indigenous-settler relations cannot be neutral. None of us are outside or above these relationships (Maddison, 2019).

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1.1 Why Indigenous? For Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism has produced structural formations and material and emotional affects that make thinking about Indigenous-settler relations unavoidable. Indigenous peoples have unique relationships with the settler order, unlike any other ‘minority’ group. Indigenous peoples are dispossessed First Nations; the peoples on a colonised territory before the colonisers arrived. The change in their status—becoming colonised peoples—has occurred without their consent. Unlike those members of migrant communities who were able to choose to become members and citizens of the settler society (noting Australia’s history of forced migration), Indigenous peoples have not willingly ceded their territories or their sovereignty over these territories (Short, 2005, p. 272). Yet, as the seminal theorist of settler colonialism, Wolfe (2016, p. 2), has observed, the role that colonialism assigns to Indigenous peoples is for them to disappear, co-opted into unequal relations with settlers through elimination and specific forms of racialisation. Muldoon (2005, p. 250) has suggested that modes or relational engagement such as reconciliation have ‘created a public space in which the experiences of Indigenous peoples can “appear”’. That an institution such as reconciliation is required in order for Indigenous peoples to become visible to settlers says much about the nature of the relationship. While colonial relations may not be central to the way Indigenous peoples frame or live their lives, neither are they ever invisible to them (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, 2014, pp. 9–10). As Dene scholar Coulthard (2014, p. 7) argues, settlercolonial relationships are characterised by particular forms of power and domination that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and autonomy. Where Indigenous peoples raise awareness of the critical issues requiring attention in order to create more just relations, settler nations and their citizens often do not follow through with transformative actions (Whyte, 2018, p. 280). Indeed, settler attempts at reconciliation have tended to further empower settler states by facilitating a belief that settlers ‘occupy firm moral grounds’ in their treatment of and engagement with Indigenous peoples. As in the case of the rejection of the Statement from the Heart, Indigenous ‘demands’ are recast as ‘undemocratic’ and disruptive, as Potawatomi environmental justice advocate and philosopher Whyte (2018, p. 282) argues: It seems that Indigenous/settler reconciliation amounts to processes that transfigure Indigenous peoples into dependents or special sovereigns who are clamouring for settler nations to grant them undue privileges and benefits. And settler nations and citizens gain additional empowerment – whether through institutions, actions, or communications – to exercise something like a right to judge whether Indigenous peoples are good or bad dependents, sovereigns, or citizens.

Such an approach is at odds with Indigenous self-understandings and must inevitably confound efforts at relational transformation. The decolonisation of settler-colonial relationships ‘will not be a settler-determined process. It will be an Indigenous ‘resurgence’ that is not premised on settler recognition’ (Veracini, 2015, p. 103). Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and lived experience must be centred in relational work.

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Settlers have always sought to control and regulate Indigeneity, policing not only freedom of movement and association, but also seeking to determine questions of identity and authenticity. The demands of the settler in this regard are contradictory and confounding. On the one hand Indigenous peoples have been (at times forcibly) called upon to assimilate into white settler culture. At other times, and through legal regimes such as native title, Indigenous people must demonstrate an ‘enduring authenticity’ in order to access settler-authorised rights (Povinelli, 2002). Indigeneity tends to be most valued by settler society when it involves cultural sites in remote locations that ‘do not trouble settler sovereignty’ (Brigg, 2016, p. 344). Indigenous peoples have been ‘nearly suffocated’ by the labels and structures imposed by the settler, leaving them with ‘no other choice than to insist on our right to speak back … to build and represent our own world of meaning and significance’ (Dodson, 2003, p. 28). In Australia, the colonising culture brought an ‘intrusive gaze’ to Indigenous lives, changing Indigeneity ‘from being a daily practice to being ‘a problem to be solved” (Dodson, 2003, p. 27). Negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples abound, and in order to challenge these, as Wakaya scholar Paradies (2006, p. 357) suggests, Indigenous people are drawn into acts of public confession about their ‘intimate subjectivities’, declaring details of ancestry and family history in ways never required of settlers. For Paradies, as for many others (including one of the editors of this volume), these histories bring both colonised and coloniser together in one embodied experience of contemporary Indigenous-settler relations. At the same time, Indigenous relations to the settler state may seem confusing and frustrating to settlers. Globally, Indigenous peoples continue to propose and lead approaches to reconciliation with the settler, including constitutional reform, treaties, and the creation of truth-telling processes that can facilitate restorative and reparative justice processes that privilege ‘healing, accountability, and territorial reclamation’ (Whyte, 2018, p. 279). Indigenous people have and will continue to make claims for political, social, cultural and economic autonomy, even as they demand that the state accord them the full rights and dignity of citizenship. As Strakosch (2015, p. 22) argues, Indigenous people continue to demand inclusion in the modern settler order even as they ‘continue to contest the authority of the state to offer it.’ For Indigenous peoples, one alternative to reconciliation and recognition is what Mohawk scholar Simpson (2014) has described as ‘refusal’—a turning away from the settler state and the forms of recognition it might accommodate but which do little to disrupt the structural arrangements settler colonialism, and a turn towards Indigenous values, ethics, and institutions. Other critical Indigenous scholars frame these relations as centred on practices of Indigenous ‘resurgence’ aimed at rebuilding Indigenous nations and centring ‘transformative alternatives’ to the colonial present (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 2). Such critical Indigenous perspectives are more than reasonable, and from such perspectives it is also reasonable to understand settler efforts at reconciliation as ‘new forms of the same old system’, barely troubling the settler order while portraying Indigenous peoples as ‘parasites who clamour for aid and special accommodations from benevolent hosts’ (Whyte, 2018, p. 287).

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1.2 Why Settlers? In our work we use the terms ‘settler’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ to refer to any individual or group of people who came to Australia at any time after the first invasion in 1788. ‘Settler’ can be seen as a problematic term, suggesting colonisation as a peaceful process of settlement rather than one of invasion and violence. The purpose of using this term, however, is to shift the frame of reference away from ideas of a naturalised national identity and onto an understanding of settler relations with the land they have occupied, the peoples they have dispossessed and the power that they continue to deploy in unequal colonial relations (Battell Lowman & Barker, 2015, p. 1). As Corey Snelgrove (in Snelgrove et al., 2014, pp. 5–6) has argued ‘There are no good settlers; there are no good colonisers’—all settlers are complicit in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Both settler subject-formation and the governance regimes of settler societies are produced and re-produced in the power relations ‘between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples’, through disavowing dispossession and disavowing Indigenous governance structures as a means of normalising settler regimes (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 5). The logics of settler colonialism are driven by the settler desire for the ownership and occupation of land as an economic and political resource (Strakosch, 2015, p. 40). There is a utility in the term in that it calls attention to the stolen ground on which Indigenous peoples have been forced into relations with unwelcome newcomers (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 27). Whyte (2018) argues that settler privilege means that some combination of our economic security, citizenship, relationship to land and place, mental and physical health, cultural integrity and spiritual life, family values and career aspirations are literally not possible were it not for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The term as we use it in our work is intended to be discomforting and, through this discomfort, ‘provide an impetus for decolonial transformation’ (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 2). For the majority of settlers, suggesting the possibility of decolonial transformation is alarming. As the Unangax critical race scholar Eve Tuck, and non-Indigenous cultural theorist Yang (2012, p. 10) argue in their precisely titled essay ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, what they describe as ‘settler moves to innocence’ involve strategies that seek to relieve settlers of ‘feelings of guilt or responsibility’ without requiring them to give up land or power or privilege; ‘without having to change much at all.’ Non-Indigenous Australian scholar Macoun (2016, p. 86) points out that all settlers are complicit in ongoing colonial relationships: Every person in Australia is always-already engaged with and in race-based colonial systems of rule and what many of us consider to be problematic political relationships; some of us have more opportunities to ignore or evade this reality than others. No politically pure or righteous way of being, acting or thinking as a white person or non-Indigenous person can exempt us from our political context, even though it is a context we collectively create, recreate, and may hope to change.

Certainly, there is no shared view among settlers as to what their relationship with Indigenous peoples ought to be. Brigg (2016, p. 343) has argued that in order to

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understand the settler imaginary we need to disrupt and challenge existing scholarship in order to seriously contest the identities, politics and knowledge produced in settlercolonial societies. In short, most scholarship normalizes settler colonialism through an unwillingness to critically reflect and engage upon its foundational effects. As Strakosch (2015, p. 27) has suggested, ‘Since the first arguments between violent settlers and protective missionaries, there has been constant non-Indigenous debate over whether and how Indigenous people should be included in or excluded from the settler order.’ The deep irony of such debates of course is that they have often taken place without recourse to Indigenous views on the subject. The recent political campaign to ‘Recognise’ Indigenous peoples in the Australian Constitution failed precisely because no one had stopped to ask First Nations what form of recognition they might want. What such failures of process reveal is a neglect of relationality. Not all settlers seek or are able to ignore the processes of how they came to be on Indigenous territories or to celebrate invasion and colonisation, as contemporary nationalism often demands. Many progressive settlers are active in grappling with the implications of their relations both to occupied Indigenous territory and to Indigenous peoples. Snelgrove et al. (2014, p. 6) acknowledges that these historical and contemporary relations lend themselves to shame rather than pride, fuelling anger and alienation both towards other settlers and to the structures of settler-colonialism that continue to shape these unequal relations. Snelgrove suggests, however, that far from being wholly negative such feelings may also ‘signal an opening’, enjoining a recognition of an underappreciated interdependence in Indigenous-settler relations.

1.3 Why Relations? The ‘dense historical entanglements’ of Indigenous-settler relations have created complex dynamics and relational exchanges that alter both selves and identities. Addressing scholarship to this relationality is overdue, particularly given the multiple ways in which scholarship itself is bound up with these same relations (Brigg, 2016, pp. 342–349). What we have suggested thus far is that relations between Indigenous and settler peoples are deeply problematic, resting on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the ongoing settler occupation of their territories. These relations are also unavoidable, and there remain many ways in which the futures of Indigenous peoples remain ‘inextricably bound up’ with the futures of settlers (Sullivan, 2011, p. vii). No matter how autonomous Indigenous peoples and nations might become, no matter the promise of Indigenous resurgence in culture and politics, the settler state will likely remain an encompassing reality for the foreseeable future. In this foreseeable future, relations of various kinds will remain a necessity. Yet while these relations may be inevitable they are not immutable. While ‘settler common sense’ may assert the naturalness or inevitability of settler-colonial ways of belonging, these are, as Veracini (2015, p. 106) has suggested, ‘merely one possibility among many.’ Analysing these relations as sites of ‘contradiction and weakness’ in which we might identify spaces and practices of resistance and resilience to

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colonial domination seems to us to be urgent work (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 27). It is possible that Indigenous-settler relations may be transformed, becoming more respectful, morally grounded, accountable and, ultimately, decolonial. These transformations may both reduce or prevent altogether the harms of settler-colonial institutions, diminishing over time the impacts of racism, discrimination, and trauma that have been intrinsic to colonialism (Whyte, 2018, p. 277). Indigenous peoples’ own articulations of the colonial experience must be centred in work that seeks to avoid the reification or replication of settler modes of domination. Good, or at least better, relations will take ‘time and care, and a willingness to live in contention’ on the stolen ground upon which settlers and Indigenous peoples must relate to one another (Snelgrove et al., 2014, pp. 3–4). Work on Indigenous-settler relations must centre Indigenous knowledge and experience, intercepting settler ignorance and the reproduction of ‘stagnated’ Indigenoussettler relations to conceive of new futures shaped through more just and ethical relations (Sloan Morgan & Castleden, 2014, p. 14). Settler attention to the transformation of these relations …must be guided by accountability and respect, care and renewal, with urgency and insurgency, to address and destroy the parasitical relations that exist between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples, as well as to support those (potentially) good relations that already exist, and those that we wish to establish between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 6)

This work can transcend a focus on the settler state ‘as mediator and site of resolution in colonial encounters’, enabling new visions and possibilities for transforming these relationships through an encounter with ‘other forms of political life that already exist’, allowing us to imagine a different future (Strakosch, 2015, pp. 180–186).

1.4 Perspectives on Indigenous-Settler Relations For all these reasons, we begin this book series with the title Questioning IndigenousSettler Relations as a way to question the many sites of existing, emerging and potential Indigenous-settler relations. As co-editors, Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata find themselves in a sometimes performative mode of Indigenous-Settler relationality. Within this performative mode, one plays the “Indigenous” and the other “Settler”, but as Sana often interjects she is both an Indigenous Australian and also a product of an Indigenous-Settler relationality: not just an intimate, familial relationship grounded in love but also a product of the same Indigenous-Settler relations that bind non-Indigenous Australians. These are the relations that characterise Australia as an unsettled nation that grapples with its colonial foundations and contesting what forms of justice for Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders can be realised. In the chapters that follow, our authors take up questions about the Indigenoussettler relations that bind us to one another and to our country in a range of ways. We have asked these contributors to reflect on two things: how do we question and

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make questions of this thing we are calling ‘Indigenous-settler relations’? What kinds of relational dynamics are at play between Indigenous peoples and settler Australians, across a range of social and political contexts? And how do different disciplinary perspectives and practices contribute to our questioning and understanding of Indigenous-settler relations? In the first chapter, politics scholar, Morgan Brigg, offers a response that attends to the ‘ontological, methodological and political dimensions’ of centering relationality in three modes: thin, thick, thicker. In this chapter, Brigg chooses the vocabulary of ‘original’ and ‘newcomer’ as an attempt to ‘sidestep a priori ontological fixity suggested by ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Settler’. In doing so, he demonstrates how the question of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Settler’ can remain in play, while still exploring the potential of relationality to expand our understanding of what’s at stake, and what’s still possible, in settler-colonial orders. Following this, Thalia Anthony, offers a perspective from the discipline of law, adopting a dialectical approach to relationality to bring ‘into sharp relief state oppression and Aboriginal expression’. Through an analysis of the policing and incarceration of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, where 100% of juvenile inmates are Indigenous, Anthony identifies relations of oppression between Indigenous people and the state, while also complicating Indigenous-settler binaries by centering ‘the role of Indigenous young people and their communities in decentring state power and forcing the state to engage with their lived experiences of restraint with a view to mitigate against them.’ Against this contemporary legal context, Katherine Ellinghaus and Barry Judd explore Indigenous-Settler relationality through the discipline and methodological practices of history, and offer reflection upon these practices as a way of locating themselves in relation to one another as scholars. Their chapter opens with a reflection of the state of the discipline of history, as one caught between the responsibility to produce a careful, analytic and objective account of the past and an ethical responsibility to account for what happens when ‘historical writing gets sent out into the world’. Ellinghaus and Judd are informed by the work of Grieves (2005) and her suggestion to ‘allow the community to direct the focus and content of the research’. What follows is an account of working in partnership, in collaboration, and the ways in which that practice rubs against the methodological norms of ‘history’. When this chapter was work shopped, participants bristled at some accounts and asked serious questions about whether the authors are required to offer a richer analysis of the agency (or its absence) in the research participants’ reflections. Such questions capture the complexity and difficult nuances embedded within Indigenous-settler relations, with historical relations unable to be disentangled from the power dynamics of the past and contemporary relations that must nonetheless grapple with those entanglements in an effort to reorient the power relations of the present. Shifting gears, the book then turns to three accounts of Indigenous-settler relations across the news media, social media and in higher education. All three chapters, in different ways, find themselves describing networks across and between Indigenous peoples and in doing so, highlight the ways in which Indigenous peoples are at once bound to settler relations in a range of ways but also assert and work toward

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new formations of relationality with one another. David Nolan, Lisa Waller, Jack Latimore, Margaret Simons and Kerry McCallum, explore an emergent Indigenoussettler relationality between Indigenous and mainstream media as performed through the relationship between IndigenousX (founded by Luke Pearson) and The Guardian Australia. Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer explore the politics of trust, as a key relational dynamic, in the help-seeking behaviours of Indigenous peoples on social media platforms. They find that Indigenous Australians, informed by a deep distrust of settler institutions, predominantly turn to social media to seek help for health and social support. In doing so, they argue that Indigenous Australians are producing what Taiake Alfred (2005) has expressed as a ‘clearing’: ‘non-colonial spaces in which new relations might be produced outside the mediating logic of elimination.’ Thus, Carlson and Frazer are able to account both for a relation of distrust between Indigenous Australians and settler institutions, and also for established and emergent Indigenous social networks as a potential site of non-colonial relationality. In a different context again, Nikki Moodie complicates the competing success and deficit narratives present in tertiary education discourses, and in doing so is able to point to limited social networks as one persistent problem for Indigenous tertiary students that current narratives are yet to address. This chapter, first presented as a keynote address to the Trinity College Indigenous Higher Education Conference, is a provocation against the anxieties currently held about the ‘deficit discourse’. While Moodie is able to tell the very positive success story of Indigenous higher education transformation, she laments that when we seek to counter deficit in this way we are at risk of overlooking the deep challenges that still remain. That is, she argues, ‘we may well run the risk of succeeding against the metrics we’ve established for ourselves’. The problem is that these metrics are not necessarily the ones that matter for Indigenous peoples and communities, because, as she writes, parity isn’t equity. Even on a parity measure, she observes that if we are to aim to close the gap in Year 12 attainment (rather than just halve it) we are over 100 years away from achieving that goal. Instead, she pushes her audience to think more ambitiously, and to argue that any kind of community of practice around tertiary education has to line up with the goals of Indigenous communities, not the Australian state. In delivering this argument, Moodie pushes her audience toward a deep consideration of modes of relationality in tertiary institutions and their capacity for transforming communities. It was against this that Lilly Brown and David Collis, who are educators in the Bachelor of Arts (Extended) program at the University of Melbourne, made a conference presentation of their own. We include it here because of how it unwittingly took up Moodie’s provocation in the mode of Indigenous-settler relationality. In posing questions to one another about their respective experiences as an Indigenous woman and non-Indigenous man, charged with the duty of creating pathways for educational success for their Indigenous student cohort, Brown and Collis point to the importance of centring Indigenous-settler relationality not just at the structural and institutional level, but as individuals who must teach against deficit in their classrooms everyday. For Moodie, accounting for deficit has a purpose: it allows us to identify and fix problems. But for Brown and Collis, deficit has been a problem that they have

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successfully navigated away from. For Collis, this ‘requires an epistemological humility on our part, particularly on the part of non-Indigenous people, to accept that we only ever partially see what we need to see and to commit to… the caring and trusting partnerships that will enable all of us to thrive.’ Following these three descriptions of Indigenous-settler relations in context, all co-authored by Indigenous and settler scholars, the collection returns to two settler perspectives on relationality. Libby Porter writes of her own experience in learning to live lawfully on Country amongst the Kulin nations, and of her own transformative moment during her PhD studies as one in which she saw the need to shift from a perspective seeking to understand ‘what it would take to “include” Indigenous knowledge within the discipline of planning’ and instead to ask ‘how is the discipline of planning sustained and maintained as if it were the only authority on people-place relationships, in a context where systems and knowledges for governing people-place relations have in fact existed for tens of thousands of generations?’ In describing this, Porter expresses not just a transformation in her own understanding of self within Indigenous-settler relationality but of the responsibilities incumbent on all settler scholars to respond to the disciplining power of the academy. Finally, Sarah Maddison takes up various Indigenous expressions of separatism as having potential to realise a new mode of Indigenous-settler relations that is less inhibited by the power differentials produced by colonial history and extreme minority status, and is instead grounded in the ‘multiple polities [that] already reside on this territory’ and their respective practices of refusal, resurgence, and nation building. Relationality then, persists, even at the horizon of decolonisation comes into view. In supporting Indigenous nations to become fully self-determining, on their own terms, there is potential for a new relationality that might be grounded in a lawful and ethical relation to country, and perhaps, to one another.

References Alfred, T. (2005). Wasase: Indigenous pathways to action and freedom. [Kindle version]. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Battell Lowman, E., & Barker, A. J. (2015). Settler: Colonialism and identity in 21st century Canada. Halifax: Fernwood Press. Brigg, M. (2016). Identity and politics in settler-colonialism: Relational analyses beyond domination? Postcolonial Studies, 19(3), 342–350. Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Daigle, M. (2019). The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1–19. Dodson, M. (2003). The end in the beginning: Re(de)finding aboriginality. In M. Grossman (Ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary critical writings by Indigenous Australians (pp. 25–42). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Grieves, G. (2005). The politics and ethics of writing Indigenous histories. Historical Journal, 33.

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Macoun, A. (2016). Colonising white innocence: Complicity and colonial encounters. In S. Maddison, T. Clark, & R. de Costa (Eds.), The limits of settler colonial reconciliation: Non-Indigenous people and the responsibility to engage. Melbourne: Springer. Maddison, S. (2019). The colonial fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Mansell, M. (2017). Uluru “Statement from the Heart” lacks real teeth and reality. New Matilda. Retrieved August 9, from, 2017 https://newmatilda.com/2017/08/09/uluru-statement-heart-lacksreal-teeth-reality/. Muldoon, P. (2005). Thinking responsibility differently: Reconciliation and the tragedy of colonisation. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(3), 237–254. Murphy, L., Graham, M., & Brigg, M. (2017). The uluru statement: We never ceded sovereignty but can we join yours? NITV News. Retrieved June 23, from, http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitvnews/article/2017/06/22/uluru-statement-we-never-ceded-sovereignty-can-we-join-yours. Paradies, Y. (2006). Beyond black and white: Essentialism, hybridity, and indigeneity. Journal of Sociology, 42(4), 355–367. Povinelli, E. A. (2002). The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Referendum Council. (2017). Uluru statement from the heart. Retrieved May 26, 2017, from https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_ From_The_Heart_0.PDF. Short, D. (2005). Reconciliation and the problem of internal colonisation. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(3), 267–282. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Sloan Morgan, V., & Castleden, H. (2014). Framing Indigenous–Settler relations within British Columbia’s modern treaty context: A discourse analysis of the Maa-nulth Treaty in mainstream media. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 5(3). Retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/iipj/ vol5/iss3/5. Snelgrove, C., Dhamoon, R. K., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity Education and Society, 3(2), 1–32. Strakosch, E. (2015). Neoliberal Indigenous policy: Settler colonialism and the ‘post-welfare’ state. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sullivan, P. (2011). Belonging together: Dealing with the politics of disenchantment in Australian Indigenous policy. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonisation is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Turnbull, M. (2017). Response to the Referendum Council’s report on constitutional recognition. Media release from the Prime Minister, Attorney General and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. Retrieved October 26, 2017, from https://www.pm.gov.au/media/response-referendum-council’sreport-constitutional-recognition. Veracini, L. (2015). The settler colonial present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Whyte, K. P. (2018). On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m sceptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation. Journal of Global Ethics, 14(2), 277–289. Wolfe, P. (2016). Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London: Verso.

Chapter 2

Registers of Relationality for Knowing Indigenous-Settler Politics Morgan Brigg

Abstract The turn to consider relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states necessitates analysis to clarify notions of relationality and to explicate accompanying methodological risks and possibilities. In response, this chapter spells out three registers of relationality for framing analyses of encounters and dynamics between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples. These three registers—‘thin’, ‘thicker’ and ‘thick’ relationality—serve to disaggregate relationality in ontological terms, to delineate methodological approaches to analysing Indigenous-Settler relations, and to reveal the types of political relations between peoples that are suggested and facilitated by how we know. While the chapter does not make a definitive argument for the use of any one register of relationality over another, it shows that that thinking in strongly relational terms is not a familiar way of knowing in dominant western scholarship, and that Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies and socio-political ordering tend to be highly relational in comparison. Moreover, thick relationality offers sophisticated forms of analyses that overcome methodological shortfalls of thin and thicker relationality as well as promising political possibilities by disrupting the comfortable work of categorical delineation and analysis that characterizes much mainstream political and social science. Keywords Entities · Relations · Relationality · Settler-colonialism · Methodology

2.1 Introduction The proposal to explicitly turn attention to relations between Indigenous and nonIndigenous peoples in the settler colonial states (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States) is appealing for a range of reasons that are grounded in the indisputable fact of encounter and sustained engagement between original (Indigenous) and newcomer (Settler) peoples. However, to focus on relations opens a range of challenging questions. What understanding of ‘relation’ is at play, for instance? What M. Brigg (B) University of Queensland, Saint Lucia, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_2

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is the standing of the two entities who relate to each other? Are the relating entities relatively autonomous, or more interdependent, and what does this do to their standing as entities? What are the consequences of thinking in terms of relations for analyses of power and politics amidst colonial conditions? Does a relational frame highlight the play of difference and power relations or does it lead them to be overlooked? These and similar questions frame the political stances and policy approaches of the dominant settler order that have shaped Indigenous lives and Indigenous-Settler relations in the past, and will shape them into the future. Equally, the language of relations suggests the possibility that the dominant are amidst relations that might be reset to move beyond dominance. Making a turn to relations, then, creates an obligation to explicitly think through the ontological, methodological and political dimensions of what it means to think relationally. There is no single or authoritative source to turn to for guidance on relationality or the foregoing questions and challenges. Talk of relations, relationality and relationalism has recently begun to flourish in many fields and relationality has also long been a minor theme in western scholarship (see Emirbayer, 1997; Mesle, 2008; Rosen, 2000; Venn, 2010). Equally crucially, scholarship is beginning to recognise relationality as a central cosmological and methodological frame in Indigenous traditions (see Graham, 1999; Moreton-Robinson, 2016; Reddekop, 2014). A focus on relations, then, is in no way straightforward, both because of the diversity of available sources and because making choices about sources raises questions about the politics of knowledge, including which traditions find expression in academic discourse. Certainly, it is not sufficient to turn only to the mainstream academic scholarship on relationality. Instead, careful effort is necessary to clarify ideas of relationality and to consider the methodological and political risks and possibilities in the study of relations between original and newcomer peoples. This chapter offers an initial response to the foregoing challenge by spelling out three registers of relationality for framing analyses of social, legal and political encounters and dynamics between original and newcomer peoples. My focus is on Australia but the framework could readily be applied in other settings. Identifying three registers along a continuum of relationality—‘thin’, ‘thicker’ and ‘thick’— serves, first, to disaggregate relationality (in ontological terms) by identifying the differing weight that the idea of relation can be given in conceptualising social, legal and political worlds. ‘Thin’ relationality, the closest register to conventional social science analyses, focuses upon relationships among entities (including individuals, organisations, or populations) without questioning how entities come into being. ‘Thicker’ relationality identifies the ways entities are mutually conditioned and changed through interaction. ‘Thick’ relationality gives conceptual priority to relations over entities and thus embraces a more fluid and dynamic understanding of social and political dynamics. Two further interwoven dimensions are crucial. Distinguishing along a continuum of ‘thin’, ‘thicker’ and ‘thick’ versions of relationality helps to identify a range of methodological approaches for knowing Indigenousnewcomer relations. Moreover, this schema helps to reveal the types of political relations between peoples that are suggested and facilitated by how we go about knowing social, political and legal encounters and dynamics between original and

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newcomer peoples. Explicating three registers of relationality assists in framing and elucidating the processes and politics of knowing original-newcomer relations. The schema presented here builds on earlier work (Brigg, 2016b, 2018a, b) and a range of relationality thinkers and scholarship (see Emirbayer, 1997; Haraway, 2016; Jackson & Nexon, 1999; Massumi, 2002; Mesle, 2008; Tilly, 1998; Venn, 2010). It is also informed by allied scholarship in complexity theory, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, emergence and related paradigms (see Lansing, 2006 Miller & Page, 2007; Mosko & Damon, 2005; Urry, 2003). The chapter does not aim to systematically review or engage this literature. Instead it goes directly to the issues at stake, drawing upon relevant literature as necessary or useful. The chapter invokes a large ‘world-historical’ or ‘civilisational’ timescale for approaching original-newcomer relations by noting that original peoples developed and practised political ordering on the Australian continent for tens of thousands of years before any of the usual dominant starting points for reflecting upon politics. In this context, the chapter uses the term ‘newcomer’ to refer to both settlers and recent migrants to the Australian continent. In addition, I use the terms ‘original’ and ‘newcomer’ peoples to avoid a priori ontological assumptions suggested by ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Settler’ that might unduly narrow or close down the conceptualisations of relations in the chapter. Nonetheless, I also in some places make use of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Settler’ to reflect the register of relationality I am discussing and in the interests of readability.

2.2 Thin Relationality: Onward with Entities Thin relationality involves conceptualising and analysing relationships among entities (for example, individual people, organisations, groups of people, or states) without questioning—or indeed providing an account of—how entities come into being. This approach is commonplace, and apparently natural and intuitive, within the dominant tradition of European-derived scholarship (though not necessarily within everyday European lived experience). As thin relationality foregrounds entities or ‘things’, it relies heavily on substantialist (or identitarian) ontologies, which build upon Greek heritage at the centre of mainstream scholarship. In this tradition, entities are understood to be internally consistent and to have a particular ‘substance’ that sets them apart from other things. In the language of Aristotle, ‘denoting the substance of a thing means that the essence of the thing is nothing else’ (Aristotle & McKeon, 1941, p. 740). Relationality and substantialism are frequently contrasted (see Emirbayer, 1997), and to this extent thin relationality is a minimal or limited form of relationality. Thin relationality sits relatively easily with dominant scholarship because it can be powerfully applied to advance causal relationships between entities. The idea that entities are internally consistent and separate also enables knowers to speak with a degree of confidence and certainty about social and political dynamics.

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Turning to original-newcomer relations, it makes sense for many reasons to draw upon the categories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and variations on these terms. The racialised description and ordering of peoples was central to how newcomer Europeans engaged with original people in the early decades of colonisation. This pattern has evolved, but more or less continued. While race has been replaced in many analyses by the more palatable notion of culture, the Europeanderived approach of specifying two broadly different peoples, although explicitly challenged to some degree and at some stages by the language of assimilation policy, has continually done a great deal to shape and order both everyday and scholarly understandings of original-newcomer relations. This distinction enables analyses of the highly asymmetric relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that seems to be a foundational and enduring feature of Australian socio-political life. Overall, the specification of categories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples appears both intuitive—at least too many—and methodologically useful. The political entailments of analyses that fall within the register of thin relationality are diverse. On one hand, most dominant scholarship, mobilizing thin relationality mirrors colonial politics by casting original people in a diminished and diminutive way vis-à-vis newcomers (see Coltheart, 1983). The responsibility for this political effect, though, cannot be strongly linked to thin relationality itself. This is because the political associations of thin relationality scholarship can be reversed in critical scholarship that speaks back to dominance. For instance, while asserting Indigenous law as prior, sovereign and separate from newcomer law, Irene Watson asks: ‘by what lawful authority do you come to our lands? What authorises your efforts to dispossess us?’ (2012, p. 12). And Aileen Moreton-Robinson asserts the ontological distinctness of Indigenous people while underscoring the founding violence of a migrant society: ‘the values required to establish the nation as a white possession are those that were also required to dispossess Indigenous people of their lands’ (2015, p. 31). In other settler-colonial settings the language of ‘resurgence’ similarly invokes Indigenous distinctiveness (see Alfred & Corntassel, 2005; Borrows, 2002; Simpson, 2011). What, then, might be the problems with thin relationality? Perhaps there is no problem with relationality if it is intuitive and useful for knowing dynamics between original and newcomer peoples, and it is not tied to any particular political stance. Most particularly, if it enables critical Indigenous voices perhaps that is sufficient to advance knowledge of original-newcomer relations. However, advocates of stronger forms of relationality argue that thin relational (or substantialist) approaches cannot provide an account of how entities come into being and how they change (Jackson & Nexon, 1999). Elucidating these methodological shortfalls, moreover, helps to demonstrate wider political shortfalls of thin relationality. One way to begin to consider the problems of thin relationality is by observing that there were no ‘Indigenous’ people on the continent prior to European arrival. The very category of Aboriginality/Indigeneity only comes about through colonisation (Langton, 1993, p. 32). While it is hard to definitively specify original peoples’ forms of self-knowing prior to colonisation, it seems very likely that the category of Aboriginality/Indigeneity is imported and laid over the top of various self-descriptions—Wurundjeri, Darumbal, Kabi Kabi, Arrente and so on.

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Substantialism, and hence thin relationality, does not have a satisfactory explanation of how original peoples become ‘indigenous’ because it simply takes entities to be pre-existing in order to analyse Aboriginal/Indigenous peoples, and to turn to analysis of relations with newcomer peoples. Thin relationality assumes entities to exist without asking how they come into being. In the case of Aboriginality/Indigeneity it relies, implicitly, on a form of biological reductivism drawn from European thought, or upon an updated version of reductivism that essentialises human difference. Because thin relationality relies upon assumed entities it also cannot readily explain how the entities/categories ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ (and similar terms) change through time though encounters and relations between people. It is only during the very early phases of colonisation that these entities might be able to stand in the form designated by Aristotle as ‘denoting the substance of a thing means that the essence of the thing is nothing else’ (Aristotle & McKeon, 1941, p. 740). However, from very early encounters onward there has been, and continues to be, significant entanglement of original and newcomer people that make metaphors like the ‘frontier’ questionable (Morrison, 2018). It thus becomes necessary to consider the possibility that ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ never really existed, were at least partially produced, or need to be reconceptualised as an effect of gradual and mutual transformations. Of course, it is necessary to also allow that part of this transformation involves the sustaining of categories of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ in the pursuit of political projects such as the pursuit of rights, especially in recent decades. The foregoing shortfalls—assuming entities to exist and an inability to account for change—point to a further and wider problem by showing that the category Indigenous (and hence non-Indigenous) derives, at least in the early phases of colonisation, from European ideas and conceptual schema. This raises the question: is there another way, other than that specified by dominant European thought, of approaching this early encounter and interaction among peoples at the point of colonisation? Why should Darumbal, Kabi Kabi and other peoples have their very being named and defined by the relation that comes with colonisation? How did Wurundjeri, Darumbal, Kabi Kabi and other peoples think of their early encounters and relations with newcomers? Asking these questions is crucial to grappling with the politics of knowing in the settler-colonial setting. To not ask these questions is to subject original peoples to the colonisers’ ways of knowing. To say that thin relationality is ‘intuitive’ or enables diverse political scholarship in the present masks these ways of knowing and consolidates colonial violence in scholarship. Carving peoples into categories on racialised terms owes too much to European knowledge, even if it may be methodologically and politically useful. On this basis, thin relationality should not dominate conceptions of relations between original and newcomer peoples. What, then, can be done to move away from the dominance of the colonisers’ ways of knowing? Is it possible to say how diverse original peoples of the Australian continent dealt with, for their part, the challenge of encountering difference? In reports from the colonial frontier, it is clear that a common way in which original peoples sought to come to terms with colonisation, and to resolve the great moral

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dilemmas arising from the often indiscriminate violence of Europeans, was to classify ‘Whites as deceased Aboriginal people’ (Swain, 1993, p. 122). As Tony Swain is at pains to point out, this is not a quaint misunderstanding but rather a ‘conceptual equation’ (original emphasis) that attempts to account for the foreign and alien nature of newcomers without closing the door to them. Swain explains that ‘[t]he value of defining intruders as deceased kinsfolk was that it provided a mechanism for expanding the pre-existent cosmologically and morally established social order to accommodate alien people’ (Swain, 1993, p. 123). Classifying whites as a form of kin is a type of invitation, and one that is profoundly relational. Europeans are invited to ‘modify their behaviour and (re-)establish morally acceptable relations with their former kin’ (Swain, 1993, p. 123). Swain points out that this phenomenon ‘does not appear to have persisted for long as a significant factor in structuring colonial ethnic relations’ (1993, p. 122). That is perhaps to be expected given the extent of devastation wreaked on the frontier and an overall European refusal to engage with original people on their terms. Nonetheless, it is possible to point to the transference of this phenomenon and the continuation of the relational register. This is sometimes articulated quite directly, such as through the Warumpi Band’s (1996) call in the song Blackfella/Whitefella: ‘We need more brothers, if we’re to make it/We need more sisters, if we’re to save it/Are you the one that’s gonna stand up and be counted’. It also manifests in regular attempts to make newcomers responsible as agents for change on Indigenous terms (see Brigg & Tonnaer, 2008). Perhaps most pervasively, there continues to be much intimate entanglement of non-Indigenous people in Indigenous families and other social settings, evincing a high level of openness to relational responsibility on the part of Indigenous people. The fact that European categories can be expected to dominate in the context of highly asymmetric settler-colonial societies makes it all the more necessary to consider the possibility that thin relationality (that gives priority to entities) does not align well with relational Indigenous cosmological and socio-political orders. A stronger version of this argument would assert that while thin relationality is the dominant formal ontology of newcomers, it is far from the dominant ontology of Indigenous people; where the former creates and sustain distinctions, the latter works through relational cosmology and socio-political ordering that enables the incorporation of difference. To insist on thin relationality in these circumstances is to deny the ontologies of original peoples and continue colonisation through the politics of knowledge. The critique of thin relationality offered here, then, generates two sets of objections. First, foregrounding entities through thin relationality does not provide an account of how entities, in this case the categories of Indigenous and Settler/nonIndigenous peoples, come into being and change through time. While the posited categories spring from encounter, how these categories arise is passed over, as is the change of the entities/categories through ongoing entanglement. To this extent thin relationality cannot adequately understand Indigenous or Settler peoples, or their interactions. Second, considering how categories were established in the early stages of colonisation shows that categories such as ‘Aboriginal’ derive from and reflect newcomer rather than original peoples’ cosmological and ontological assumptions.

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Using thin relationality to engage with original-newcomer relations therefore risks reflecting rather than critically engaging with the colonial foundations of dominant knowledge production. The implication of the foregoing critique is that there are grounds for setting aside thin relationality. However, doing so is not easy and may not be wholly desirable. Thin relationality feels intuitive to many people (both newcomer and original, non-Indigenous and Indigenous), enables apparently commonsense distinctions to be drawn and facilitates highly critical as well as more conventional scholarship. Furthermore, regardless of the possibilities of stronger forms of relationality (to be elaborated further below), all peoples construct categories and entities of some form to make sense of their world. That can take the form, for instance, of ‘unfinished objectivation’—the process of making from relations entities that are both differentiated and linked within a relational worldview (Di Giminiani & Gálv, 2018). Conversely, it may be that while objects per se might not have strong ontological standing for some Indigenous peoples, a relation, like the wind or the tide may have greater standing as a phenomenon in the world. To further examine the possibilities and options for conceptualising relations between Indigenous and newcomer peoples it is useful to turn to ‘thicker’ relationality.

2.3 Thicker Relationality: Mutually-Conditioned Existence Thicker relationality emphasises the ways entities are mutually conditioned and changed through interaction. This moderately strong form of relationality asserts, for instance, that no individual, organisation or state can exist unaffected by others or apart from the relations that constitute them. Thicker understandings of relationality challenge mainstream social science efforts to understand the world primarily in terms of entities or substances. If an entity arises in relation to another entity, gaining its characteristics through exchange, then its ‘substance’ is less important than the relations it shares with other entities (Brigg, 2016b). Thicker relationality suggests that ‘what distinguishes subject from subject, subject from object, or object from object is mutual relation rather than substance’ (Schaab, 2013, p. 1975). Turning to original-newcomer relations, thicker relationality resonates well with the rich empirical reality of mutually entangled relations between original and newcomer peoples. To this extent, thicker relationality immediately appears far more methodologically satisfactory than thin relationality for approaching and analysing original-newcomer relations—including in terms of change, a key methodological shortfall of thin relationality. For instance, Austin-Broos (1996, 2001) shows how Arrente ontological forms have been affected and changed by colonial encounter and interactions. Interlacing influences are common in Indigenous art (see McLean, 2000). In the governance of Indigenous organisations, David Martin challenges ideas of a fully autonomous Indigenous domain: ‘nowhere in Australia do indigenous people live in self-defining and self-reproducing worlds of meaning and practices; rather they inhabit complex and contested intercultural worlds’ (2003, p. iv). (Of course,

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Indigenous peoples have been quite remarkably able to insist on and maintain their identities and ways of being in the face of relentless colonial onslaught, but the conditions of settler-colonialism mean that this occurs in ‘complex and contested intercultural worlds’). A thicker relationality register also seems to offer more nuance than thin relationality to the extent that it allows that entities persist even as they change through time. Austin-Broos, discussing Arrente people in Central Australia, argues that ‘local Aboriginal culture’ is ‘still specifying for the Indigenous people involved’ despite ‘extensive change’ (2001, p. 189). McLean shows that Lin Onus compellingly articulates an Indigenous identity in hybrid form (McLean, 2000). And Martin advocates Indigenous ‘strategic engagement’ to develop ‘distinctively indigenous institutions’ (2003, p. iv). Thicker relationality is far better equipped than thin relationality to analyse the dynamics and mechanisms of interaction and change between original and newcomer peoples. Yet despite these benefits, thicker relationality shares with thin relationality the problem of not being able to provide an adequate account of how entities come into being. It assumes entities—in this case by assuming original difference between Indigenous and Settler/non-Indigenous peoples—and then turns to how interaction modifies and transforms entities and categories. The political implications of a thicker relationality frame are also mixed. In comparison to thin relationality, thicker relationality does not provide the same ready platform for specifying Indigenous difference. But like thin relationality, the thicker register can both reflect dominant political dynamics and be deployed to analyse or challenge them. The first pattern is partly evident in the above examples to the extent that they primarily reflect on Indigenous rather than non-Indigenous change. Austin-Broos, for instance, argues that Western Arrente people undergo an ‘ontological shift’ (the move to a sedentary mission order and then to a system of outstations are key moments) that is ‘an historical affair, a demanding work in progress’ (Austin-Broos, 2013, p.119). By analysing existing realities, thicker relationality can tend to facilitate the following—and hence perhaps embedding—of dominant political relations. The risk here is that the Indigenous party to the relationship is scrutinized and explicitly or implicitly focused upon as the party who changes or needs to change (see Anderson, 1997; Dodson, 1994) while the non-Indigenous is affirmed and strengthened through time. Such risks manifest in scholarship that is positive about transformations that have emerged as a result of self-determination era of policy-making. Tim Rowse, for example, suggests that settler-liberal democratic institutions and rights have provided benefits for Indigenous people that justify the accompanying and necessary transformations. He points out that legislated provisions for Indigenous corporations provide significant opportunities for Indigenous collective organisation and self-expression (Rowse, 2015). Rowse notes that incorporation ‘undoubtedly puts pressure on those

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who attempt it’ but suggests that the accompanying adaption to ‘prevailing norms of governance enables them politically and is worth the effort of self-transformation’ (Rowse, 2015, p. 186). He sees these developments as part the development of a vibrant ‘Australian Indigenous political culture’ (Rowse, 2015, p. 198). Rowse is empirically correct, but his claim that the self-transformation involved is ‘worth the effort’ is questionable because it apparently accepts the existing conditions of settler-colonial liberalism. That is, his analysis overlooks the normative implications of highly asymmetric power relations of settler-colonialism. This type of analysis can be read, especially in the context of decolonial politics, as another continuation of the denial of Indigenous polities and people because it implies that the identities and forms of self-expression that Indigenous people can and should take up are those that are on offer through settler-liberalism. The attention to relative Indigenous powerlessness in processes of change thus tends to naturalise liberal-settler analyses and presence while serving to facilitate and extend the denial of expressions of Indigenous polities and people (Coltheart, 1983, p. 43). The fact that thicker relationality has operated in the foregoing ways does not mean that it might not be mobilised in other ways. If a more critical orientation is adopted—relevant resources in contemporary scholarship include settler-colonial studies, critical Indigenous studies, and decolonial studies—there is no reason why it is not possible to adopt a more balanced approach to the interplay of original and newcomer peoples from within a thicker relationality frame. This work has started with non-Indigenous practices and identities beginning to be examined in the context of relations with original peoples (see Cowlishaw, 1999; Kowal, 2015; Land, 2015; Morrison, 2018; Macoun & Strakosch, 2013). Thicker relationality thus enables analyses that do not naturalise settler dominance, are open to change by both Indigenous and Settler peoples, and pay more careful attention to the power dynamics of relations between Indigenous and Settler peoples. Thicker relationality also promises opportunities for articulating the solidity of an Indigenous stance without some of the methodological shortfalls of thin relationality while allowing for more dynamism and mobility than does thin relationality, including to account for how both parties change through time. In sum, thicker relationality provides a methodological approach that is more sophisticated than thin relationality, but it shares thin relationality’s problem of not being able to account for the origins of entities. Politically, thicker relationality may have historically been deployed in ways that risks quietism by implicitly endorsing the overwhelming of one party in the relation, but it is not intrinsically problematic. Indeed, while thicker relationality provides a platform that is less fixed and less about difference when compared with thin relationality, it is no less politically strong for its focus instead on Indigenous agency and continuity through relations of both time and space (see Anderson, 1997).

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2.4 Thick Relationality: Opening to Encounter, Flow and Difference ‘Thick’ relationality gives priority to relations over entities, embracing a more fluid understanding of social and political dynamics than either thin or thicker relationality (Brigg, 2016b). In other terms, thick relationality suggests that we should ‘not only see relations between things but things as relations’ (Strathern, 1995, p. 19). By emphasising dynamism, process, and the emergent formation of entities, thick relationality suggests that relations ‘are ontologically more fundamental than … entities themselves’ (Wildman, 2010, p. 55). Thick relationality is a minor thread in dominant western scholarship—perhaps the earliest instance is Heraclitus’ dictum ‘everything flows’ (or ‘streams’)—but interest has burgeoned in recent decades. Meanwhile, thickly relational cosmologies are important for many Indigenous peoples and this is increasingly reflected in contemporary Indigenous scholarship (see Graham, 1999; Moreton-Robinson, 2016; Rogers, 2018). Relationality is also well documented in ethnographic analysis with Stanner noting, for instance, that phenomena of inter-relatedness are the centre of Aboriginal cosmology and socio-political ordering (1979, p. 34). Thick relationality, then, potentially orients analysis both more expansively and in ways that are more consistent with Indigenous cosmologies. Equally, thick relationality is likely to be a relatively less intuitive approach for many. Considering first encounters in original-newcomer relations, thick relationality frees analysis from the need to assert categories that come with thin and thicker relationality. This, in turn, enables fuller consideration of the range of possibilities for encounter than those typically suggested within a thin relationally frame. As already discussed, the very category of Aboriginality/Indigeneity only emerges through a relation that comes with colonisation. However, it is also the case that the category ‘British’, the other party to first encounter, is also questionable. The fact that British people are out-of-place, away from the European metropole, affects their standing and identity. The era of formal European colonialism was accompanied by anxieties about how encounters with other peoples could affect and potentially compromise both individual national identities (in particular) and European-ness more broadly. In these circumstances the very idea and forms of European-ness was developed and refined through colonial relations (Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 1995a, b). The identities of both Indigenous and Settler, then, were not established prior to encounter but only through encounter and relations. It follows, then, that possibilities of encounter included not only the differentiation and violence that unfolded though Governor Phillip’s grasping and ultimately inept efforts to engage Indigenous people (Stanner, 1979, pp. 198–201)—a pattern repeated in many other locales—but also the possibilities of reciprocity, understanding, and communion that can be glimpsed, for instance, in the diaries of Watkin Tench (Tench and Flannery 1996). The depth of possibility for relationally transforming identities in encounters is represented in its perhaps most adventurous and sophisticated form in the early efforts of Aboriginal people, noted earlier, to establish relations with Settlers through

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kinship-based cosmological order by classifying them ‘as deceased Aboriginal people’ (Swain, 1993, p. 122). Here, obviously different (European) people are invited to enter into relation though a system of socio-political order, which is also, in the face of change, able to open to difference. To redress colonial prejudice, it is important to note that this possibility is a human creation. As Stanner points out, the Indigenous system in play is neither a ‘natural’ or religious phenomenon but rather a secular human achievement; an ‘intricate… intellectual and social achievement of a high order’ (1979, p. 33). In a more everyday sense, the pragmatic and sometimes intimate accommodations that developed on cattle stations (Cowlishaw, 1999) among other settings, demonstrate the human possibilities for thick forms of relationality that do not begin with or proceed from thin relational approaches to original-newcomer relations. More broadly, identities are in constant relation. Langton (1993, p. 31) points outs that ‘Aboriginality arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book’. While more fluid than either thin or thicker relationality, a thick relationality register is also able to account for and analyse violence, including by tracing the creation and sustaining of categories. Whereas thin and thicker relationality assume entities, thick relationality requires that analysis grapple with the making of categories and their maintenance. This requires turning to how Indigeneity and other categories are formed, and hence to the politics of interactions among peoples. Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon argue that the formation of entities begins as ‘local interaction gradually tosses up stable properties defining two “sides”’ (1999, p. 314). The world begins to be cut up in a particular way and, in a next stage, the ‘sides’ serve as protoboundaries as they become ‘yoked’ together. The yoking process links sides to form the inside of one entity (1999, p. 314). The categories of Indigenous and Settler are likely created more rapidly than the category of the state that Jackson and Nexon discuss, including because of readily available European means for making sides. The process of creating sides and then entities can be seen in Governor Phillip’s hamfisted attempts to engage Indigenous people (Stanner, 1979, pp. 198–201) with the boundaries here (and in other early encounters) produced through race and power relations, including through violence. Scholarship of Indigenous-Settler relations has paid relatively little attention to the making of ‘sides’ and boundaries through encounters (though for some examples see Morrison, 2018; Paradies, 2006), or to how these have gone on to generate sustained entities in subsequent decades. Thick relationality has distinct methodological and political advantages over thin and thicker relationality because it can explain how entities arise and examine the politics of how entities emerge and are sustained. The case for thick relationality can also be extended further, as it offers a way of intervening in the politics of knowing that may disarm dominant scholarship and empower Indigenous knowledge. Emphasising relations rather than focusing on assumed entities (or relations between them) goes some way toward dissolving the intellectual authority of those who focus on categories and entities. By asking: ‘what relations are borne of interactions?’ and the accompanying methodological challenge, ‘how do we make sense of relations?’

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the dominant scholar’s assumed ability and reflexive practice of specifying categories and undertaking analysis can be disarmed. In place of this tendency, thick relationality requires paying more attention to the diverse play of relations and to the processes and meanings of those relations as experienced and understood by all parties. This, in turn, requires attending to original peoples’ understanding of relations and accomplished capacity with relationality in knowing and socio-political ordering. A turn to thick relationality metaphorically drags the newcomer into contact with the intellectual and politico-philosophical commitments of original peoples. Some may be skeptical about the foregoing possibilities, perhaps raising the objection that emphasising relations to the extent suggested by thick relationality removes grounds for critique, analytical purchase, and indeed for the formation of any kind of agency. If entities are relationally formed and continually mobile, then surely, the critique runs, ‘this is disabling’. However, following Marilyn Strathern, what is at stake is not a naïve attempt to assert that entities and relations do not have some durability, but rather seeing things as relations (1995, p. 19). As Brian Massumi states, the analytical challenge for conventional scholarship is to realign with ‘the being of a relation’ (2002, p. 70). Di Giminiani and Gálv (2018) provide an exemplar by examining Mapuche human–water relations. They use the term ‘unfinished objectivation’ to explain the way that, for Mapuche, relations have the potential for objectification. This potential is both necessary and must be kept in check, because objectivation is socially and politically dangerous if taken so far as to turn relations into a mere object/s. Water circulates with transformative power and potential, illustrating the wider principle that relations are a ‘segment of an immanent continuity to which all entities belong’ (Di Giminiani & Gálv, 2018, p. 200). However, turning water into a mere resource object, removes its capacity to act by subordinating it to the status of only being the property of humans, a move that comes with negative moral and practical limitations (2018, p. 211). Hereby, Mapuche show that thick relationality does not dissolve the world of things but provides ways of more fulsomely engaging with the world than does thin relationality, which asserts and pursues unconstrained objectivation. A key contribution of thick relationality, then, is to challenge the intellectual authority of dominant scholarship focused through categories and entities. Aligning with the ‘being of relation’ diminishes the standing of the fictional sovereign knower of mainstream social science, and in doing so, aligns with the demonstrable ways of the world and provides ways of linking with the foregrounding of relations in many Indigenous knowledges (Brigg, 2016a). This move does not spell dispersion and disorder. Relations are often anchored, grounded, and durable (though they are of course also mobile) both in their coalescence as entities and in relations among entities. They are borne of—and rehearsed and embedded through—interactions, including, for instance and for original peoples of Australia, though relations with places in the landscape figured as Country. Country, a thoroughly relational phenomenon, evokes how land participates in a reciprocal relation with human beings, bringing humans and all of existence into being and serving as a poetic ordering

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principle for guiding relations among people (Arthur, 1996, pp. 119–120; Stanner, 1979, pp. 23–30). The result, as Stanner notes, is that: ‘One is dealing, not with ‘land’, but with ‘country’, land already related to people’ (Stanner, 1965, p. 14). Country demonstrates the relational possibilities for ethico-moral judgement and practice. All peoples throughout history have also proven capable of the very human processes of forming societal entities and enacting political agency informed by ethico-moral judgement. A relational frame merely recognises the dynamic underpinnings of agency rather than diminishing it. While contingent entities are formed in and through relations, they are no less significant for being formed in this way (Brigg, 2014). Thick relationality in no way denies, for instance, the durable phenomenon of Indigenous struggle; it merely points out that it changes through time. Thick relationality also does not preclude the ‘yoking’ together of strong Indigenous claims such as those for Indigenous sovereignty. While such claims can be pursued through thin relationality, thick relationality offers the advantage of a more nuanced approach that resonates more fully with original peoples’ ontology. Thick relationality overcomes the methodological and political shortfalls of both thin and thicker relationality by challenging the analyst to think more expansively. It enables explanation of how entities form and change through time, and allows greater possibilities for encounter and flow among categories and entities. These capacities reflect the empirical reality of lived experience between original and newcomer peoples. At the same time, thick relationality recognises and enables the formation of durable entities for the pursuit of political projects. It allows for the assertion of identity with flexibility. Finally, thick relationality, by foregrounding interactions, disables the assumed ascendency of the dominant colonial knower and points to the capacities of original peoples as longstanding practitioners of relational ontology. While thick relationality may feel counter-intuitive to many, efforts to develop and change modes of thinking are, naturally, not easy. To be discomforted and challenged as part of turning to relations seems appropriate as part of wider efforts to challenge the commonplace complicity of social science with colonialism.

2.5 Conclusion The effort to develop a research agenda focused upon relations between Indigenous and newcomer peoples requires an explicit effort to systematically reflect upon what is meant by ‘relations’ and the accompanying methodological pitfalls and possibilities. The politically charged nature of knowing relations between original and newcomer peoples further requires particular attention to the political dimension of how we know relations. This chapter has begun this task by presenting a tripartite schema for considering what is methodologically and politically at stake in the analysis of relations. It has suggested that thinking in terms of a continuum of three registers of relationality—‘thin’, ‘thicker’ and ‘thick’—serves to disaggregate relationality by identifying the differing weight that the idea of relation can be given in conceptualising relations between original and newcomer peoples. This schema also

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helps to reveal the types of political relations between peoples that are suggested and facilitated by how we know. Thin relationality, which foregrounds entities (including individuals, organisations, or populations) and relations among them, is the register that will feel most familiar to conventional social science scholars. It does not question how entities come into being, and aligns with commonplace and longstanding distinctions between Indigenous and Settler peoples. Thin relationality can be mobilized in both conventional scholarship and in highly critical work that asserts strong Indigenous identities. Thicker relationality highlights how entities are mutually conditioned and changed through interaction. While more methodologically sophisticated than thin relationality, thicker relationality can similarly reflect dominant political dynamics, or be deployed to analyse or challenge them. Thick relationality, finally, gives conceptual priority to relations, challenging analysts to explicitly consider how entities form and change through time. This enables both flexible and normatively critical analyses of entities and relations, and is the most innovative, vis-a-vis conventional social science scholarship, of the three registers outlined here. This chapter has not drawn firm conclusions about which register of relationality should be used for examining Indigenous-Settler relations. Such judgments are, unsurprisingly, best made on a case-by-case basis. Nonetheless, the chapter has highlighted that thinking in strongly relational terms is not a familiar way of knowing in dominant western scholarship, and that original peoples’ cosmologies and sociopolitical ordering are, comparatively, highly relational. Second, the continuum from thin to thicker to thick relationality coincides with relatively more methodologically sophisticated modes of inquiry. In dominant contemporary scholarship, thin relationality is commonsense. However, thin relationality cannot account for how entities arise or how they change through time. Thicker relationality considers how entities change through time, but only thick relationality adequately deals with the challenge of explaining both how entities form and how they are sustained. Finally, because thick relationality is oriented more expansively and in ways that challenge dominant scholarship, it exhibits advantages beyond simply addressing the shortfalls of thin and thicker relationality. Thick relationality enables highly critical scholarship and the assertion of strong Indigenous political projects while also highlighting the possibilities for mutual traffic and exchange between original and newcomer peoples. It disrupts the ascendency of mainstream scholars and the comfortable work of categorical delineation and analysis that such scholars routinely engage in, thereby challenging them to examine how to know relations in particular places—a process that promotes engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and approaches to socio-political ordering. While all three registers of relationality promise to advance knowledge of Indigenous-Settler relations, thick relationality promises the most in terms of both understanding and advancing Indigenous-Settler relations.

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Langton, M. (1993). Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television …: An essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Lansing, J. S. (2006). Perfect order: Recognizing complexity in Bali. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Macoun, A., & Strakosch, E. (2013). The ethical demands of settler colonial theory. Settler Colonial Studies, 3, 426–443. Martin, D. F. (2003). Rethinking the design of indigenous organisations: The need for strategic engagement. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Canberra. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham & London: Duke University Press. McLean, I. (2000). One mob, one voice, one land: Lin Onus and indigenous postmodernism. In M. Neale (Ed.), Urban dingo: The art and life of Lin Onus 1948–1996. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery. Mesle, C. R. (2008). Process-relational philosophy: An introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. West Conshoshocken, PA: Templeton. Miller, J. H., & Page, S. E. (2007). Complex adaptive systems. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2016). Relationality: A key presupposition of an Indigenous social research paradigm. In C. Andersen & J. M. O’Brien (Eds.), Sources and methods in indigenous studies. Routledge ProQuest Ebook. Morrison, G. (2018). Walking, frontier and nation: Re/tracing the Songlines in Central Australian Literature. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40, 118–140. Mosko, M. S., & Damon, F. H. (Eds.). (2005). On the order of chaos: Social anthropology & the science of chaos. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Paradies, Y. (2006). Beyond black and white: Essentialism, hybridity and Indigeneity. Journal of Sociology, 42, 355–367. Reddekop, J. (2014). Thinking across worlds: Indigenous thought, relational ontology, and the politics of nature; Or if only nietzsche could meet a Yachaj. London: The University of Western Ontario. Rogers, J. (2018). Photostory and relatedness methodology: The beginning of an Aboriginal-Kanaka Maoli research journey (part one). Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2018, 3–16. Rosen, R. (2000). Essays on life itself. New York: Columbia University Press. Rowse, T. (2015). Indigenous incorporation as a means to empowerment. In S. Brennan, M. Davis, B. Edgeworth, & L. Terrill (Eds.), Native title from Mabo to Akiba: A vehicle for change and empowerment? Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. Schaab, G. L. (2013). Relational ontology. In A. Runehov & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Encyclopedia of sciences and religions. Netherlands: Springer. Simpson, L. (2011). Dancing on our turtle’s back: Stories of Nishaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence. Winnipeg: ARP Books. Stanner, W. E. H. (1965). Aboriginal territorial organisation: Estate, range, domain and regime. Oceania, 36, 1–25. Stanner, W. E. H. (1979). White man got no dreaming: Essays, 1938–1973. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Stoler, A. (1995a). ‘Mixed-bloods’ and the cultural politics of European identity in colonial Southeast Asia. In J. N. Pieterse & B. Parekh (Eds.), The decolonization of imagination: Culture, knowledge and power. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Stoler, A. L. (1995b). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Strathern, M. (1995). The relation: Issues in complexity and scale. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press.

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Swain, T. (1993). A place for strangers: Towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being. Oakleigh, VIC: Cambridge University Press. Tench, W., & Flannery, T. F. (1996). 1788: Comprising a narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay and a complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. Tilly, C. (1998). Micro, macro, or megrim? In J. Schlumbohm (Ed.), Mikrogeschichte – Makrogeschichte: komplementär oder inkommensurabel? (Vol. 7). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Urry, J. (2003). Global complexity. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Venn, C. (2010). Individuation, relationality, affect: Rethinking the human in relation to the living. Body & Society, 16, 129–161. Warumpi Band. (1996). Too much humbug. In Alice springs. Northern Territory: CAAMA Music. Watson, I. (2012). The future is our past: We once were sovereign and we still are. Indigenous Law Bulletin, 8, 12–15. Wildman, W. J. (2010). An introduction to relational ontology. In J. Polkinghorne & J. Zizioulas (Eds.), The trinity and an entangled world: Relationality in physical science and theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Chapter 3

Settler-Colonial Governmentality: The Carceral Webs Woven by Law and Politics Thalia Anthony

Abstract This chapter is concerned with the relationality of law and politics in historical and contemporary expressions of colonial sovereignty in the Northern Territory of Australia and how this weaves webs of control over Indigenous peoples’ lives. It illustrates the inter-disciplinary exercise of colonial carceral control, encompassing ‘welfare carceralism’, ‘protectionist carceralism’ and ‘penal carceralism’. In doing so, it delves deeper than the current focus on mass imprisonment to demonstrate that incarceration has a long colonial lineage. It concludes that a relational analysis—of place, time and disciplines—opens up a broader understanding of structural colonial oppression and Indigenous resurgence that challenges colonial carceralism through self-determination. It does this through the lens of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. Keywords Imprisonment · Indigenous people · Colonialism · Criminal justice · Socio-legal studies · Indigenous self-determination · Indigenous resistance · Colonial carceralism · Royal commissions

3.1 Introduction In recent years the Northern Territory has been a locus for critique of settler colonial policies due to the distinctly discriminatory and overtly coercive controls over Indigenous people in that region of Australia. Scholars have variously analysed the welfare and criminal justice policies and practices towards Indigenous people in the Northern Territory from distinct and discrete disciplinary standpoints. They have contributed to a body of work on the structurally oppressive and unlawful nature of the policies. When combined, their analyses paint a powerful and holistic picture, but rarely do their critiques individually identify the ideological threads in welfare and criminal justice policies and the congruency in the operation of politics and law to reveal settler colonial control as more than individual policies, government T. Anthony (B) University of Technology, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_3

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jurisdictions or disciplines. There is an especial reticence to engage Law in these critiques: both in terms of the law as a device of settler colonial governmentality and the state’s breach of law with impunity as an indicia of the law’s maintenance of settler colonial relations. At most, scholars refer in passing to state illegality, such as under Federal policies in Northern Territory Indigenous communities, as an extension of politics. But they overlook the role of law itself as governmentality, which nests deep in the settler colonial structure. The assertion of state jurisdiction, the role of courts and the differential treatment of Indigenous people in the legal system are hallmarks of governmentality outside of parliamentary policies and ideologies, while running in tandem with such politics. This chapter demonstrates the relationality of law and politics in asserting ongoing controls over Indigenous communities, enabling the suspension of lawful protections for Indigenous people in the enactment of racially discriminatory policies, providing a lawful premise for incarcerating Indigenous people, and absolving state officials for enabling acts of violence against Indigenous children. While Wolfe’s (2006) statement that colonisation is a structure rather than an event is oft cited by settler colonial scholars, rarely do scholars substantiate this claim beyond a study of a narrow disciplinary area or policy juncture. Exploring relationality among disciplines and temporal junctures reveals a deep-seated colonial legacy permeating time, jurisdictions and institutions. It also signals that redressing the harms of settler colonial governmentality for Indigenous people requires more than a change of policy or government, but rather structural change that unsettles a multiplicity of institutions. This chapter explores the webs of settler colonial control over Indigenous peoples’ lives, especially in the Northern Territory, which cross from the welfare realm to the penal realm and over time since the inception of colonisation. It engages ‘relationality’ thinking by identifying relationships among seemingly different phenomena— resisting ‘Eurocentric binaries’ by forging ‘a complex and interactive understanding of the relationships between history, social organization, and forms of consciousness’ (Collins & Bilge, 2016, citing Bannerji, 1995, p. 12). This chapter fuses the fields of political economy, criminal justice and law to highlight ideologies and histories of colonialism, suggesting that the restraints placed on Indigenous people cut across institutional spheres. It reveals that the issue is not one of policy alone but of oppressive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Through such analysis, a broader structural critique can be made, and pathways towards restructuring the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can be considered.1 In engaging relationality, this chapter does not provide a wholesale dismissal of binarism. Indeed, it relies on this binarism to suggest a systemic collusion of institutions in maintaining a settler colonial governmentality in opposition to the survival and wellbeing of Indigenous people. The collusion is not intentional or planned, but a product of shared adherence to dominant colonial values. It is based on a ‘zero-sum logic’ that requires ‘the elimination of Native alternatives’ from 1 For

a detailed exposition of this approach, see Maddison (2019).

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settler colonial societies, to borrow the potent words of Wolfe (2013). This logic of elimination manifests in the treatment of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, and in the abuse of Indigenous children in child protection and detention systems— the focal point of this chapter. This analysis is nonetheless set apart from strict binary dichotomies and is attune to the complexities of the settler colonial process, which settler colonial theory itself acknowledges (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2013). This chapter adopts a dialectical approach to relationality to reveal state oppression and Indigenous expression. This analytic was developed in De Beauvoir’s (1949) The Ethics of Ambiguity as the struggle between objective conditions beyond our choice and subjective maintenance of identity and bonds (including intersubjectivity through sharing subjective states). De Beauvoir reconceptualises relationality to one-another and not simply as the ‘othered’. This means that for Indigenous people, while they may be “cultural outsiders” to the colonial settler state, they are “cultural insiders” within their own communities (see Turner-Walker, 2011). By highlighting Indigenous resistance to elimination and the survival of Indigenous cultures in the Northern Territory, this chapter does more than contribute to relationality through demonstrating the need for an inter-disciplinary understanding of state and legal institutions. It also takes up a post-disciplinary challenge: to transcend Western disciplines and engage Indigenous knowledges and standpoints in research on settler colonial governmentality (see Anthony & Sherwood, 2018). The final section of this chapter decentres state power and its various institutional manifestations by turning to the extant power of culture, Country and community in the lives of Indigenous children, young people and families and in the face of the state’s ongoing impetus to incarcerate and harm Indigenous people in the Northern Territory.

3.2 Restraining Indigenous Lives Across Policy and Institutional Settings The language of Indigenous disorder, deficit and dysfunction binds welfare and carceral policies toward Indigenous people in the Northern Territory of Australia (NT). In announcing federal and territory legislation in relation to Indigenous welfare (social security and child welfare) and criminal justice controls, the Indigenous community is problematised, while the state’s commitment to law and order is valorised. The impetus is assimilationist, seeking to remake the Indigenous person and community in the mould of the imagined non-Indigenous community, with its individualist norms and capitalist ethics. In doing so, governments locate the state as the fixer of Indigenous people and communities. This rubric eschews and demeans Indigenous standpoints and solutions to their own wellbeing. The federal government’s top-down management of Indigenous communities in the NT since 2007 sprang from a platform where federal ministers and the mainstream

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media freely voiced their disdain for Indigenous communities. It prompted reforms that are colloquially known as the ‘Northern Territory Intervention’ because of their broad-sweeping implementation across remote Indigenous communities and the coercive manner in which they were imposed, including by the influx of Australian Federal Police and the army and the expansion of police powers (Altman, 2013, p. 2). The reforms restricted Indigenous rights to social security, land2 and alcohol possession, and through changing funding arrangements to the NT government, transferred the powers of Indigenous community councils to government regional councils and defunded services on homelands. The pronouncement of the NT Intervention followed a decade of conservative government rule that recoiled from the previous policy of Indigenous self-determination and denied government responsibility for historical wrongs to Indigenous people. Its governance of Indigenous affairs included the pursuit of ‘practical’ outcomes for Indigenous people through mainstream (rather than Indigenous-controlled) services, the diminishment of Indigenous land rights and native title rights, and the replacement of national Indigenous representative structures, which informed government decision making on Indigenous affairs with the government’s appointment of its own Indigenous advisers (Robbins, 2007). The Northern Territory Intervention came in the wake of a media campaign on the abuse of Indigenous children in Indigenous communities. Initial reports, including of paedophile rings, were later proven to be fabricated by government insiders (see Graham, 2008), but their narrative of abusive Indigenous communities in need of constraint shaped state discourse and the policy response. The state discourse, deployed by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough and the then Prime Minister, John Howard, also invoked stereotypes of Indigenous dependence on welfare and alcohol. Aboriginality in remote communities, with attendant rights to land and nascent structures of self-governance, was constructed as a threat to the prevailing settler colonial social order and required reorientation to settler colonial norms and economies (see Macoun, 2011). The ‘Aboriginal problem’, according to this depiction, required an urgent, top-down Federal Government intervention. In introducing the key piece of Intervention legislation, the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007, the Federal Government vilified Indigenous communities. Brough (2007) painted all Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory with the same brush, characterising them as a ‘failed society’. He supplemented this racially charged language with references to Indigenous communities as ‘dangerous and unhealthy places’ where ‘normal community standards’, ‘social norms’ and ‘law and order’ have ‘broken down’. Communities were described as inundated with ‘rivers of grog’, notwithstanding that many remote NT Indigenous communities had been self-proclaimed dry areas for decades (d’Abbs, 1990). Consequent to the minister’s contempt, over 70 Indigenous communities, tens of thousands of kilometres apart, were subject to racially discriminatory laws that only 2 The NT Intervention reforms were contemporaneous with amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976 (Cth) (‘ALRA’), which opened up access to Aboriginal land for mining and, in the following year (2007) increased the issuance of mining exploratory licences by over a third and doubled the number of grants of mining tenements (Anthony, 2018, p. 262). See also Short (2016).

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applied within the prescribed area of each Indigenous community. The legislation required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), which gives legal force to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Australia. This meant that Indigenous people were cast outside of the protections of the rule of law. More insidiously, the legislation undermined Indigenous rights to exercise their own laws. Sections 90–91 of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth), for instance, provided that cultural practice and customary laws could not be considered in the determination of bail applications and sentencing.3 Accordingly, Indigenous people could not be released from custody to be punished under their own laws, which was necessary for community restoration following a crime, and nor could they have prospective punishment under their laws considered in sentencing in settler courts. This assertion of colonial settler legality over Indigenous people in the Northern Territory to the detriment of their practice of their own laws was a critical expression of settler colonial authority. It represented more than the denial of universal civil rights, but also an attempt to stamp out Indigenous legal systems. Less than a decade after the NT Intervention, Indigenous children came forward to talk about their abuse. However, it was not within their communities or at the hands of Indigenous men. Rather, it was within state detention institutions and child protection placements. Evidence of the torture of Indigenous children was screened nationally and precipitated a Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory (hereafter ‘NT Royal Commission’) in 2016/17. Criminal justice and child protection systems are almost exclusively settings for Indigenous children in the NT—who make up 30% of the youth population, yet 100% of the detention population (McDonald, 2018) and 89% of the child welfare population (NT Royal Commission, 2017a, p. 13). Since the Intervention, increasing numbers of Indigenous children have been entering detention at young ages (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2017, p. 10). Overall, the number of Indigenous children going into these systems has skyrocketed—including because of greater powers afforded to police under the Intervention legislation and more federal police in Indigenous communities (Anthony, 2009). The responsibility of the federal government for the segregation of Indigenous children in detention is matched by harsh carceral policies on the part of the NT Government. NT criminal law and procedure reforms have been justified by public statements of senior NT ministers that Indigenous people and their cultures present a law and order problem. It has set the tone for racism and torture in youth detention. Former NT Attorney General (between 2012–2016) John Elferink implicated Indigenous culture for high incarceration rates of Indigenous children. He pointed to the failure of Indigenous cultural practices: ‘[T]he fact that so many Aboriginal children are in the custodial environment … is indicative that those [Aboriginal] cultural practices are not succeeding’ (Elferink, 2017a, p. 5215). Elferink also claimed that cultural practices relating to initiation ceremonies and marriage undermined human rights and proposed 3 These

provisions were subsequently enacted under the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) ss 15AB, 16AA.

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to Cabinet that these practices should be outlawed (Elferink, 2017a, p. 5178). Such proposals were consistent with the NT government’s tough punitive regime. In 2010, Member of Parliament and later Chief Minister Adam Giles asserted in the legislative assembly that criminals should be put in a ‘big concrete hole’ that is covered with concrete so they can never come out (Giles, 2010). He referred to the problem of the number of Indigenous children in detention and Indigenous adults in prison as a ‘basket case’ that the government had been attempting to fix (Giles, 2017, p. 3266). Minister Elferink (2017a, p. 5213) also pointed to the need for the NT Government to ‘improve’ Indigenous children in detention, which he regarded as rife with challenges. He deemed these children ‘villains’ and the ‘worst of the worst’ (2017b, p. 3212). Further, Elferink (2017a, p. 5212) referred to the problem of high rates of Indigenous children in child protection as reflecting the indifference that parents have ‘to the care of their children’. As with the Federal Government’s approach, Chief Minister Giles dealt with Indigenous affairs through mainstreaming services, including by dismantling the Indigenous Advancement portfolio and eradicating Indigenous input in government decision-making (Altman, 2014, p. 99; Giles, 2017, p. 3311). This chapter will proceed to consider how this settler colonial mentality of state order and alleged Indigenous disorder has shaped the treatment of Indigenous people since the early colonial period in the NT in the nineteenth century. There have been consistencies in the settler state’s imperative to sequestrate and incarcerate Indigenous people. It presents a multi-disciplinary understanding of the application of welfare, criminal justice and legal regulations to Indigenous people to enforce settler colonial ‘governmentality’: the practice of government and rationality, to borrow Foucault’s (1979) phrase. ‘Settler colonial governmentality’, as I develop the term here, not only crosses over policy and institutional spheres, it also pervades over time. Policies and discourses of Indigenous inferiority are not sui generis to the current practices of neo-liberalism and mass incarceration. Studies that focus on these phenomena as discrete occurrences often place the historical lineage of Indigenous incarceration and state control as a footnote to contemporary policy. This precludes an assessment of the continuity in settler colonial logic, which is unpacked below.

3.3 Rationality in Settler Colonial Governance In invoking the concept of ‘settler colonial governmentality’, I rely on the works of settler colonial scholars such as Wolfe (2006), and critical Indigenous scholars such as Coulthard (2014). Through centering settler colonial relations, both approaches demonstrate that policy change is contingent on the logic and structures of colonisation—colonising land, affecting primitive accumulation and eliminating the native. Accordingly, policy change driven by the state inadequately materialises Indigenous rights and can often set them back, including where touted as progressive such as gestures towards reconciliation and native title. State reforms remain built on a ‘logic of elimination’ that shapes the settler colonial response to cultures, languages, Country and sovereignty (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387).

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Settler colonial theory is concerned with how colonialism lives and breathes in the present. The continuity of colonial legacies produces discursive and non-discursive strategies, according to Coulthard (2014, p. 7), to facilitate the ‘ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority’. The relegation of historical colonial wrongs to a ‘dark chapter’ in history disconnects them from ‘continued child removals, mass incarceration and ongoing land dispossession’ (Woolford & Hounslow, 2018, p. 205). Equally, designating contemporary forms of systemic discrimination as exceptional, annuls the entrenched and intergenerational impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples. Contemporary injustices—whether that is Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia, the removal of M¯aori babies in Aotearoa or the construction of pipelines across North America—deepen existing scars rather than create new wounds. Situating the various guises of state policy and legality within this historical and continuing trajectory enlivens a relational analysis of state containment and control of Indigenous people. This approach shows that incarceration and maltreatment are not one state policy or directive alone, but in fact are a longstanding feature of the settler colonial-Indigenous relationship. In addition, however, examining the lived experience of settler colonial policies demonstrates another form of relationality. It brings to the fore Indigenous peoples experience as one of subordination, resilience and resistance. In undertaking a review of the formal statements in the NT Royal Commission, this chapter exposes the ideologies of the state officials as well as the perspective of the Indigenous young people who were detained in the criminal justice system and removed from their families, as well as the standpoints of Indigenous Elders, respected persons and leaders. Through this analysis, it is evident that Indigenous peoples’ resilient cultural and family ties offset the settler state’s logic of elimination. Indigenous identity extends beyond their relationality to the nonIndigenous settler state and remains attached to their living culture, notwithstanding the hugely traumatic impact of state violence on Indigenous people in the NT.

3.4 Colonial Carceralism and Its Multiple Guises While mass incarceration has become synonymous with contemporary penal policy, for Indigenous people, incarceration is not an exceptional state of being. The penal phase of mass incarceration is yet another iteration in Indigenous people’s long experience of the settler state’s impetus to segregate and contain Indigenous people, whether that be for Christian, civilising, protectionist, welfare or penal purposes (see Chartrand, 2019). Loïc Wacquant coined the term ‘hyperincarceration’ to describe the phenomenon of over-representation in the criminal justice system and the broader role of the penal system as an ‘instrument for managing dispossessed and dishonoured groups’ (Wacquant, 2001, p. 95). For Indigenous people, management through mass detention featured long before the war on drugs or neo-liberal class warfare. Declaration of jurisdiction over Indigenous people by the first settler colonial courts in eastern Australia (New South Wales) were made in response

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to Indigenous peoples’ challenges to the capacity of the colonial administration to imprison them (see R v Bonjon, 1841; R v Murrell, 1836). Since then, Indigenous people have been incarcerated by settler colonial authorities for administrative and penal ends. Nonetheless, analogies can be drawn with Wacquant’s description of the ‘neverending circulus’ between prison and the ghetto for African Americans (Wacquant, 2001, p. 97). It can be likened to the symbiosis between Indigenous incarceration and a network of institutions designed to further Indigenous extinguishment. This racialised strategy of institutionalisation has barely shifted since early colonisation; it has simply been veiled by the state’s claims to neutrality. Concealing bias has become more insidious by enabling the state, as demonstrated above, to blame the Indigenous person for being more criminal while exculpating any bias on the part of law enforcers. For example, former Chief Minister Giles (2017, p. 3310) told the NT Royal Commission that his government was not acting in a discriminatory manner towards Indigenous children when they were segregated in isolation cells, gassed and tortured, it was simply dealing with a problem with children. Simply following the law enables all types of wrongs to be rationalised, and was relied on by detention staff to justify all manner of torture against Indigenous children. The law removes the need for overt politics because law is conceived by the settler state as a neutral instrument, while it operates as a coercive tool to disproportionately regulate Indigenous people. Segregation of Indigenous people took root in early colonial policies and practices. The 1837 British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes recommended the protection of Aboriginal people on reserves and missions under the authority of ‘protectors’ who had legislative powers to police and manage all aspects of Indigenous lives, including their movement, associations, marriages, clothing, food, income and work (British Parliamentary Select Committee, 1837). It sought to instil ‘civilisation’ (non-Indigenous values and routines) on Indigenous people through forced work and instruction. Early Northern Territory settlements were established through ration depots, similar to processes intended to sedentise Indigenous people in government-sanctioned locations in eastern Australia and Canada. This period, which can be considered as ‘welfare colonialism’, coincided with and facilitated the removal of Indigenous people from their homelands. Displacement from homelands occurred through violent dispersals and the denial of access to their traditional food sources, as their land became overrun with cattle (Turner-Walker, 2011, pp. 50–51). Indigenous people were brought onto ration depots for ostensibly welfare purposes: the provision of necessary sustenance (mainly through white flour) and to seek refuge from frontier violence. Pastoralists would ‘hunt down’ Indigenous people and dry up their water holes and food supplies (see Rowse, 1998). They became permanent settlements as ration provisions and services expanded as a deliberate mechanism of colonial governance, including efforts to keep Indigenous people away from towns and dependent on government (Turner-Walker, 2011, p. 51). By the early twentieth century, an official policy of Aboriginal protectionism was enacted through a set of Aboriginal Protection Acts across Australia, which

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continued into the mid-twentieth century.4 It meant that ‘welfare carceralism’ gave way to ‘protectionist carceralism’ where confinement on government settlements, church missions, pastoral stations and homesteads, sought to civilise and discipline Indigenous people into settler ways of living. By the 1930s, orphanages would be established for the lodgement of Indigenous children who would become known as the Stolen Generations (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). The NT Chief Protector of Aborigines was the guardian of all Indigenous children, displacing the rights of parents and removing many children to pastoral stations or Indigenous children’s homes such as Jay’s Creek in the 1920s. During the protectionist era, the NT’s Aboriginals Ordinance 1918s 13(1) provided that: The Administrator may, by notice in the Gazette, declare any mission station, reformatory, orphanage, school, home or other institution established by private contributions to be an aboriginal institution for the maintenance, custody, and care of aboriginal and half-caste children, and shall thereupon issue a license to the institution.

The Aboriginal Protection Acts rendered Indigenous people outside the rule of law and inside a state of legal ‘exceptionalism’ (see Agamben, 1998). A network of (nonAboriginal) Aboriginal Protectors were given wide-ranging powers over Indigenous lives, including powers over their families, employment, money and movements, which was consistent with the direction of the British Parliamentary Select Committee (1837) on Aboriginal Tribes. Significantly, it meant that Indigenous people had restricted access to their lands, laws, languages and cultures and could face punishment for speaking in language or practicing dance and ceremonies—especially with a view to saving Indigenous children from their culture (Khan, 1993, p. 33). This resonates with the treatment of Canada’s First Nations that under the Indian Act sought to ‘Kill the Indian in the child’ through the removal of First Nations children (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015, pp. 131–132). Havemann (2005, p. 59) describes the legal exclusion and segregation of Indigenous people in the following terms: In the colonies Indigenous people … have been the paradigm non-people, non-citizens, homines sacri. If not, at worst, exterminated with legal impunity, they have been excluded and condemned to placelessness in ‘zones of exception’ such as reserves, mission schools or camps and other forms of segregation under the regime of the sovereign’s draconian ‘protection’ (footnotes excluded).

When the Aboriginal Acts were repealed in the mid-twentieth century, ideologies of assimilation and integration reclassified Indigenous people as ‘wards’ under the ‘guardianship and tutelage’ of the state (McGregor, 2005). Indigenous people would not receive citizenship rights such as equal social security until they could prove their advancement in accordance with the expectations of non-Indigenous society. 4 See, for example, Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (WA); Aboriginal Protection Act and Restriction

of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld); Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW); Aborigines Act 1911 (SA); Aboriginals Ordinance 1911 (NT); Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (Cth). In Canada, similar legislation was introduced through amendments to the Indian Act, with the 1876 Indian Act, codifying controls of ‘Indian agents’ over the lives of First Nations people.

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Rates of Indigenous children in state care continued to rise in this period and until the 1970s. From the 1970s, Indigenous people in the Northern Territory began moving off settlements and into towns and cities in larger numbers, where they were released into the clutches of police forces—subjecting Indigenous people to a new phase of ‘penal carceralism’. While punishment by the state had not been outside of Indigenous peoples’ previous experiences—with harsh penalties afforded to Indigenous people who disobeyed the Aboriginal Protection acts, including detention on penal islands such as Palm Island in Queensland or corporal punishment in the NT, the phase of ‘penal carceration’ was marked by criminal laws becoming the defining instrument for incarcerating Indigenous Australians. The policing of Indigenous people focused on public disorder and offensive language—constructions of crime that affront the white social order (Eggleston, 1976, p. 176). Public spaces were ‘worlded’ by white power, which saw the inscription of colonising worldviews, systems, rules, regulations and practices (Spivak, 1988). New penal strategies were designed to move Indigenous people on from public spaces and into prisons—extending the state’s biopolitical power over Indigenous people (Tedmanson, 2008, p. 149). Today Indigenous Australians are the most imprisoned people in the world, although Indigenous people in New Zealand and Canada trail closely behind (Anthony, 2017). Indigenous women and children face particularly disproportionate rates of incarceration. While Foucault (1977, p. 82) likened imprisonment to punishment of the soul rather than body, for Indigenous people prison has not been free of violence. Indigenous deaths in police and prison custody and the torture of Indigenous children in youth detention haunt Indigenous carceral experiences, and continue unabated today (Fitz-Gibbon & Gordon, 2018; Jordan, Anthony, Walsh, & Markham, 2018, p. 6). In the NT, there were 40 deaths in custody in the last decade (Allam, Wahlquist, Banister, & Herbert, 2018)—an alarmingly high number given the Indigenous population is 58,248 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). State violence inflicted on Indigenous adults and children in custody was detailed in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) and the more recent NT Royal Commission (2017a). The NT Royal Commission’s Final Report (2017b, vol. 1, p. 9) found ‘systemic and shocking’ mistreatment of Indigenous children in detention. It referred to evidence of torture along with NT Government support for this practice. For instance, the NT parliament passed legislation in 2016 to give significant powers to administer Abu Ghraib-like torture devices—including hoods and the use of a mechanical restraint chair (Goldflam, 2016, p. 841, pp. 846–848). The use of toxic chemical agent CS Gas (tear gas) on six Indigenous children in isolation units, leading to blindness and chronic health problems, was authorised by the Corrections Commissioner and supported in the NT Parliament (AD, 2016a, p. 618; Middlebrook, 2017, p. 3008). Just prior to this incident, detention guards stated their intention to ‘pulverise’ the children (see Kelleher, 2017, p. 1565). The Indigenous children who were gassed by the riot squad in 2014, as well as many before and since the incident, were housed in dark, hot and rancid segregation cells for 23 hours per day for indefinite periods (AD, 2016b, p. 4; Hunyor, 2017, p. 1487). These children were placed in segregation units to contain their

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‘disorder’, which was allegedly contributing to a ‘crisis’ in detention (Middlebrook, 2017, p. 3316). Middlebrook (2017, p. 3349) stated that segregation was akin to containing a ‘virus’ that would otherwise ‘spread to other vulnerable, impressionable young people’. The violence in youth detention was endemic: Indigenous children had their heads smashed on concrete walls; they were kicked, hit and grabbed by the neck and forcibly strip-searched with knives (AN, 2017, p. 17; Turner, 2017, p. 923; Voller, 2016, p. 18). They endured racist and lewd language, including being called ‘stupid black cunts,’ ‘camp dogs,’ ‘oxygen thieves,’ ‘waste of space,’ ‘little black poofters,’ and ‘fucking sluts’ (Fattore, 2017, p. 1000; Zamolo, 2017, p. 1396). Setting a pretext for such acts to occur, the most senior administrator of youth detention, Corrections Commissioner Middlebrook (2017, p. 3316), described the Indigenous children in detention as ‘hoodlums’, and the Corrections Minister referred to them as ‘ratbags’ (Elferink, 2017b, p. 3148).

3.5 Penal/Welfare Carceralism Under the Northern Territory Intervention The strategy of the Northern Territory Intervention has been a mix of penal and welfare approaches. While the raison d’etat for the Intervention was to address crime against children in Indigenous communities, a major impact has been the criminalisation of Indigenous children and the removal of children from families and into out-of-home care, including 16 per cent sent to residential institutions and group homes (Office of the Children’s Commissioner NT, 2017, p. 68). Criminalisation for Indigenous young people has doubled, with a five-fold increase for Indigenous girls, and out-of-home care has increased by 56 per cent since 2012 (NT Royal Commission, 2017a, pp. 12–13). Of the Indigenous children who are placed with families, only 32 per cent were placed with Indigenous families (Office of the Children’s Commissioner NT, 2017, p. 10). As mentioned in the foregoing section, Indigenous children have been sent to penal youth detention centres at unprecedented rates since the NT Intervention. The effect of this law enforcement strategy was a spike in the criminalisation of Indigenous people, including children. Policing of Indigenous children is generally directed to minor offences, especially traffic-related offending (which increased by 100 per cent following the NT Intervention), breaches of justice procedures or summary property offences (Anthony, 2016; Mitchell, 2016, p. 38; NT Royal Commission, 2017a, p. 12). New police stations established in remote Indigenous communities have been regarded by Indigenous people as being ‘heavy-handed with children’ when investigating a crime (Pilkington, 2009, p. 128). While Indigenous children are sent to youth detention as part of a penal agenda, the removal of Indigenous children to out-of-home care is pursuant to a welfare agenda. The most common reason for the removals is that the state deems these Indigenous

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parents ‘neglectful’ of their children (Office of the Children’s Commissioner Northern Territory Annual Report, 2017, p. 10). Far from providing protection, however, the NT Royal Commission heard repeated reports from Indigenous children of the abuse they suffered in placements, often in cities and towns far away from home, which rendered these children more unsafe than in their families and communities. There is a strong crossover between the penal and welfare systems with children being cycled between the two. Children in state care are policed at higher levels than children in families because staff in residential institutions or group homes or foster carers are more likely than natural families to report incidents at home (as minor as squirting tomato sauce over the kitchen table) to the police (Lea, 2017, p. 3683). The majority of Indigenous children in detention are also in the child protection system (Anthony, 2016; NT Royal Commission, 2017a, p. 32, p. 36). In this way, the NT Intervention has created a mingling of penal and welfare carceralism for Indigenous children and young people. More broadly, the policy and practice of the NT Intervention has been channeled through punitive and welfare measures. The first response was penal: sending the army into Indigenous communities in central Australia, thereby rendering Australia the only ‘member of the Coalition of the Willing to invade itself’ (Rundle, 2007). The Federal Government then supplemented the army presence with the mobilisation of Federal Police, the launch of special criminal operations in NT Indigenous communities, the establishment of new ‘Themis’ police stations in remote Indigenous communities, the widening of police powers for Northern Territory police (including to search houses without a warrant) in Indigenous communities, and the denial of relevant sentencing and bail considerations (such as culture and customary practice) in the courts (see Pilkington, 2009, p. 55, p. 174; Anthony, 2009). Later, the NT Government would add to the arsenal of law and order policies through increasing maximum sentences, broadening the scope of mandatory sentences, expanding powers of arrest (through the paperless arrest regime) and increasing street police operations in the major centres of Alice Springs and Darwin (Hunyor, 2015). These explicitly penal policies were supplemented with welfare policies that were equally coercive and applied exclusively to Indigenous people. Indigenous peoples’ welfare income in prescribed communities under the NT Intervention was subject to scrutiny and control. The blatantly discriminatory nature of the welfare laws harked back to the ‘ration days’ in the nineteenth century when Indigenous people ‘were not entitled to handle cash like other citizens and rationing regimes were used to control Indigenous movement and labour’ (Gibson, 2012, p. 63). The discriminatory changes to the Northern Territory’s welfare regime were predicated on fears about crimes of Indigenous child abuse. This demonstrates the role of law in perpetuating unjust Indigenous-settler relations. Crimes are used as a rational basis for wide-sweeping political reforms. This is not unique to the governance of Indigenous Australians, although this settler colonial approach has a much longer trajectory than the more recent identification of its occurrence among modern governments of Europe and North America. Simon (2007) refers to ‘governing through crime’ to describe how moral panics about crime have restricted access to welfare payments and basic entitlements for the poor. Criminologist Garland (2001, p. 195)

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researched how waves of anxiety in relation to law and order in the late twentieth century gave rise to a ‘new structure of controls and exclusions’. These controls and exclusions apply to those, such as social security recipients, who are portrayed as ‘incapable of discharging the responsibilities of the late modern freedom’ (2001, pp. 195–196)). Key provisions of the NT Intervention legislation related to the sequestration of at least 50 per cent of all social security payments onto a ‘basics card’ that quarantined these funds for expenditure in certain stores for certain items. Where welfare officers determined that parents were not living up to expectations in terms of, for example, ensuring school attendance, up to 100 per cent of social security payments could be quarantined. For Indigenous people who depend on social security because they are responsible for children, sequestration can inhibit their capacity to provide for their children. This in turn leads to the removal of children by welfare departments— Territory Families as it is currently called—into the child protection system and into out-of-home care. One major rationale is ‘failure to thrive’, which is an indication of malnourishment (Grant, 2008). Rather than supplementing support for Indigenous families, the families are blamed and punished through the removal of their children (Northern Territory Council of Social Service, 2014, p. 9). Symptomatic of the colonial governmentality embedded in the NT Intervention, the Federal and NT governments have pursued the idea that they know what is best for Indigenous families who are not capable of looking after themselves or their children. Indigenous people are blamed for depending on welfare—a dependence that was originally instigated by colonisers through ration depots. They are accused of failing to engage in the ‘real economy’ through full-time jobs, which are not commonly available in remote Indigenous communities, in conformity with the expectations of the settler colonial economy. As ration depots sought to push Indigenous people off homelands in the nineteenth century, limits to the welfare system are now trying to push Indigenous people off remote communities and into towns and centres (Marks, 2015).

3.6 Relationality to the State: Indigenous Perspectives on Settler Colonial Oppression and Trauma During the opening days of the formal proceedings of the NT Royal Commission, prominent Indigenous women took the stand, namely Pat Anderson, Alyawarre woman and Chairperson of the Lowitja Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research, and Muriel Bamblett, Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung woman and the Chairperson of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Association. Anderson co-authored the Little Children are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson, 2007), which identified Indigenous-owned strategies for reducing child abuse but became a rouse for the NT Intervention, much to the despair of Anderson and local Indigenous people who participated in the report in the hope that they would

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be given greater support and services to run programs and initiatives to help their children. In her evidence to the NT Royal Commission, Anderson (2016, p. 149) described the NT Intervention as a ‘betrayal’. Anderson (2016, p. 149), along with other Indigenous witnesses, including Bamblett, Larissa Behrendt, and Olga Havnen, foregrounded the relationship between settler colonial governmentality and the experiences of Indigenous children in NT detention. The treatment of Indigenous children in the NT was not an isolated experience but symptomatic of the oppressive relationship between the settler state and Indigenous people. Anderson asserted that the NT Intervention and the acute racism that it unleashed in the NT created an environment that enabled the torture of Indigenous children in detention. She (2016, p. 161) explained the ways in which the racial violence of the state in youth detention mirrors the government and media’s demonisation of Indigenous people throughout the NT, labelling them as deviant and dysfunctional. Anderson argued that the racism under the NT Intervention (2016, p. 161) legitimated the attitude that Indigenous people can only be dealt with as a problem and failed to accept that ‘we’ as Indigenous people are ‘human beings and this is our place and this is our country’. Systemic racism is threaded through the NT’s criminal justice, child protection and welfare systems, according to Professor Behrendt (2017, p. 3997), Eualeyai/Kamilaroi woman and Research Director of the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research. She told the NT Royal Commission that Indigenous people are stigmatised under the NT Intervention, which affects their interactions with a range of institutions and in their daily life. Behrendt (2017, p. 3997) pointed out that the NT Intervention has ‘disempowered’ and ‘visibly discriminated against’ Indigenous people, who are made to line up in separate queues at the supermarket and in government agencies, and are excluded from ‘the general community … and treated in a more controlled way’. Along with Anderson (2016, p. 157, p. 161), Bamblett (2016, p. 199, p. 218, p. 231) recognised the long-term, inter-generational trauma and injury on Indigenous people from government interventions. These harms have arisen from the exclusion of Indigenous people from both their own ways of life and from civic life and economic participation. They manifest in the generations of child removals that have inhibited the transmission of Indigenous culture from Indigenous parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren. At its extreme, state control results in unrestrained cruelty and humiliation inflicted on Indigenous children. Havnen (2017, p. 1595), Western Arrernte descendant and chairperson of Danila Dilba Health Service, described the treatment of Indigenous children in detention as ‘completely barbaric’, ‘outdated’, and intended to cause ongoing trauma to a child. She refers to the continuation and legality of these practices on Indigenous children as ‘deeply disturbing’ (2017, p. 1595) and only capable of being restrained by giving Indigenous families and communities a ‘bigger voice and role’ in the lives of their children (2017, p. 1593).

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3.7 Relationality to Community and Postdisciplinary Approaches: Indigenous Cultural Strengths While Indigenous people articulated their relationality to the state as one of subordination and oppression, they did not present to the NT Royal Commission a singular relational identity. Indigenous people’s relationality was also expressed in terms of their relationships to their culture, Country and community. A consistent theme in the statements and evidence prepared by Indigenous young people who had been detained or removed from their family for the NT Royal Commission was their need for the security they had felt with family and in community, their sense of belonging to culture, and their desire to be on Country and participate in ceremonies (NT Royal Commission Voices Series, 2017c). Within their families and communities, the young people described feelings of being empowered, respected and cared for. They maintained their pride in their culture despite the dislocation and isolation of incarceration. In their testimony, young Indigenous people in the care and protection system told the NT Royal Commission about wanting to be nowhere but with their family. When one young person was asked where they would like to stay if things weren’t ‘quite right’ such that they were precluded from living all the time ‘with mum’; the child said that there was nowhere else—‘just my mum’ (NT Royal Commission, 2017d, p. 2). Children explained that they ‘begged child protection authorities to go back to [our mother]’ (2017d, p. 4). They commented that they ‘wished’ they could go home and they felt that their life was ‘better before’ they were taken into state care (2017d, p. 10). For children who were taken from family, and who had the rare fortune of staying with siblings, it was their siblings who gave them a ‘sense of strength’ (2017d, p. 4). For children in detention, they spoke about missing their family and wanting to make contact with them (NT Royal Commission, 2017e, pp. 30–31). They referred to the only people who would listen to them as their grandparents, parents and siblings (2017e, p. 33). The children believed that their wellbeing would be accommodated by taking them on Country—to visit waterfalls, swimming places and out hunting where it made them ‘feel good’ (2017e, p. 35). While the NT Royal Commission lamented the lack of resources in remote NT Indigenous communities, Indigenous people referred to the strengths of these communities. Bamblett (2016, p. 207) told the NT Royal Commission that the ‘best resource and the best collateral asset that we have are the families and the communities themselves’. She explained that Indigenous laws and their strong cultural base need to be fostered to support Indigenous children, including reordering the political relationship between the state and Indigenous nations through treaties that would facilitate Indigenous connections to Country (Bamblett, 2016, pp. 205–206, p. 229). Indigenous Elders and Respected People in remote communities pointed to the value of culture in the wellbeing of their young people, including participation in ceremonies, living on their land and learning about their songlines (Dowardi, 2017, p. 4543, p. 4547, p. 4577; Dixon, 2017, p. 4550; Fejo-King, 2017, p. 4665; Jangala, 2017, p. 4548, p. 4551; Riley, 2017, pp. 4077–4078). Elder Paruntatameri (2017,

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pp. 2403–2404), a Tiwi man who contributed to the Elders Program in Don Dale detention centre in Darwin, regarded the children in detention as potential Indigenous community leaders who needed to be included in culture, and these children themselves were necessary for the survival of their culture.

3.8 Conclusion: Dialectical Relationalities and a Postdiscplinary Vision In tracing the historical incarceration of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, this chapter revealed that incarceration is embedded in a settler colonial governmentality of dispossession, displacement and detention. Indigenous people’s relationality with the state, therefore, is nestled in colonial patterns of ordering rather than being tied to a particular policy or period. It traverses criminal justice, child protection and welfare policy spheres and is maintained through the discourses and practices of legal institutions. Their intersecting roles in incarcerating Indigenous adults and children pivots on settler colonial governmentality. The objective conditions of governmentality are inter- and multi-disciplinary to weave webs beyond the lines of singular policies and across political economy and law. But this relationship is counterbalanced by Indigenous people’s subjective relationality to their cultures, laws and land. As shown in the testimony to the NT Royal Commission, cultural inclusion is a source of identity and strength in the face of government interventions and outside of such interventions. A postdisciplinary approach illuminates this relationality by shedding light on Indigenous subjectivity and intersubjectivity outside of the relationship to the settler state. Indigenous worldviews constrain the attempt by the settler state to ‘other’, belittle and demonise Indigenous people, by informing relationships to one-another and to Country. Indigenous intersubjectivity pushes against the settler colonial logic of elimination that renders them as inferior cultural outsiders. Returning to the case study in this chapter, that of the NT Royal Commission, the evidence of Indigenous people and workers in Indigenous organisations highlighted the importance of Indigenous communities playing a central role in shifting the Indigenous-colonial relationship. Behrendt (2017, p. 3995) pointed to selfdetermination as a necessary guiding principle in Indigenous affairs, which involved vesting control in Indigenous families and nations. In the NT, Warlpiri people spoke about the significance of their law and justice programs in ensuring their children were brought up in a moral order that respected one another and Country (Dixon, 2017, p. 4549; Jangala, 2017, p. 4548). Yolngu people from Arnhem Land, in north-eastern NT, spoke about their success in bringing up their children in safe environments for tens of thousands of years, and the role of Yolngu family programs in supporting their children’s upbringing today (Wala Wala, 2017, p. 4544). Rather than be bound to the state’s paternalism, there was an acceptance that ‘Aboriginal people are perfectly qualified and perfectly able to take control, and manage their own affairs’, as

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articulated by Anderson (2016, 155). These views suggest the possibility of radical transformations in Indigenous-settler relations that centre Indigenous law and culture rather than colonial governmentality. Unpacking settler colonial relationalities is more than a theoretical task. It informs a vision for change. First, it exposes the fraught nature of shifting the settler stateIndigenous relationship on the terms of the state—i.e. better policy, staff and institutional settings—because these singular terms are constitutive of the problem that subordinates Indigenous people. Second, it recognises the possibility that solutions are already vested in Indigenous Knowledges that Indigenous people possess as cultural insiders within their own communities. Finally, and consistent with the first two points, it implicates the state and legal institutions in the oppression of Indigenous people and charges it with responsibility for change through jointly empowering Indigenous communities and restructuring the state to discontinue its oppressive practices. The creation of a new relationality between remedial state action and self-determination of Indigenous communities provides a blueprint for decolonising governmentality.

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Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. New York: Oxford University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. London: Macmillan. Tedmanson, D. (2008). Isle of exception: Sovereign power and Palm Island. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 4(2/3), 142–165. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. http:// www.chaireconditionautochtone.fss.ulaval.ca/documents/pdf/Honouring-the-truth-reconcilingfor-the-future.pdf. Turner, J. (2017, 13 March). Transcripts of Proceedings for Royal Commission into Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory 2016–2017. Turner-Walker, J. (2011). Clash of Paradigms: Night Patrols in Remote Central Australia. Masters of criminal justice thesis. Perth: University of Western Australia. Voller, D. (2016). Statement. In Royal commission into protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory exhibits. Exhibit 051.001, 25 November. Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh. Punishment & Society, 3(1), 95–134. Wala Wala, M. A. (2017, 20 June). Transcripts of Proceedings for Royal Commission into Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory 2016–2017. Wild, R., Anderson, P. (2007). Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle “Little Children are Sacred”: Report of the Northern Territory board of inquiry into the protection of aboriginal children from sexual abuse. Darwin: Northern Territory Government. http://www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/pdf/ bipacsa_final_report.pdf. Wolfe, P. (2013). Recuperating binarism: A heretical introduction. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 257–279. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. Woolford, A., & Hounslow, W. (2018). Criminology’s time: Settler colonialism and the temporality of harm at the Assiniboia residential school in Winnipeg, Canada, 1958–1973. State Crime Journal, 7(2), 199–221. Zamolo, C. L. (2017, 20 March). Transcripts of Proceedings for Royal Commission into Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory 2016–2017.

Chapter 4

Writing as Kin: Producing Ethical Histories Through Collaboration in Unexpected Places. Researching F.W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and Lutheran Experiments in Aboriginal Education Katherine Ellinghaus and Barry Judd Abstract This chapter explores the possibilities of relationality through collaboration between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholar. It describes an attempt to move beyond the problematic ways in which Indigenous history has largely been written by non-Indigenous historians who utilise archival sources without engaging with the Indigenous communities or people about whom they write. We describe the methodology of a project that focuses on the work of the Finke River Mission and its head missionary Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht who, during the 1950 and 1960s, initiated an education scheme that targeted ‘half-caste’ Indigenous girls living on pastoral stations across Central Australia. Keywords Ethical history · Lutheran missions · Assimilation · Collaboration · Methodology · Albrecht

4.1 Introduction There are, perhaps, two parallel truisms about best practice in the historical profession. First, most historians attempt to ensure that they provide documentary evidence for their history: they carefully analyse and critique their evidence, they provide and discuss points of view that are contrary to or challenge their ideas about the historical events they are discussing. They attempt to create an historical account that is as true and as objective as is possible from the historian’s particular perspective. A second K. Ellinghaus (B) La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia e-mail: [email protected] B. Judd Charles Darwin University, Alice Springs, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_4

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kind of historical ethics comes into play when historical writing is sent out into the world. The words we write as historians, how we utter them and the subjects about which we write—or don’t write—have power, and power beyond the time they were written. These are ‘parallel’ truisms because these two aspects of ‘good’ history are often not discussed in the same breath or not discussed at all. Historians often simply go about their business of trying to write well-researched historical narratives with little thought about how their work reaches beyond the academy. This is particularly true in the field of Australian Indigenous history, paradoxically named because the field is almost completely exclusive of Indigenous contributions. This is a field where non-Indigenous historians frequently publish accounts of Indigenous people’s experiences using only archival research, never reaching beyond dusty boxes to engage with the living contemporary communities about whose past they are reconstructing through their writing. Since the 1980s, Indigenous scholars in this country (and Indigenous scholars elsewhere) have asked non-Indigenous historians to simply stop writing ‘about’ or ‘for’ Indigenous people. In 1982 Yorta Yorta Professor Wayne Atkinson asked: ‘Are we then going through another process of colonisation where our cultural heritage is being dispossessed by academics?’ He added: ‘with some exceptions, researchers are motivated by the desire to advance their own academic careers, and not the conditions and struggles of Aborigines’ (Loit-Poit-Cha, Aborigines Advancement League newsletter cited Broome, 2014, p. 48). In 2005, Worimi artist, historian, and filmmaker Genevieve Grieves wrote that the way forward should not be through consultation, but through collaboration. This did not mean a situation where ‘a researcher goes into a community with an outcome in mind and persuades the community to agree to this’ she wrote. Rather, Grieves said, researchers should meet the needs of the community, ‘and allow the community to direct the focus and content of the research.’ Grieves added that ‘partnerships imply a process of working together to direct the aims, content and outcomes’ (Grieves, 2005, pp. 1–5). ‘There are still more scholars working with deficit approaches who are trying to either “save” us from ourselves or fix us up, sort us out, and, in some cases still, convince us that they “know best.”… I feel a sense of déjà vu that some of my early work still needs to be restated’ (Smith, Tuck, & Yang, 2019, p. 6). Similar points have been made by many other Indigenous thinkers whose work crosses a number of academic disciplines and fields of inquiry in which articulations of the past from the perspective of Indigenous peoples are considered nonnegotiable. According to this view, the construction of valid understandings of contemporary Australian society hinges on insight into power dynamics that characterise race relations in Australia today that draws not only on settler-colonial archives; but includes, as mandatory, Indigenous articulations of the past. In Other Peoples Stories an essay published in Overland, Aboriginal writer Jeanine Leane, bemoans the fact that literary writings dealing with the history of Australian colonialism continue to be portrayed as ‘Aboriginal stories’ when clearly they are not. The deception, according to Leane, is to accept and popularise historical novels like Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) as something more than a rewrite of history by a settler-colonial writer (Leane, 2016). Elsewhere Barry Judd has argued that dogmatic

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adherence to archive-based research adopted by some Australian historians continues to locate the task of making history in Australia as the domain of settler-colonial scholars (2012 and 2018). This idea has been supported in the influential writings of settler-colonial historian Bain Attwood. In his book Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, Attwood (2005) confirms that Indigenous peoples have alternate ways of recounting the past.1 History, with its emphasis on chronological order and factual events supported by documentary evidence, is an intellectual tradition that belongs to non-Indigenous people. Indigenous peoples, according to Attwood, have others ways of recalling past events in which place and the ethical insights for directing proper relations between animate and inanimate objects take priority over time and facts of the matter. Although Attwood had drawn attention to cultural differences in the ways Indigenous peoples recall the past as a means to critique Keith Windschuttle and the assertions of the political right that Indigenous history was a fabrication, his analysis and conclusions about the place of history as an academic discipline underlined the fact that the so-called ‘history wars’, fought over the fallaciously named ‘Aboriginal history’, were a debate overwhelmingly conducted by non-Indigenous scholars, politicians and journalists in which Indigenous peoples themselves had little or no voice (MacIntyre & Clarke, 2003; Windschuttle, 2002). For Aboriginal academic and novelist Tony Birch this has been the most important characteristic of recent debates about Australian history. Birch took particular aim at those on the political left who positioned themselves as friends and supporters of Indigenous peoples and ‘Aboriginal history’, arguing that his overarching concern with the debate was: the lack of engagement by anyone involved in this debate with indigenous intellectuals, historians, academics and community leaders. We are spoken about, not to. Some of us would also like to confront the views of so called liberal historians who claim to speak on our behalf, but in fact construct narratives which are at times more offensive and poorly constructed than the work produced by historians on the right. This may come as a surprise to people, but it shouldn’t. The level of authority claimed by some historians to speak for and on behalf of others is indicative of the level of conceit displayed by some in the history profession. We do not need historians claiming the moral ground for indigenous people. We do not need them to take up a fight on our behalf. We do not need them at all unless they are willing to recognise the autonomy of our voice, unless they are willing to share their own platform with us, and, in addition, to listen, for a change, to what we are saying without having either to patronisingly explain our position to us or feign outrage and offence when we intellectually criticise their work (2006, pp. 22–23).

1 It should be noted the debate about the place of Indigenous peoples in Australian history is a matter

of great importance to Indigenous people who exist outside scholarly debates. Briggs’ collaboration with Dan Sultan in the song 26 January is a good example, with the lyrics directly questioning the construction of Australia’s national history and its apparent inability to include Indigenous peoples: ‘How you wanna raise a flag with a rifle, To make us want to celebrate anything but survival? Nah, you watching tele for The Bachelor, but wouldn’t read a book about a fuckload of massacres? (what?), I remember all the blood and what carried us (I remember) They remember twenty recipes for lamingtons (yum), yeah, their ancestors got a boat ride, both mine saw them coming until they both died, fuck celebrating days made of misery (fuck that), white Aus’ still got the black history (that’s true), and that shirt will get you banned from the Parliament, If you ain’t having a conversation, well then we starting it’ https://genius.com/Ab-original-january-26-lyrics.

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The continued marginalisation and absence of Indigenous participants in both the construction of Australian history, and in debates concerning how the past of Indigenous peoples should be included or excluded from the national story, remains a ‘wicked problem’ for Australian history. The persistent problem of non-Indigenous people writing about Australia’s past in isolation from contemporary Indigenous peoples—situating it within the Academy and promoting it to the public as ‘Aboriginal history’—remains entrenched. Although Lynette Russell’s installation as President of the Australian Historical Association indicated some progress (because she is the first AHA president who also claims an Aboriginal identity), she nevertheless used her final address to members to sum up the inherent shortcomings of the organisation she led: Despite the well-meaning intentions, Indigenous people continue to be over-represented in the criminal justice system and under-represented in academia, government, health and medicine, media and more. Within the Australian Historical Association, and indeed on the pages of History Australia, Indigenous historians are few, a fact that makes my tenure as president all the more precious to me, and all the more poignant. I sincerely hope in the next decade we might improve this (2018, pp. 211–213).

Leane sums up the problem as one that is ultimately about cultural appropriation: Without knowing us, our histories, our stories, it is impossible to ‘write’ an Aboriginal story—any attempt at representation would be merely self-serving cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is not empathy. It is stealing someone else’s story, someone else’s voice’ (Leane 2016).

Cultural appropriation and the distance that exists between the settler-colonial archive and Indigenous peoples and their contemporary communities, raises not only macro issues of concern that impact on national politics and society, but also micro questions that concern the ethics of the research processes that underpin scholarly constructions of the past (see Judd, 2018; Hawkes, Pollock, Judd, Phipps, & Assoulin, 2017). Beyond the reactionary right, however, few people dispute the idea that the truth about the history of settler-colonialism in Australia has to be written, disseminated and more fully absorbed by the ‘nation’. In 2018, the National Reconciliation Week theme, ‘Don’t Keep History a Mystery’ stressed the importance of all Australians to learn more about their own history ‘hidden just beneath the surface, ready and waiting to be uncovered.’ Reconciliation Australia’s biennial survey has found that more than one in three Australians do not accept that Indigenous peoples were subject to mass killings, incarceration, and forced removal from their lands. Meanwhile Richard Broome, a retired non-Indigenous historian who wrote many books on ‘Aboriginal history’ through the 1980 and 1990s believes that ‘we’ (by which he means nonIndigenous, Anglo-Australian historians), ‘must do “Aboriginal history”. If we think it is too hard or too scary, we need to brace ourselves and get on with it, for it is our story too.’ In many ways it seems that the best way to study and write the history of settler-colonialism in this country is still up for debate and there remains a huge disconnect between the actions of academics and the needs of Indigenous communities. A key question that concerns us is whether that gap is too wide to bridge.

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The late Tracey Banivanua Mar argued that, in large part, the problem lies in the way that the discipline of history emerged during the age of European empire and thus worked, as she put it, ‘to naturalise and fix imperial power relations as fated by biological inevitabilities such as race’ (Banivanua Mar, 2012, pp. 178–199). In the months before she died, the seeds of this paper (co-authored by a non-Indigenous historian of assimilation policy in Australia and the United States and a leading Indigenous scholar in the field of Australian Indigenous Studies) were sown in conversations between the authors and Banivanua Mar about the possibilities of finding new opportunities for cross-disciplinary ways of recalling the past in postcolonial contexts such as Australia. Inspired by Tracey’s optimism and example, we strive to find a scholarship of ethical engagement that repositions the processes of writing Australian histories about Indigenous peoples to include elements that exist beyond the colonial archive and are grounded in real life, active and dynamic engagement with contemporary Indigenous peoples and society. Our collaboration, as much as it is about the research topic set out below, is also fundamentally about working through the ‘wicked problem’ of Australian history that we briefly outline above. Aside from a shared commitment to including Indigenous articulations of Australia’s past in our academic writings, on the surface of things we share little in common. One of us lives in inner city Melbourne, the other in Alice Springs near the very centre of remote inland Australia. One of us is a career historian, the other claims no disciplinary speciality or expertise. One of us has built a career on research in the settler-colonial archive and has published two books on the topic of Indigenous history that were written without consultation with Indigenous people or communities, the other has built a career on research in the field, where gathering information and stories from living Indigenous people has formed the basis of their scholarly activity. One of us is female, the other male. One of us sees no intellectual value in sport (but is coming around), the other is a noted writer of Indigenous people in Australian sport. As such our decision to work together may appear strange to some; but in our view it is these very differences that make our collaboration all the more necessary. In our view, working collaborations like ours are necessary in order to unpick the ‘wicked problem’ of Australian history. Working together has enabled us to find common ground in the most unexpected of places; and in ways that make our shared commitment to working together seem rational, as well as fortuitous—at least to us. We have found common ground in our shared but divergent experiences as staff and students at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. And, most unexpectedly, we have also found common ground through conversations about the influence that German culture and ideas have exerted in Australian society and Anglo-Australia resistance to this, as one of us is shaped and defined by a German ancestry and the other via the enduring cultural impact of the German ideals that made their way to central Australia through Lutheranism in the late nineteenth century. This connection is particularly important given the focus of the research in this project. Through our growing experience of working together despite our many differences we have increasingly come to believe that finding the common ground that might exist between scholars who claim non-Indigenous

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and Indigenous identities is absolutely key to gaining more accurate insights into Australia’s settler-colonial past and the experiences of Indigenous peoples within that ‘national’ story. The focus of our collaboration is a research project that seeks to refine and rework the narrative of the Stolen Generations. In the 1990s, the experiences of Indigenous people who were forcibly removed from their families, cultures and histories came to dominate contemporary debate about Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Australia. Historians and those working in the field of Australian Indigenous Studies had increasingly come to assess the role that church and mission played in actively propagating the Stolen Generations in largely negative terms. Scholars had come to view the role of Christianity in forced child removal as critical to settlercolonial government attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples from an Australian nation-state conceived to be racially White and culturally British (Briskman, 2001; Haebich, 2000, 2008). The close association of church and mission with the attempted destruction of Indigenous society by child removal has left little room for counter narratives or indeed more nuanced historical readings of the role they played during the age of assimilation. In our project we focus on the work of the Finke River Mission (FRM) and its head missionary Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht (1894–1984). To date, historians have paid scant attention to the educative schemes practiced by the Lutherans in Central Australia. Tim Rowse has focused on what he terms Albrecht’s ‘mercantile evangelism’ during the interwar period and summarises the ‘Lutheran experiment’ as focused on keeping people away from ‘harmful contact with settlers, especially from Alice Springs; second, to teach Christian beliefs and to assert its superiority over Indigenous Law; third, to avoid ‘pauperising’ the recipients of rations’ by paying people for work and teaching tanning and bootmaking’ (1998, pp. 80–91). Others have paid attention to the complex ways in which corporal punishment, Christianity, clothing, concepts of illness, and music played a part in the initial encounters between the Lutherans and the Arrernte (Brock, 2007; Brock and Van Gent, 2002; CurtisWendlandt, 2010; Hurley, 2017; Swijghuisen Reigersberg, 2012; Van Gent; 2003). While Joanna Cruikshank’s work usefully grapples with the way faith missionaries in general were both hostile to many aspects of Indigenous culture but also open to Indigenous participation in faith and spirituality, much of this scholarship explores a one-way imposition of Western cultures on Indigenous people (2010). During the 1950 and 1960s, Albrecht initiated an education scheme that targeted ‘half-caste’ Indigenous girls living on pastoral stations across Central Australia.2 Largely unknown and unacknowledged outside the FRM, the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA) and the Indigenous families directly impacted by it, the education scheme for ‘half-caste’ girls initiated by Albrecht in the 1950s was underpinned 2 In

Australia, the term half-caste was widely used in British colonial laws to refer to the offspring of white colonists and Aboriginal natives of the continent. The Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 proclaimed by the British colony of Victoria (now the Australian state of the same name) mentioned half-castes habitually associating with or living with an Aborigine. Later academic literature, also applied the term and became a central feature in the works Australian ethnographers and anthropologists including Baldwin Spencer and Norman Tindale.

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by the progressive political ideal of individual consent and the even more radical idea that a productive Indigenous future must have its foundations in an individual retaining connections to the cultural traditions and history of an Indigenous past. The girls handpicked by Albrecht as the best and brightest ‘half-castes’ from the pastoral stations he visited were billeted to members of Lutheran congregations in South Australia to receive a primary education in the state school system. Those who succeeded in their studies were later sent as long-term boarding students to Lutheran secondary colleges in South Australia and New South Wales. Professor Judd’s mother, Lorna Wilson, was one of these girls. The FRM scheme was progressive because, for F.W. Albrecht, assimilation via participation in formal schooling required the maintenance of strong family and kin relationships. The FRM scheme appears unique during this period of history because of the requirement that participating ‘half-caste’ girls continue a correspondence with their Indigenous mothers, siblings and other family members and that they journey back to the pastoral stations they originated from for the end of year Christmaslong school break. It was a scheme that enabled access to a quality private college education while also encouraging participants to remain connected to family and extended kin relationships. Significantly, this was a situation that also provided them with opportunities to learn cultural knowledge of Country and, most importantly, to retain the knowledge and use of their first language as native speakers of several central Australian languages including Western and Southern Arrernte, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara. Many of the girls who participated in this FRM scheme went on to have highly successful careers as nurses and later as leaders of Indigenous community organisations as well as translators of Indigenous languages and advocates for Indigenous rights in Central Australia and elsewhere. Our project draws on the extensive archive materials of the FRM and the LCA as well as in-depth interviews conducted with several of the surviving Indigenous women who participated in the FRM scheme. This chapter introduces the project as a ‘work in progress’ as we examine a Central Australian Indigenous experience of church, mission and assimilation policy that is considered markedly different in aim, objective and outcome from the experience of many Stolen Generations individuals. This chapter is therefore written as part one of an exploratory series that we hope will serve as a potential guide to those who seek to engage with Indigenous peoples when writing Australian history. As professional scholars, we are both strongly committed to practising ethical research when writing about Indigenous peoples and their communities. We believe ethical research is best done in partnership and active collaboration with living Indigenous people and communities. We strive to find a scholarship of engagement that repositions the processes of writing Australian histories about Indigenous peoples to include elements that exist beyond the settler-colonial archive and are grounded in real live, active and dynamic engagement with contemporary Indigenous peoples and society. This chapter constitutes our first attempt to find such a scholarship of engagement as we bring together expertise, methodological approaches and theoretical insights that emerge from the discipline of history and the field of Australian Indigenous Studies. With such objectives in mind this chapter seeks to marry archival research with the oral evidence gathered

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from the Indigenous women who participated in FRM scheme as girls, as we seek new insight and understanding of how they as Indigenous people see and assess the attempts of F.W. Albrecht to achieve Indigenous assimilation in ways that did not require the eradication of an Indigenous identity. The results of the initial phase of our project will largely be discussed in a series of publications to follow. Our broader methodology is based on the idea of flipping what might perhaps, at first glance, be our expected roles, framed by widely held ideas about race and culture in Australia. In previous research Judd has written about ideas that continue to link capability and skills to race and cultural background and their impact in continuing to define Indigenous peoples and their interests and capacity as constituting an inferential form of racism (Hallinan, 2009). Although Ellinghaus is not the member of the team with the deepest connection to Indigenous communities, we concluded that she would be the more appropriate interviewer (especially as Judd is related to several of the potential interviewees), while Judd would focus on the archival story left behind by the FRM. Ellinghaus’ subject position places her outside the community and kinship networks of the women being interviewed for the project. She is also of a different generation and claims a different identity position. Yet she shares their gender and brings a deep knowledge of the assimilation policies that shaped their lives, as well as professional experience as a historian in the conduct of oral history interviews. The stories that interviewees tell to Ellinghaus are inevitably framed by her outsider status, they include explanations of places, people, events and cultural traditions that would probably not be necessary had Judd been the interviewer. Thus, from the very beginning, we have asked interviewees to shape their stories for a broad audience. Meanwhile, Judd brings his own lived experience, family stories, and cultural knowledge to the dusty boxes of the FRM archives. His perspective, as we will outline in the second section of this chapter, allows a new reading of these archives and the story contained within them.

4.2 Part One: What We Have Learned So Far In this section, we outline three insights that we have already gained about collaborative Indigenous-settler research into Australia’s recent colonial past, even though the project is still in its initial stages. The first is that there is a disjuncture between ethics as defined by universities and ethics as everyday practices in substantive Indigenous communities that influence what actually transpires and is negotiated between these communities and ‘researchers in the field’ (Hawkes et al., 2017, pp. 17–41). ‘What makes research ethical?’ asked Madeline Whetung and Sarah Wakefield as they navigated the research ethics process of the University of Toronto (Whetung & Wakefield, 2019, pp. 146–158). We had similar, perhaps less polite, queries about ethics during the longwinded process of gaining the approval of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Human Ethics Advisory Group (HEAG). Indeed, the process seemed at times to be irrelevant and even antithetical to the work that we had committed to doing and were being prevented from commencing. Assessors, for example, saw Judd’s role

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in the project, as crucial to the functioning of the research because he offered a direct connection to the community. But his familial relationship to a number of the interviewees was also viewed as highly problematic and a ‘conflict of interest’. In this, it reflected Madeline Whetung’s experience of the ethics protocol at the University of Toronto, which made her ‘feel as though it was impossible to embody both at once: I was either colonising researcher or Indigenous community member: the subject of research’ (Whetung & Wakefield, 2019, p. 148). For Judd, the process reiterated his concerns that contemporary Human Research Ethics Committees (HREC) of Australian universities and the national ethical frameworks that direct their oversight of research involving Indigenous participants, such as those developed by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), mirrored the historic work of Aborigines Protection Boards; stifling the decision-making processes that Indigenous peoples themselves are participants in and to whose authority and outcomes they adhere. For Judd, this experience was indicative of how the ethics approval processes of Australian universities often functioned to achieve unethical outcomes by undercutting the ability of Indigenous researchers and Indigenous community participants to be ‘self-determining’ in establishing and agreeing to the terms on which research will be carried out in practice. For Ellinghaus, while it was useful to be reminded of proper processes when doing the interviews and to have the ‘legal backing’ of her institution, the pieces of paper she brought to the Indigenous women she has talked to so far seemed meaningless beside her personal ambition of being a worthy and trustworthy recipient of their stories. To date, interviewees have spent little time thinking about the intricacies of the ‘Plain Language Statement’ or the ‘Consent Form’ before placing their signature upon the latter. Whetung and Wakefield wonder whether ethics processes in universities serve to ‘re-embed colonial understandings of relationship, respect, and responsibility’ in research (Whetung & Wakefield, 2019, p. 149). It has undoubtedly been the collaborative engagement between Ellinghaus and Judd that has promoted respect and responsibility in this project, rather than the involvement of the HEAG. Second, this project has taught Ellinghaus a particular lesson about the importance of time and place in doing settler—Indigenous research. Judd, in his work at Papunya, was already well-versed in the need to carve time from a busy academic schedule to visit the remote community with which he works (see Judd & Butcher, 2015). After her first trip to Alice Springs to undertake interviews, Ellinghaus quickly realised that these interviews would not be completed in the one-to-three hours described in the ethics application. Her first interviewee, Lorna Wilson, unexpectedly scheduled a visit to the FRM church archives, before the interview itself. Bemused but willing, Ellinghaus went along unaware of the important context she was about to experience. The church archives sit on the same land as the Mission Block, where Lorna Wilson lived for a short time as a child, in the actual building where Albrecht taught her as a child (the church itself is now located in a new, adjacent building). This is the place where Wilson continues to attend services, where she maintains friendships with church staff and members, and where she is a senior and valued member of the congregation. Later that day, Ellinghaus found that her ability to understand Lorna’s life story was enhanced by the photographs she observed, the

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stories told by Lorna during the visit, her meeting with church officials, and her experience actually being in the same physical places that featured so heavily in Lorna’s childhood. A later visit with Lorna Wilson and Judd to Titjikala (Maryvale Station), where Lorna Wilson spent her early childhood years, functioned similarly. More fundamentally, the time taken to make these visits deepened the growing trust and friendship between Ellinghaus and Wilson. Standing together on the very land where episodes from Wilson’s earlier life had taken place, observing her interacting with other members of the communities to which she belongs, were moments that have deepened Ellinghaus’ ability as an historian to tell her story. Banivanua Mar reminds us of the importance of the landscape as an historical text. Epeli Hau’ofa prompts us, she says, to acknowledge that we do history every day as we move through a landscape. Moreover, ‘to remove a people from their landscape or vice versa is to sever them from their history, and this is of the “same order of enormity as the complete destruction of all of a nation’s libraries, archives, museums”’ (Banivanua Mar, 2012, p. 189). The written archives traditionally relied upon by historians to write Indigenous history can, therefore, tell only part of the story. Archival sources, by their very nature, separate people’s stories from the Country on which they take place. Being physically present in historical spaces has added a dimension to her understanding of Wilson’s history that Ellinghaus is only just beginning to understand and be able to articulate. The conversations in the car on the way to these landscapes, as Kijas has noted, were also crucial (2010). It was in the car that Wilson began teaching Ellinghaus how to be a better interviewer by emphasising the importance of listening as opposed to asking questions (which so often, Ellinghaus realised when reading the transcripts of the interviews, were the wrong questions) (Yow, 1997). In this respect, slowing down, recognising the importance of place, and being mindful that the Indigenous participants in the project have very different ideas and understandings of what is a good use of time and what is a useful way to work, became important lessons learned by Ellinghaus that gave her a deeper understanding of Judd’s oft-expressed complaint that university systems and workload calculations rub up uncomfortably against the demands of community-based research. For Judd, the experience reaffirmed things first learned at Papunya in 2015. Playing by Luritja/Pintupi rules of engagement has required Indigenous cultural protocols to be observed, many of which required much time and waiting. For example, Judd insisted that upon setting up camp, protocols associated with rights to Country were evoked. This requires patiently waiting for the hosts to approach and welcome the researcher as visitor onto their Country. At Papunya, this has sometimes required a 24–36 h wait by Judd and his fellow researchers before appropriate contact could be made. For some of Judd’s non-Indigenous research colleagues coming to terms with community protocols and ethical practices has proved to be an extremely difficult lesson to learn. Ultimately, however, strict itineraries and time management practices have to be thrown out the window. Finally, this project has highlighted the importance of having a good working relationship based on trust and friendship. The history that we write will be enigmatically and indefinably enhanced by all the other conversations we have had—about academic life, work pressure, parenting, and our friendly disagreements about the

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importance of the history of sport in Australian society. Shared conversations lead to honest conversations that reach beyond differences in background, experiences and discipline. These conversations have particularly helped Ellinghaus move beyond the limitations, silences and unspoken fears of her chosen discipline. This part of our shared learning reintegrates much of what is outlined in the earlier section about the nature of our unlikely collaboration and the unexpected common ground we have come to share. Finding common ground through a productive working relationship is key not only to more valid insights to Australia’s recent settler-colonial past but also in solving the political impasse that exists in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler-colonial state. Our learning to work together productively in search of a better Australia for our children is the kind of committed collaboration based in authentic friendship and respect that the author Richard Flanagan recently spoke so eloquently about at the Garma Festival. Hearing this speech in person, Judd quickly communicated the transcript to Ellinghaus via email with the comment ‘he’s talking about commitments like ours’. Flanagan spoke for us when he said: In Yolngu the word for selfish is gurrutumiriw, which translates as lacking in kin, or acting as if one has no kin. And Australia as a nation, after 200 years, is faced with a fundamental truth. We are now entwined peoples; by custom, by humour, by friendship, by love, by work and by sport, in art, in music, in words, and through the land; in all these ways we have over 200 years found ourselves in each other. Black and white, we have become kin. We cannot be selfish. And because we are kin it is not possible for white Australia to pretend that it is not damaged by the war that so damages black Australia, that it is not crippled by the same wounds, that it too is not rendered oddly mute by the same silence (Flanagan, 2018).

Through undertaking this research together we are learning to treat each other not just as colleagues but as respected kin, whose work together will shape an Australian future that is shared by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike.

4.3 Concluding Remarks The production of historical studies of Indigenous Australia that model ethical research design and practice require research activity grounded in substantive relationships with living Indigenous communities. Ethical research collaborations between scholars who, respectively, claim Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities require a deep level of trust and a willingness to acknowledge how cultural difference impacts the research process. Researchers need to be open to modifying practice in ways that embrace concepts and protocols that originate in Indigenous ontologies. While ethical research about the history of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders may require us to write as kin, our reasons for doing so extend well beyond support for reconciliation and settler-state recognition of first peoples in law and politics. Our decision to pursue research in this way is also motivated by a commitment to ensure the outcomes of our work together has real world outcomes for the Indigenous people we collaborate with. We are conscious of the need for scholarship that has a purpose beyond the intellectual discussions that endlessly swirl within the confines of

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Australian academia. In many cases, academic debate that focuses on the historical position Indigenous people have occupied at the very margins of settler-colonial society, seems to exist in a vacuum. Debates in Australian history appear largely disconnected from efforts that aim to improve the well-being—economic, political, social and cultural of Indigenous people alive today. We believe that Australian history has slipped into what Lewis R. Gordon has termed disciplinary decadence in respect to the way the discipline currently constructs the past occupied by Australia’s Indigenous peoples.3 While efforts to uphold the tried and tested approaches to ‘mainstream’ historical research and the cultural norms of the discipline do much to secure the position of the discipline within the power structures of the Australian higher education system, maintaining the status quo does little to make the discipline relevant or beneficial to Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders. The insights we discuss in this paper indicate that alternate approaches are required. In this project, we hope to write history that is broadly pertinent and useful to Indigenous peoples in several ways. First, we aim to do so by telling Wilson’s story in ways invited and curated by Wilson herself. Second, we are engaged in developing a new model of ethical engagement between non-Indigenous and Indigenous scholars. Finally, we write history that respects Indigenous traditions, knowledge systems, ontologies and the importance of place to an understanding of the past. In our view Australian historians must reconfigure the way in which they do ‘Indigenous’ history to move beyond a research process that is centred on the archive and document based empirical data to a process that is decentred, multifaceted; acknowledges and indeed actively embraces research where empiricism is experiential and grounded in ongoing relationships with all the additional complexity this brings to the work.

References Attwood, B. (2005). Telling the truth about aboriginal history. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin Academic. Banivanua Mar, T. (2012). Settler-colonial landscapes and narratives of possession. Arena, 37(38), 178–179. Birch, T. (2006). ‘I could feel it in my body’: War on a history war. Transforming Cultures eJournal, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5130/tfc.v1i1.188. Briskman, L. (2001). Beyond apologies: The stolen generations and the churches. Children Australia, 26(3), 4–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1035077200010282. Brock, P. (2007). Nakedness and clothing in early encounters between aboriginal people of Central Australia, missionaries and anthropologists. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2007.0015. Brock, P., & Van Gent, J. (2002). Generational religious change among the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, Central Australia. Australian Historical Studies, 33(120), 303–318. https://doi.org/10. 1080/10314610208596221. Broome, R. (2014). Doing aboriginal history. Agora, 49(2). Cruickshank, J. (2010). Race, history, and the Australian faith missions. Itinerario, 34(03), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0165115310000677. 3 Gordon

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Curtis-Wendlandt, L. (2010). Corporal punishment and moral reform at Hermannsburg mission. History Australia, 7(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2104/ha100007. Flanagan, R. (2018, August 5). The world is being undone before us. If we do not reimagine Australia, we will be undone too. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2018/aug/05/the-world-is-being-undone-before-us-if-we-do-not-reimagineaustralia-we-will-be-undone-too. Gordon, L. R. (2006). Disciplinary decadence: Living thought in trying times. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Grenville, K. (2005). The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Grieves, G. (2005). The politics and ethics of writing indigenous histories. Historical Journal, 33. Haebich, A. (2008). Spinning the dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970. North Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Press. Haebich, A., & Press, F. A. C. (2000). Broken circles: Fragmenting indigenous families 1800–2000 (Large print ed.). Fremantle, WA: Arts Centre Press. Hallinan, C. (2009). Changes in assumptions about Australian Indigenous footballers: From exclusion to enlightenment. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26(16), 2358–2375. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523360903457015. Hawkes, G., Pollock, D., Judd, B., Phipps, P., & Assoulin, E. (2017). Ngapartji Ngapartji: Finding ethical approaches to research involving indigenous peoples, Australian Perspectives. ab-Original, 1(1), 17–41. https://doi.org/10.5325/aboriginal.1.1.0017. Hurley, A. W. (2017). Farewell my country? Hermannsburg, Gus Williams, and the indigenised heimatlied. Journal of Australian Studies, 41(1), 18–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2016. 1272476. Judd, B. (2012). The question of indigenous origins and the unlevel playing field: Outside the boundary of the dominant paradigm. Sport in Society, 15(7), 1026–1033. https://doi.org/10. 1080/17430437.2012.723372. Judd. (2018). Colonialism and race relations in remote inland Australia: Observations from the field of Australian indigenous studies. ab-Original, 1(2), 214–242. https://doi.org/10.5325/ aboriginal.1.2.0214. Judd, B., & Butcher, T. (2015). To play Papunya: The problematic interface between a remote Aboriginal community and the organization of Australian Football in Central Australia. Sport in Society, 18(5), 543–551. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2014.976004. Kijas, J. (2010). Same place, different views: Exploring the Wilsons River story sites Community History Project. The Public Historian, 32(2), 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2010.32.2.51. Leane, J. (2016). Other peoples’ stories. Overland. Retrieved from https://overland.org.au/previousissues/issue-225/feature-jeanine-leane/. Macintyre, S., & Clark, A. (2003). The history wars. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Rowse, T. (1998). White flour, white power: From rations to citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Russell, L. (2018). Editorial: From the president. History Australia, 15(2), 211–213. Smith, L. T., Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2019). Introduction. In L. T. Smith, E. Tuck, & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view (p. 6). New York: Routledge. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, M. (2012). ‘We are Lutherans from Germany’: Music, language, social history and change in Hopevale. Aboriginal History Journal, 36. https://doi.org/10.22459/ah.36. 2013.05. Van Gent, J. (2003). Changing concepts of embodiment and illness among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg mission. Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change, 227–248. https://doi.org/10. 1163/9789047405559_012.

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Whetung, M., & Wakefield, S. (2019). Colonial conventions: Institutionalized research relationships and decolonizing research ethics. In L. T. Smith, E. Tuck, & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view (pp. 146–158). New York, NY: Routledge. Windschuttle, K. (2002). The fabrication of Aboriginal history. Vol. 1, Van Dieman’s Land 1803–1847. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press. Yow, V. (1997). “Do I Like Them too Much?”: Effects of the oral history interview on the interviewer and vice-versa. Oral History Review, 24(1), 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/24.1.55.

Chapter 5

Analysing the Indigenous News Network in Action: IndigenousX, The Guardian and the Wakul App David Nolan, Lisa Waller, Jack Latimore, Margaret Simons and Kerry McCallum Abstract Research into Indigenous news representation has suggested it has supported relations of colonial subordination and exploitation rather than Indigenous empowerment. Recently, Indigenous news representation in Australia has been transformed and, to some extent, empowered by shifts in the media ecosystem. This chapter explores the significance of a partnership between the Indigenous owned and operated online media organisation IndigenousX and Guardian Australia. The second half of the chapter introduces a research intervention that aims to broaden and deepen the IndigenousX-Guardian collaboration through the deployment of an innovative piece of digital infrastructure, the Wakul app. This software application aggregates and makes available Indigenous media content and other relevant information from throughout Australia, with the aim of enabling increased Indigenous perspectives, agendas and worldviews in the generation and production of news. This project is underpinned by Actor Network Theory (ANT), which provides scope to consider how Indigenous news is produced through dynamic material relations. The chapter explores methodological affinities between decolonising approaches and ANT, and the degree to which a negotiated combination of these methodological approaches might facilitate a nuanced, ethically-grounded and up-to-date mapping of relations that constitute the Indigenous ‘news network’. D. Nolan (B) · J. Latimore University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. Latimore e-mail: [email protected] L. Waller Deakin University, Burwood, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Simons Monash University, Clayton, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. McCallum University of Canberra, Bruce, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_5

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Keywords Indigenous journalism · Indigenous news network · Wakul app · IndigenousX · The Guardian · Decolonising news

5.1 Introduction This chapter elaborates a relational approach to understanding Indigenous news representation, and presents a project that seeks, through a media intervention, to gain a better understanding of how the relations that constitute what we term the ‘Indigenous news network’ may be changing. Although a consideration of media representation as an outcome of a network of relationships might not appear a particularly bold claim, our approach marks something of a departure from a field of existing studies on Indigenous news representation. As McCallum and Waller (2017a) have noted, the majority of studies of Indigenous news representation have focused on the issue of media racism, drawing on a tradition of work that has approached media as an ideological site that serves to uphold asymmetrical relations of power. Without discounting the importance and persistence of this tradition, whose claims have been grounded in extensive empirical research, it is notable that this approach lies squarely within a tradition of examining the impact of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, with the media positioned as a mechanism of racial subordination. Implicitly positioning Indigenous peoples as victims of, rather than active participants in, media has met with criticism for both its paternalism and its tendency to be methodologically complicit in a silencing of Indigenous voices that such scholarship otherwise critiques. By contrast, a second paradigm has centred more squarely on Indigenous media production, particularly in the community sector, positioning it as a site through which Indigenous identities are sustained and a mechanism through which Indigenous people ‘speak back’ and seek to counter mainstream media representations they regard as misleading and as reproducing prejudicial tropes surrounding Indigenous people. While again important, some concerns surrounding this paradigm centre on the degree to which it tends to categorise Indigenous people as occupying a position outside the mainstream, in relatively enclaved spaces, rather than as active and effective participants in shaping and contributing to ‘mainstream’ debates. It is important to qualify our position at this point, as we neither wish to be misunderstood, nor to revert to a reductive binary that suggests that Indigenous media must be either read through a framework of marginalisation, on one hand, or empowerment on the other. Our intention is neither to dismiss the importance of the above traditions or the value of their findings. In particular, we recognise both that the power relations that are characteristic of the Indigenous news network today continue to be asymmetrically structured, supporting modes of representation that continue to have baleful consequences for Australia’s First Nations peoples, and that Indigenous people are neither passive nor marginal to the Australian media field, albeit many Indigenous voices and perspectives do continue to be significantly marginalised. That is, the power relations that are constitutive of the Indigenous news network are precisely that: relations, not ‘structures’ that are entirely encompassing, monolithic

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and immutable (though again, we do not deny the persistence and durability of these relations, embodied as they are in practices and institutions that are marked by their colonial history and that have proved strongly resistant to change). The possibility of change, however, remains as a consequence of both the ways in which the dynamics of existing relationships can themselves shift, and as a consequence of the introduction of new actors and practices within the network. To illustrate this point, before going on to elaborate our approach and its application more fully, we introduce a case study we have analysed more fully in previous works (Dreher, Waller, & McCallum, 2017; Latimore, Nolan, Simons, & Khan, 2017) to ground our thinking and introduce some of the actors that our research into the implications of shifts in the Indigenous news network focuses upon. In 2015, an opinion survey was published by RECOGNISE, the government and corporate funded, professionally slick, campaign launched to promote public support for a general statement of recognition of Indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution. A random sampling method was used to canvass 750 Indigenous people and 2700 non-Indigenous people, and the published poll indicated 75% of all Australians and 87% of Indigenous people would vote “Yes” in a referendum on the issue. These RECOGNISE survey results were widely reported in Australia’s mainstream media as an indication of community support for constitutional recognition. In light of findings he felt were implausible, based on local talk on the issue, Indigenous activist and IndigenousX founder Luke Pearson conducted an alternative, informal survey using an accessible online tool (Survey Monkey). Pearson publicised his survey via Twitter, attracting 827 self-selected Indigenous respondents. The findings of this poll indicated that 58% of these respondents did not support the RECOGNISE campaign, and 62% believed they would be no better off if they were recognised in the Commonwealth constitution. Pearson then employed Indigenous activist and blogger Celeste Liddle to write an article for The Guardian, based on these findings, which questioned whether the RECOGNISE campaign was representative of Indigenous views on recognition, and criticised Australian news outlets for their failure to represent a wider breadth of Indigenous perspectives on the issue (Liddle, 2015). Thus amplified, the IndigenousX poll findings were reported as a national news item, originally picked up by ABC news, and subsequently by other outlets. This served, significantly, to performatively reposition the story from that of a movement that attracted consensual support to one that positioned the issue of constitutional recognition as controversial, if not divisive. We present an account of this episode here not to assess its significance in the context of this public debate, or the validity of contrasting methods of assessing public opinion, but to position it as a product of shifting relations through which Indigenous news, and media debates surrounding Indigenous Australia, are constituted. To reiterate, our claim is not that longstanding criticisms of media reporting of Indigenous Australia are no longer relevant, or that entrenched shortcomings are likely to be imminently resolved. Nevertheless, what this story does indicate is the introduction of significant new actors and relationships in the Indigenous news network. The entrants include Indigenous media activists/journalists such as Pearson and Liddle, technologies and platforms including Survey Monkey and Twitter, and

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relatively new entities in Australia’s media marketplace such as The Guardian. Our interest is in gaining a greater understanding how the entrance of such new actors and relationships may be contributing to shifts in the constitution of news agendas relating to Indigenous people and issues, and how these might be situated and understood within the broader context of Indigenous-settler relations in Australia. Furthermore, as we discuss below, we are concerned to explore the potential for a project that not only interrogates such transformations, but also makes a contribution towards a progressive ‘decolonisation’ of news through an action research methodology that reflects on and incorporates ‘decolonising’ approaches. To this end, we provide an initial elaboration of our theoretical and methodological approach, before turning to focus particularly on the relationship between IndigenousX and The Guardian, with whom we have developed a research partnership in a forthcoming project.

5.2 From the ‘Indigenous Public Sphere’ to Indigenous News Networks Attempts by researchers to map the dynamic field of Indigenous news have typically relied on the concept of the ‘public sphere’ (Latimore et al., 2017). As it is used more broadly in media and journalism studies, the public sphere in some respects simply provides a convenient shorthand term for the domain or process of ongoing public discussion and representation—in this case, how Indigenous people and issues are represented by, and have variable access to, a range of media forms, institutions and technologies. However, the public sphere concept also serves as a particular mode of conceptualising and approaching this space, which is not inconsequential. Among existing conceptualisations of the ‘Indigenous public sphere’, two contrasting definitions have been influential. On one hand, Indigenous public spheres are conceived as cultural sites and practices through which Indigenous identities and voices engage in dialogues that support the maintenance and expression of specific identities, which also provide vehicles through which problematic representations in mainstream media can be contested. Thus, for Michael Meadows, the development of a series of parallel, overlapping spaces, facilitated by community media, is theorised as a process whereby Indigenous people ‘are turning their backs on mainstream media and engaging in their own forms of cultural production’ (2005, p. 37). On the other hand, Hartley and McKee (2000) theorised the ‘Indigenous public sphere’ as the entire semiotic space in which images and conceptions of Indigeneity are produced and circulated through various (non-Indigenous and Indigenous) media. By enabling the formation and exchange of ‘public opinion’ and ‘public imagery’, it is through the public sphere of media representations that conceptions of collective identity, and the relation of Indigeneity to and/or within it, are negotiated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. In this approach, the Indigenous public sphere is thus also not entirely, or even primarily, the preserve of Indigenous participants.

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Both of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Meadows’s approach draws attention to how Indigenous people use media, and in particular the importance of community media as a resource for Indigenous ‘counter-publics’. However, his characterisation of such spaces as ‘discrete formations’ risks underestimating the degree to which Indigenous media practices are both impacted by and consequential for wider processes of public representation, and now appears rather dated in light of recent research documenting the take-up and mobilisation of networked media resources by Indigenous people (Carlson & Frazer, 2015). This position risks underestimating the degree to which Indigenous media practices are both impacted by and consequential for wider processes of public representation. While Hartley and McKee’s approach has the benefits of a wider perspective, its analytic utility is undermined by its idealised conceptualisation of processes of Indigenous media representation. Hartley and McKee present media representations as the product of an increasingly inclusive process of ‘dialogue’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, governed by an underlying ‘logic of democratic equivalence’ they claim is inherent to modernity, and particularly embodied in commercial media culture (Hartley & McKee, 2000, p. 4), moving gradually towards a more progressive and inclusive public sphere. This approach discounts critical consideration of the legacies of colonial racism and its contemporary manifestations, as such legacies are apparently on the way to being overcome by modernity’s inherent (teleo)logic. It also discounts consideration of how political and (particularly) commercial influences might contribute to the reproduction and generation of discourses of Indigeneity and Indigenous issues as inherently and inevitably problematic and intractable, in ways that limit rather than enable engagement with Indigenous voices (Brough, 1999; Fforde et al., 2013). Despite their differences, both accounts are ‘idealised’ in another sense, insofar as the adoption of the public sphere model itself tends, by implication, to position the problem of representation through an image of speech and dialogue, centring on Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants themselves (although, it should be acknowledged, Meadows’s wider focus on community media as resources that facilitate speech goes beyond this). Indeed, such idealisation has been identified as a persistent problem associated with the public sphere concept, inherited from Habermas’s (1989) presentation of the public sphere as both a basis for describing actual spaces of public debate and, simultaneously, as a normative critical ideal. As Nerone (2015) suggests, because public sphere theory views media systems as the partial or full realisation of a regulative ideal, it tends toward abstraction, rather than consideration of the material forces that contribute to actual forms of and opportunities for public representation. To the extent that material relations shaping media representation are considered, they are thus positioned as obstacles or embodiments of a ‘conversational’ or ‘dialogic’ ideal of face-to-face communication. Notably, too, this regulative ideal derives from a non-Indigenous epistemological framing of representative democracy, which does not reflect on how Indigenous people conceptualise their own activities of representation and deliberation (Waller, 2017). While public sphere theory brings a critical ideal derived from a colonial system of government to consider news representations, critics have positioned news itself as a product of

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a colonial knowledge system which, they argue, works to authorise dominant epistemologies as representing the ‘real’ while marginalising other knowledges (Avison & Meadows, 2000; Rigney, 1999; Smith, 1999; Waller, 2010). In recent years, various scholars have turned to Actor Network Theory (ANT) to develop an alternative, expanded horizon for understanding and analyzing publics (Anderson, 2013; Anderson & Kreiss, 2013; Hawkins, 2013). ANT analyses draw on a wider consideration of how publics are formed and facilitated through the contingent, dynamic relations that characterise a shifting assemblage of human and non-human relationships. From this perspective, rather than a greater or lesser embodiment of an abstract ideal, media are positioned as a pluralistic network of institutions, practitioners, technologies, discourses, practices, formats and heterogeneous relationships (with media owners, advertisers, state funders, regulators, sources and users) that collectively influence its various forms at any given time, and over its history. As Chris Anderson and Daniel Kreiss argue, understanding the nature of public life involves accounting for the ways in which such assemblages have been historically constructed and transformed through the interactions of (to draw on Bruno Latour’s terminology) the various actors and actants that constitute them: [T]o understand power and reform social institutions, and even uproot them, requires attention not just to theories of participation, deliberation and the public sphere, but the sociotechnical engineering of democratic publics and the cultural presuppositions that guide it (p. 380).

Although such an approach can thus be distinguished from public sphere theory, it might nevertheless be positioned as but another imported epistemological framework derived from a European theoretical tradition. There may be, however, some potential for exploring how far the relations between ANT and Indigenous epistemologies might be productively brought together (albeit not simply ‘reconciled’). Indeed, without gainsaying their very different cultural and epistemological bases, Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) has highlighted some affinities between ANT and Indigenous approaches, underlining that ANT is built upon the premise of interconnecting, referential chains of humans and non-humans, and how these connections recognise mutual exchange/effect (2013, p. 28). The emphasis placed on the agency of non-human things, particularly land and water, in Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies stands in stark contrast to the normative abstraction characteristic of humanist approaches to representation (Waller, 2016). Indigenous modes of conceptualising reality are often literally ‘grounded’, such that theories and understandings are intimately bound to, and not distinct from, sacred connections between place, non-human and human (see also Marika, 2008; Marika, Yunupingu, Marika-Mununggirtj, & Muller, 2009; Rose, 2007; Watts, 2013, p. 22; Waller, 2017). The metaphysical dimension of Indigenous epistemologies based on relationships to land poses a deep challenge to the principles and premises of Western research methodologies rooted in secular post-enlightenment epistemologies. Rose (2007) uses the term ‘recursive epistemologies’ to discuss the dynamic nature of Indigenous ethical and epistemological processes, in which the world is inhabited by both human and non-human forms of sentience ‘and events continually enter into,

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become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe’. She explains recursive epistemology as a ‘situated connectivity’ that fosters ‘porous proximities’ to work productively with difference, change, and exchange. This occurs when both knower and known are mutually embedded in an encounter and knowledge is exchanged and changes both parties (Rose, 2007, pp. 91–92). Another aspect that might allow an ANT-based analytical approach to afford potential connections to Indigenous research approaches derives from its reflexive acknowledgement that analyses of socio-technical networks can facilitate, and may already constitute, interventions to ‘reengineer’ them. Gaining an understanding of the socio-technical relations that have been constitutive of what we define as the Indigenous ‘news network’ [a term we draw from Domingo, Masip, and Costera Meijer (2015)], and how it is changing, requires consideration of how it has been (and remains) structured by colonial relations of power that are embodied by and enacted through institutional structures and practices. Universities do not stand apart from this network, but as sites where media education, training and research are conducted, form an essential part of its complex. Here, an agenda for a more encompassing analysis of the relations through which news networks are formed can be productively extended by drawing upon decolonising approaches to knowledge production. Decolonising methodologies involve acknowledging the ways in which research has historically served to naturalise or justify colonial oppression (Smith, 1999) and can (inadvertently) contribute to ongoing dispossession (Foley, 1999; Moreton-Robinson, 2011). Researchers are therefore required to critically reflect upon their own privilege, institutional position, and the impact of their work (Foxwell-Norton, Forde, & Meadows, 2013). Furthermore, as Rigney (1999) suggests, a vital aspect of a decolonising approach involves both reflexivity and respect for Indigenous perspectives and knowledge. An indigenist research framework is underpinned by a three-point agenda: political integrity, giving privilege to Indigenous voices and action for social change (Rigney, 2006). We return to the issue of how these principles might be incorporated within an updated, action-oriented analysis of Australia’s Indigenous news network later in this chapter.

5.3 Australia’s Shifting Indigenous News Network Consideration of factors that contribute to shaping news representation has centred on intersecting, reinforcing, competing and conflicting factors and agendas in play. These include the existence and persistence of longstanding, racialised discourses that provide culturally embedded frames for understanding Indigenous Australia that have tended to represent Indigeneity as a site (or cause) of deficit and failure, and as a continual problem-space, burden and site of inevitable conflict (McCallum & Waller, 2017a; Meadows, 2001). Journalists invoke news values that naturalise ‘race’ as a site of social conflict (Bell, 1997), and on this basis construct and then report on ‘events’ that reiterate this embedded epistemology. They also tend to preference the perspective of social authorities, particularly government sources (McCallum, Waller,

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& Meadows, 2012). It is also important to consider the particular influence of the institutional goals, political agendas and different forms of market appeal characteristic of different news organisations and outlets on editorial positions and practices. Market dynamics, and the degree to which these facilitate and constrain the strategies of particular actors and institutions, also serve as forces that materially enable and constrain public life, alongside state initiatives such as investment in media content initiatives (public and community media) and content regulation. Alongside such influences, the discursive practices of governmental and non-governmental sources, and the particular ways in which they work to create media agendas also play a constitutive role in shaping public and political agendas and representations. The representation of Indigenous Australia is also a matter of great interest to private actors that use public relations and sponsorship to further their interests and manage their reputations, as well as exert influence over the nature of policies relating to Indigenous Australia, such as those on land use and land rights. In addition to these political, economic and media influences, a range of broader factors also serve as material influences on representation. These include the question of what technologies exist and are used to produce and circulate representations, their affordances and constraints, and how are they taken up and used by different actors. It also includes the question of how far powerful and influential figures (such as journalists) have acquired a cultural competence in reporting on Indigenous Australia, and the understanding they bring to that practice (McCallum et al., 2012; Waller, 2013). Another factor is the broader influence of inherited cultural tropes and narratives that both journalists and audience-users bring to their engagement with Indigenous Australia, and the degree to which these contribute to influencing stories that are told. Textual representations can be considered as an ongoing outcome of such influences, and reciprocally as contributing discourses, tropes and templates that, over time, become embedded and persistent modes of knowing and representing Indigenous peoples. A long tradition of media research has found that mainstream news coverage relating to Indigenous peoples has overwhelmingly tended to focus on a narrow range of well-resourced voices and attaches discourses of conflict, blame and deficit to Indigenous identity (Meadows, 1996; McCallum & Waller, 2017a). At the same time, there has been a vibrant and diverse Indigenous media sector for at least 50 years, which has contested misrepresentation and marginalisation of Indigenous people and issues in mainstream media, and provided crucial forums for community communication, language maintenance, information delivery, political action (Forde, Foxwell-Norton, Meadows, 2002; Meadows, 2001; Meadows et al., 2007), as well as media training for Indigenous media workers and sources of news (McCallum et al., 2012). As Burrows (2016) notes, a significant shift in the Indigenous news network in recent times has seen an overlapping of ‘traditional’ and ‘user-generated’ sectors, which has enabled a proliferation of independent Indigenous media outlets, practices and voices. Existing research makes it clear that Indigenous people are voracious and creative content users and generators of this new media (Carlson, 2013), but other studies have also argued that opportunities for ‘voice’ do not, in themselves, increase the likelihood of being heard by those in positions of power, including mainstream journalists and news editors (Dreher et al., 2017; McCallum et al., 2016).

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There have been two major developments in the past decade that, while not entirely restructuring settler-Indigenous media relations, have nevertheless contributed to some transformation in those relationships. The first of these are the changes taking place in wider news ecologies at both global and local levels which can serve to disrupt and, potentially, support positive change (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015). The emergence of new non-Indigenous institutional actors in Australia such as Buzzfeed and The Guardian have to some extent problematised and, at least partially, transformed the space of Indigenous representation in Australian news markets. Their entrance on the scene has been marked by attempts to differentiate between legacy media and these new non-Indigenous players and infrastructures, and some of the new media players have sought to include distinctive forms of Indigenous representation as part of their editorial and market strategies. The second development, related to the first, is a proliferation of Indigenous media initiatives that have taken up and used these new non-Indigenous platforms to gain increased exposure in mainstream, legacy media (Dreher et al., 2017; Latimore et al., 2017). In the case of both developments, the emergence of digital networked communication tools and infrastructures have been vital in contributing to change. The partnership between IndigenousX and the Australian arm of The Guardian provides arguably the most significant and wellknown example of how these shifting relations are supporting new possibilities for Indigenous voices and perspectives in Australian public life. In the next section, we consider the details of this partnership and how far it might be read as both emblematic and contributory to shifts in the Indigenous news network, before turning to our action research project, that seeks to both investigate and extend these shifting relations. We draw our evidence from analysis of both IndigenousX and The Guardian’s media activity, and from interviews with both Luke Pearson and editorial staff from The Guardian.

5.4 IndigenousX and the Guardian @IndigenousX was launched as a Twitter account in 2012 by Luke Pearson, a Gamilaroi man with a previous career as a schoolteacher, educator and advocate. His objective, he has said, was to use social media to “challenge representations of Indigenous in the dominant media by providing a platform to showcase the diversity of First Nations peoples” (Latimore, 2018, p. 50). Since then, the account has acquired more than 40,000 followers. Hosting the account is circulated between Indigenous ‘guest hosts’ and around 300 of these have participated, both writing original content and seeking to amplify and draw attention to other content through retweeting, commenting and ‘liking’ (IndigenousX, 2018). In the early years, @IndigenousX provided the guest hosts with a platform for initiating and sustaining what might be described as cultural interventions. One host, Aaron Nagas, took Aldi and Big W to task over offensive ‘Australia Est. 1788’ T-shirts—offensive because the colonial dating disregards millennia of First Nations civilisation. A further campaign involved the Macquarie Dictionary re-addressing its entry for the word ‘boong’. Another

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campaign was an online drive that raised around $10,000 for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, which runs significant projects aimed at redressing low literacy levels in some Indigenous communities (IndigenousX, 2018). Fourteen months after IndigenousX was launched, The Guardian—the liberal British based news outlet run by the not for profit Scott Trust—launched an Australian website, carrying a combination of material from the international news organisation and locally produced content from journalists employed in Australia. The Guardian Australia was a significant local development in a media landscape which had previously been dominated by two publishers—News Corporation and Fairfax—in a country with one of the most concentrated media ownerships in the world (Simons, 2007; Tiffen, 2007, 2010). The Guardian’s arrival was followed in 2014 by the launch of an Australian edition of Buzzfeed and a web-based edition of the English tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail. These new arrivals went a small way to diluting ownership concentration, although they employed relatively small numbers of local journalists. The Guardian Australia was innovative in other ways. The launch editor, Katherine Viner (now editor in chief of The Guardian internationally) arrived in Australia six months before the launch and set out to familiarise herself with the Australian media scene, seeking to identify both gaps in market for news and information, and opportunities for a newcomer to establish itself (personal communication with Simons). A characteristic of the British Guardian under its editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, and board member Emily Bell had been an openness to new media technology and social media as a means of greater interaction with the audience and broadening the range of opinions published online (Bell, 2005; Cole, 2015). In the process, the adoption of brand taglines, such as ‘Comment is Free’ and ‘Open Journalism’, have been combined with the adoption of innovations in practice. Whereas the former involved a practice of drawing upon a wider array of opinion writers, the latter evokes connotations of the open source software movement, to position journalism as both a more transparent process and as involving users as co-creative partners, rather than simply consumers, of news (Lewis & Usher, 2013; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015). Viner brought this approach to Australia. She recruited some of Australia’s most senior journalists, including two leading political journalists then working for Fairfax, Katherine Murphy and Lenore Taylor (now the editor in chief of The Guardian Australia) as well as one of Australia’s most senior journalists, David Marr. The Guardian Australia was, therefore, both a start-up yet to establish a reputation and audience in Australia, but also an outlet with a rich journalistic pedigree, both through its relationship to the British parent Guardian, and its recruitment of journalists who had established reputations and mainstream media experience. These experienced journalists were encouraged to experiment with new media enabled forms of reporting, including political live blogging and aggregation of social media content from audience members (Murphy, 2015). The Guardian in Australia achieved early success in establishing an audience, and at the time of writing has a staff of 80, reaches a unique audience of 2.5 million and is the sixth most read digital news site in Australia (Bennett, 2018). Viner has since described her approach as becoming part of what she saw as an emerging ‘ecosystem’ for news enabled by the internet. The Guardian Australia, she felt, should aim to be part of this ecosystem and ‘not just plonked on

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top of it; to submit to the web’s architecture, psychology, mores, rather than imposing a newspaper’s structure over it’ (Viner, 2013). Viner had become aware of the @IndigenousX Twitter account during her period of familiarisation, and had begun to follow it. As she recently recounted (Latimore, 2018), she had identified ‘gaps’ in the Australian media coverage as being ‘asylum and immigration, political policy and Indigenous issues’: As someone fascinated by Australian history, the issue of the rights of Indigenous Australians seemed to me to be glanced over. I wanted to find a way for The Guardian to cover that, and was keen that it wouldn’t be top-down reporting. The [IndigenousX] account was one of the most interesting things we could see in the Australian media, and we thought if we collaborated we could perhaps find ways for the work to reach even more people, readers all around the world.’ (Latimore, 2018).

After some negotiation, it was decided that The Guardian in Australia would profile the weekly @IndigenousX hosts with a question-and-answer session about their lives and the issues they were interested in with the aim of revealing a broad Indigenous experience for The Guardian’s predominantly non-Indigenous readers. The partnership was established, and has gone on to influence other outlets of the parent Guardian organisation. For example, the Guardian’s USA outlet has established ‘On The Ground’, an initiative that commissions work from writers with intricate knowledge of their communities right across the rural U.S. At the same time, the model of rotating hosts for a public affairs Twitter account has since been adopted by other interest groups, in particular @EduTweetOz, an account for debating education issues, and the public-health focused @WePublicHealth, both of which have acknowledged the influence of @IndigenousX (Sweet, Pearson, & Dudgeon, 2013). IndigenousX content now runs under a separately branded arm of the Guardian Australia’s “Comment is Free” opinion section. The Guardian pays IndigenousX an agreed fee for each article used, which is passed to the author, or if the author prefers is retained to fund IndigenousX’s operations. Recent innovations in online crowdsourcing have also made a significant impact. Both IndigenousX and The Guardian have separately made seeking donations from readers part of their business model, with considerable success. The Guardian (2018) reported that it was now, five years after launch, in surplus largely thanks to 65,000 readers who made a financial contribution to Guardian in Australia, accounting for 36% of the local website’s revenue (Meade, 2018). Meanwhile, IndigenousX separately raised considerable funds through the Patreon crowdfunding platform. Both outlets have demonstrated that committed communities of readers can provide a significant part of news media revenue, even when not required to do so in order to access content—a model that has previously been compared to that which has supported community broadcasting (Simons, 2007). The Guardian relationship has assisted in amplifying the work of IndigenousX and the concerns and profile of its hosts, as well as bringing them into a closer relationship with mainstream media. For example, since IndigenousX was launched, its former daily editor Jack Latimore, (one of this paper’s authors) has begun working regularly for The Guardian Australia under a retainer arrangement. IndigenousX

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founder Luke Pearson has also held jobs at NITV and the ABC. In addition, Latimore has established a mentoring partnership between IndigenousX and The Monthly magazine. Guest hosts at @IndigenousX have also received opportunities in media as a result of their participation. For example, Steve Bunbadjee Hodder Watt, a manager at Gununa Aboriginal Corporation in the remote Northern Territory, has reported that following his period hosting @IndigenousX, he appeared on NITV, received two commissions from The Guardian Australia, another from the Indigenous owned Koori Mail, as well as speaking engagements and various radio appearances (Latimore, 2018). Perhaps the most visible impact IndigenousX and its partnership with The Guardian Australia has had on national debate was following its intervention, discussed at the outset of this chapter, in the debate on constitutional recognition. The country’s dominant media had widely reported the RECOGNISE poll results without questioning them. Following its amplification through The Guardian and in turn, other national media outlets, the IndigenousX poll gained more attention after its findings were quoted by Senator Nova Peris in Federal Parliament, and by Indigenous writer and lawyer Noel Pearson, who used the data in media interviews where he argued for a series of Indigenous-only community conferences (Pearson, 2015). Pearson told listeners: ‘That IndigenousX survey confirms that the whole process going forward has got to allow Indigenous people to have the debate and have the discussion right across the country’ (Latimore, 2018). The IndigenousX data was subsequently co-opted by Indigenous delegates to support their argument for a series of Indigenous community conferences. This process, eventually agreed to by the Abbott Government, culminated in a constitutional convention bringing together over 250 representatives of Indigenous peoples in May 2017. The key outcome of the convention was the Uluru Statement, a resolution calling for the establishment of a ‘First Nations voice’ in the Australian constitution.

5.5 Wakul: Making Connections Through the Indigenous News Network In its previous sections, this chapter has sought to outline an analytical approach that positions Indigenous news representations as a product of an Indigenous news network, comprising a range of human and non-human actors, institutions and practices. Alongside a focus on persistent aspects of this network, we have highlighted how the emergence of new actors may be producing significant shifts in the sociotechnical relations through which news relating to Indigenous Australia is generated. The relationship between IndigenousX and The Guardian stands as a product and example of such shifts, and a significant development in its own right. However, the extent to which new institutional actors such as The Guardian and Indigenous media initiatives such as IndigenousX can amplify Indigenous voices and agendas is largely reliant on how they interconnect with other aspects of a relatively durable network

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of relationships. Despite notable achievements, their arrival on the Australian media scene has not heralded a wholesale transformation in the routines or ‘values’ that structure mainstream news (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017). Nor does it automatically transpire that access to a wide range of Indigenous sources via digital platforms means mainstream journalists will consult them, or even know about them (Waller, Dreher, & McCallum, 2015). Journalists working to deadlines are usually time poor, which contributes to a tendency to rely on and reproduce well-worn story frames and elite, easily accessed sources of Indigenous news (McCallum & Waller, 2017b). In this respect, while it is important to acknowledge the degree to which significant new developments are occurring, it is also important not to overstate their ‘disruptive’ effects (Dreher et al., 2017). Waller et al. (2015) have argued that, for the potential impact of Indigenous use of new media to be maximised, amplification is key. Yet, as is the case with news media more broadly, Indigenous outlets are faced with audience fragmentation that inhibits wide public impact on public discussion with any one piece of media content. Therefore, one of the key challenges for Indigenous news media is to find a ‘centralised’ or ‘aggregated’ audience, and also ‘bridge’ Indigenous perspectives and stories into mainstream news media more directly—in order to achieve the amplification of its interventions, on which public and policy impact and influence relies (McCallum & l, 2017b). It is with this in mind that we have developed an action research project that seeks not only to understand the changing relations that constitute Indigenous news, but to actively build on those changes. To this end, the Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) at the University of Melbourne developed a piece of software infrastructure, the Wakul App (Latimore, 2017) that might contribute to further amplification, while building on the established partnership between IndigenousX and The Guardian. Wakul is derived from the phrase ‘wakul gagil ngarraldiyn’, meaning ‘coming together through knowing’ in Gathang language. Arising out of a project that sought to map a range of Indigenous news providers, Wakul was developed as a mechanism to collect data from a diverse range of news sources, with the explicit aim of amplifying different agendas. There are two key components to the Wakul app: a data layer and the mobile application. The data layer stores rich and fine-grained data of Indigenous news outlets, news content and social media content and uses a combination of different database management systems to cater for different user needs. The result is a document-oriented and heterogeneous archive of news outlets (Latimore et al., 2017). Each news source is attributed with unique geospatial data, such as: broadcast reach of radio stations; circulation area of print media; and analyses of location-enabled social networks. This geospatial data can then be combined with aggregated census statistics enabling, for example, the ability to determine which specific issues are affecting search-relevant Indigenous communities and how far such issues are receiving attention in local, regional or national media. In addition, through a process of ‘Twitter harvesting’, the Wakul app can provide data for social network source and sentiment analysis. Wakul allows users, communities, researchers, the media and the broader public to meaningfully interact with the collected data. The app contains a rich feature set, including news feeds, a First Nations interactive map and a news source directory. The news feed updates with local stories as the user

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seeks information on geographic locations. The news feed also highlights trending topics within Indigenous networks, determined via real-time analysis of news articles and social media activity. The emphasis of the algorithm is placed on discovering what issues matter to Indigenous users and communities rather than what is being distributed by mainstream media outlets. A directory of the Indigenous news outlets is also accessible, enabling users to retrieve details and contact information. In doing so, Wakul simultaneously provides a tool that aggregates a range of news content, and a reporting tool that enables journalists to readily find contact information in the process of following up stories. Our current project involves a process of ‘road-testing’ Wakul through a process of embedding an Indigenous journalist at The Guardian Australia. Our interest lies in how an altered set of relations—engendered by a journalistic role, incorporating a piece of networked digital infrastructure, and supported by a partnership with a university—interfaces with an already existing set of relations that contribute to, and are responsive to, the agendas of an already existing (although not immutable) Indigenous news network. Our research aims to trace—through observation, interviews and textual analysis of a range of media outputs—the degree to which this media intervention contributes to a process of transformation, or how far existing relations serve to exert a stabilising agency and ‘the production of systemic effects’ (Plesner, 2009, p. 613). Acknowledging our role as actors rather than passive recorders in this network, the Wakul project draws on decolonising methodologies to inform its intervention, from its theoretical underpinnings, to processes of technological development and consideration of key research practices, including the management of data. For the non-Indigenous researchers involved with this project, reflexivity begins by acknowledging their social fields have: actively silenced Indigenous people; imposed Western, deficit perspectives on Indigenous identity and their devastating consequences; as well as failed to recognise or value Indigenous knowledge. A key aim is therefore to challenge the ongoing colonial project by working together respectfully and reflexively to co-create transformative media pathways and foreground Indigenous perspectives and voices on a project that serves Indigenous collaborators’ self-determined media agendas. The team consists of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and has been developed with strong input from Goori journalist and researcher Jack Latimore. Trust and respect are central tenets in decolonising approaches, and this carries through to the design of the Wakul media intervention: it builds on, rather than tries to create anew, the strong existing relationship between IndigenousX and The Guardian. This partnership highlights First Nations’ agency, leadership, ingenuity, and success in contrast to the dominant framing of intractable ‘problems’ found in much mainstream media (McCallum et al., 2016).

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5.6 Conclusion This chapter has outlined an analytical frame for understanding news representations of Indigenous people and issues as products of a relational ‘news network’, and presented insights into the changing nature of mediated production of Indigenous news through an examination of the relationship between the Indigenous media start-up IndigenousX, and the new digital entrant in the Australian news ecology, The Guardian Australia. We have attended to the material and discursive conditions that have shaped this emergent relationship, the practices of Indigenous media activism and mainstream news editors when there is a deliberate willingness to engage, to listen and to shape media practices. The collaboration between The Guardian and IndigenousX has, on particular occasions, both set and shifted news agendas, most evidently through the RECOGNISE poll intervention, but has also amplified many otherwise unheard Indigenous voices and enabled them to intervene in a diverse array of localised political issues and debates. The proposed research project will test the potential for further amplification of Indigenous voice through the Wakul app intervention. Our research does not, however, shy away from critical consideration of the legacies of colonial racism and its contemporary manifestations, not imagine it can provide an easy fix to these issues. Our action research approach acknowledges that, although enjoying some success in crowd-funding, both IndigenousX and The Guardian operate within the constraints of a colonialist media landscape dominated by commercial interests. It is our intention to shed light on these practices, constraints, and interventions. In accordance with decolonizing methodologies it also unequivocally prioritises Indigenous voices, storytelling, and diversity (Geia, 2012; Smith, 2005), and privileges ‘counter-narratives’ in order to ‘challenge the status quo in ways that will benefit Indigenous Australian people and communities’ (Geia & Sweet, 2013, p. 3).

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Chapter 6

The Politics of (Dis)Trust in Indigenous Help-Seeking Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer

Abstract Policy interventions continue to fall short in addressing significant health, economic and educational disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. In understanding this, our chapter builds on insights from settler-colonial studies to approach the political dynamics of ‘trust’ in Indigenous help-seeking. Drawing on qualitative data on the practices of Indigenous social media users, we offer three analyses of trust in Indigenous help-seeking. First, we unpack the politics of trust in formal sources of help, discussing how care institutions are a significant point of encounter between Indigenous peoples and the settler state, and thus often perpetuate the settler logic of Indigenous elimination. Second, we turn to the narratives of Indigenous social media users, who are actively producing new spaces, relations and arrangements of care online. We argue that, in the context of settler colonialism, seeking help online can be understood as a way of contesting the authority of settler institutions. Finally, we conceptualise social media as a significant site of encounter between Indigenous and settler peoples; and, importantly, as a site in which settler sovereignty can be extended. Trust, we argue, offers a powerful lens through which to explore Indigenous-settler relations. Keywords Trust · Indigenous · Settler colonialism · Social media · Help-seeking · Implicit activism

6.1 Introduction Demographic disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia are well known and well documented. It has been estimated that the overall burden of disease is 2.5 × greater for Indigenous peoples (Sherwood, 2013). Indigenous peoples experience an eight-year gap in life expectancy (Commonwealth of B. Carlson (B) · R. Frazer Macquarie University, North Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. Frazer e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_6

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Australia, 2019), a youth suicide rate five times that of their non-Indigenous counterparts (AIHW, 2015), and complete high school at a rate 14% lower than the national average (Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). The situation has been widely described as a national crisis, and has instigated responses from all levels of government, business, the third sector and community. The most significant of these has been the national ‘Close the Gap’ campaign, which seeks to raise Indigenous life expectancies to mainstream levels by 2030 (Taylor & Thompson, 2011). But progress towards achieving this aim has been slow and uneven. Reflecting on these policy failures, Herring, Spangaro, Lauw, and McNamara ask: “How is it that so many interventions seem to fall short of achieving their goals?” (2013, p. 105). Blame has been dealt in many directions: bureaucratic bloat and dysfunction, corruption, cultural incompetence, ‘policy churn’, and holding responsible Indigenous peoples for their own disadvantage (Westerman, 2010). While some of these explanations have merit, in this chapter we take a different approach, which looks at the political dynamics of ‘trust’ in Indigenous peoples’ helpseeking. Trust—the existence or lack of it, the abuse of it, and so on—is integral to relations of all kinds, including Indigenous-settler relations. In the last few years, the politics of trust has received increasing critical attention from scholars. Trust, Cook writes, “is at the very heart of the problem of social order and is essential to the conduct of everyday life” (2005, p. 6). She describes it as “the glue that holds everything together” (2005, p. 11). Trust is a matter of relations between things: humans and others humans, non-humans, and institutions. Scholars have shown there are always social, cultural and political forces working to mediate and mitigate help-seeking. Approaching the issue of Indigenous health through the lens of trust, it becomes evident that, by and large, there is often little reason for Indigenous peoples to hold much faith in state-run or -funded services (see Farrelly 2008; Isaacs, Pyett, Oakley-Browne, Gruis, & Waples-Crowe, 2010; Lumby & Farrelly 2009; Rickwood, Deane, & Wilson, 2007). These care organisations and service providers have been and continue to be a significant point of contact between Indigenous peoples and the settler-colonial state. Both historically and currently, they constitute one of the main mechanisms through which the logic of settler colonialism is reproduced and effected. To this end, a small but important body of work has unpacked some of the dynamics of (dis)trust in Indigenous service settings. Issues of intergenerational trauma related to past and present policies of removal and assimilation (Isaacs et al., 2010; O’Donnell, Talpin, Marriott, Lima, & Stanley, 2019), institutionalised racial discrimination (Lumby & Farrelly, 2009), and a monocultural approach to health and wellbeing (Vicary & Westerman, 2004; Westerman, 2010) have all been found to significantly impact trust in settler institutions and, consequently, the help-seeking preferences of Indigenous peoples. Given the multiple harms created by the ‘good intentions’ of the state in providing care for Indigenous peoples, it is perhaps not surprising that Indigenous people are often more reluctant to approach formal services for concerns around health and wellbeing—even when they are readily available (which they often are not). Instead, social research has found they often prefer to

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rely on more ‘informal’ networks of support, through friends, family and community (Farrelly, 2008). Evidently, however, there are many ways in which trust may be socially organised. Technology scholar Botsman (2017) recently claimed that we have entered a new era of trust—one defined not by more hierarchical modes of organisation (broadly, trust in institutions), but by ‘distributed’ networks, largely facilitated through recently emerging internet technologies: particularly mobile apps and social media. Internet technologies have radically transformed the way in which trust is produced, maintained, and circulated across society. The rapid and ubiquitous uptake of these social media technologies globally has been heralded as providing new pathways through which users might connect with potential help sources—both supportive informal networks (such as friends, family and support groups) and formal institutions of care (such as state, private and third sector services). Through facilitating connections between billions of users, institutions, and knowledges, social media has become one of the primary pathways through which new, more distributed networks of care might be achieved. A nowsignificant body of work has emerged that explores the potential for social media to facilitate practices, relations, and networks of care between people who need help and the people and groups who might be capable of providing it. If the rule of thumb for many Indigenous Australians is, as Austin (1997, p. 1) has suggested, to “never trust a government man”, then in this chapter we ask: what opportunities might social media provide in meeting the social and emotional wellbeing needs of Indigenous Australians?

6.2 Aims and Arguments This chapter is based on an ongoing national research project exploring the helpseeking practices of Indigenous social media users. At the time of writing, in-depth qualitative interviews have been conducted with 41 participants across five communities across Illawarra (NSW), Dubbo (NSW), Brewarrina (NSW), Darwin (NT), and Cairns (QLD). Participants ranged from 19 to 60 years old, were relatively balanced between genders, and included five people who identify as non-heterosexual. Most participants identified as Aboriginal or Indigenous, with most participants in Cairns identifying as having either Torres Strait Islander or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestry. We were interested in the lived realities of Indigenous Facebook users and the political, social and cultural factors that contribute to their decision to either use or not use social media in times of need. To this end, interview transcripts were analysed using a form of narrative analysis, where themes were allowed to emerge from the data and were read in the context of the participants’ lives. This chapter draws on insights from settler-colonial studies to unpack the political dynamics of trust in Indigenous help-seeking. We are interested in the lines, limits and economies of trust in settler-colonial society. Settler-colonial studies seeks to

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understand the material and expressive mechanisms through which settler authority and sovereignty are entrenched, and, conversely, the ways Indigenous peoples might work to produce alternative arrangements of power and agency. This relatively new field understands colonialism not as an historical event, but as a continuing force in the present that works towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and it seeks to produce concepts and ideas capable of articulating this force (Wolfe, 2006). While trust might be “the glue that holds everything together”, as Cook says (2005, p. 11), it is clear we also need to ask what exactly is being held together. Is it a violent, hegemonic structure of settler-colonialism that seeks the elimination of Indigenous Australians? Or, alternatively, is it more emancipatory and decolonising arrangements of sovereignty to self, community and country? Thinking through the lens of trust encourages us to pay attention to the political valence of help-seeking. What are the forces that guide our decision-making in times of need? What are the limits of our trust? And what can be done when state institutions can’t be trusted? In approaching these questions, this chapter proceeds as follows. We offer three analyses of the dynamics of trust in help-seeking. First, we unpack the politics of trust in formal sources of help. This section analyses how care institutions are a significant point of encounter between Indigenous peoples and the settler state. Institutions of care have historically been sites of great violence, assimilation and domestication— violence at both corporeal and expressive registers. It is clear, then, that formal help sources are not ‘neutral’ institutions, but political. Accordingly, we suggest that we can understand the lack of use of formal help-sources not only as some ‘personal’ failing, but a political stance. Importantly, however, settler sovereignty is not complete. The second and third sections of this chapter explore the politics of trust and help-seeking on social media. Here, we are interested in the everyday experiences, practices and ideas of Indigenous social media users, and seek to understand how they might be working to produce their own networks of care ‘outside’ the logic of the settler state. We find that, in the absence of material access and social trust of formal help sources, these Indigenous users rely heavily on the often powerful connections facilitated through social media. Through being directly connected with friends and family—even unknown but caring others— social media provides vital pathways through which Indigenous users can, largely outside the workings of settler institutions, access the help they need—what we describe as a ‘clearing’, following Alfred (2005, loc.5003). Extending this thinking further, we argue that going online can be understood as a way of contesting the authority of settler institutions. Finally, the third analytical section troubles this relatively optimistic account of social media technologies. Scholars have demonstrated powerfully that social media is also a space in which settlers seek to establish and reiterate their sovereignty. Social media can be a site through which racist violence proliferates; where notions of white supremacy are spread through receptive users; and where the state can surveil ‘troublesome’ citizens, including Indigenous activists. Accordingly, we conceptualise social media as a significant site of encounter between Indigenous and settler peoples; and, importantly, as a site in which settler sovereignty can be extended. In this section, we unpack some of the ways in which users navigate the landscapes of

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distrust of social media, and how this might impact its potential as a pathway for help-seekers, outlining the dangers of social media, the various costs of its use, and how it is implicated in the settler project of elimination. Trust, we argue, offers a powerful lens through which to explore Indigenous-settler relations. Trust is a core component of all relations that matter; it is produced through and productive of relations. But importantly, trust and distrust circulate through and between complexes of social relations: social groups, communities, technologies, institutions. And in this chapter, we have sought to explore the conditions under which trust is made (im)possible.

6.3 Formal Help-Seeking and the Politics of Distrust 6.3.1 The Logic of Elimination Drawing on Wolfe (2006), Clark, de Costa, and Maddison (2016, p. 4) write “the central logic of settler colonialism” is “one of elimination and absorption into the settler society”. The settler state wants Indigenous peoples to disappear—to leave, perish, or assimilate entirely into the settler population. This logic is effected through settler institutions, including those ostensibly intended to ‘care’ for Indigenous peoples. Sherwood (2013) argues that in understanding Indigenous health, we must move away from depoliticising, atomising models based on notions of individual choice and agency. She argues, instead, “the fate of health status is not entirely a choice but the product of many historical-political-social determinants that are often not elaborated within the discourse of medicine” (Sherwood, 2013, p. 30). Colonisation, Sherwood (2013) argues, must itself be considered a determinant of health (see also Paradies, 2016). That is, we must look not only at the social determinants of Indigenous health, but also, as O’Sullivan (2015) suggests, the political determinants of health. Despite this analysis, however, we actually know very little about how settlercolonialism impacts Indigenous health (Paradies, 2016). ‘Trauma’—and auxiliary concepts such as intergenerational trauma and legacy trauma—has gained considerable attention in unpacking this complex relationship. In this first section, however, we seek to follow Taylor and Thomson’s (2011) lead, and develop understandings of the dynamics of Indigenous peoples’ ‘historical mistrust’ in settler institutions. As Strakosch (2019, p. 2) writes, “bureaucracy has been the frontline of colonisation”; it is through settler care institutions that Indigenous peoples have, she continues, “been dealt with as a domestic population who are legitimate subjects of state intervention and improvement”. Formal help sources, we argue here, are often settler institutions that effect the logic of settler-colonialism, and are understood as such by Indigenous peoples.

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6.3.2 Eugenics and Assimilation The eliminatory logic of state care institutions is seen perhaps most unequivocally in its mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century manifestations. In Australia (and other nations settled by British colonists, such as Canada and New Zealand), health and educational institutions were key sites of Indigenous-settler encounter. This era of ‘protectionism’ (1838–1970s) brought in ideas of ‘caring’ for Indigenous peoples through strategic policy of containment and control. Informed by racist ideas of the “dying race”, “civilisation”, and so on (Sherwood, 2013), these institutions violently impacted Indigenous peoples, families and communities Australia-wide. Child services removed Indigenous children from their parents with the explicit intention of de-Indigenising and domesticating them into white settler life (de Leeuw, Greenwood, & Lindsay, 2013). Health services that were ostensibly about providing healthcare for Indigenous peoples were found to often be engaging with Indigenous populations with only the intention of studying the course of disease—or sterilising women without their consent. Employment programs were often nothing more than indentured labour, where workers were barely or never compensated for their work. The ‘protectors’ were enacting a project of making Indigenous people invisible; it was a clear policy of elimination through eugenics, domestication and assimilation. These institutions sought to “breed the black out” (Sherwood, 2013, p. 34) and— when they couldn’t—they sought to contain and eliminate Indigenous presence.

6.3.3 The Self-determination Era As Indigenous peoples fought for civil rights during the 1960 and 1970s, these more explicit policies of Indigenous elimination became increasingly untenable. During these decades, there were movements for Indigenous agency around health, education and legal services, among other sectors. Widespread racism and discrimination were the driving force for the establishment of Aboriginal community-controlled organisations. The Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS), for instance, was established in 1970 and the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) in 1971, both in Redfern, NSW. The ALS was necessary due to Aboriginal people’s distrust of police and the legal system. Police harassment, intimidation and high levels of surveillance were a reality for Aboriginal people. Health also became a major focus for the ALS, with staff realising extensive health problems existed in the Indigenous community and that legal, health and social problems were all closely connected. In the early 1970s, the Indigenous child mortality rate was twenty times the national average and the adult population faced similarly appalling standards of health (Foley, 1991). Experiencing high levels of racism, degradation and humiliation while accessing mainstream health services led to Indigenous people disengaging from health service providers. In response, Indigenous activists and allies established the first Aboriginal Medical Service. Aboriginal-controlled organisations such as the Aboriginal Legal Service

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and Aboriginal Medical Service “were intended to be as much about autonomy and self-determination as they were about service provision” (Maddison, 2008, p. 33) and are cornerstones in Indigenous community life through to the present.

6.3.4 Reconciliation and Recognition While health and welfare services today might not work explicitly in the service of settler logics, recent research indicates the many ways in which they still operate to erase Indigenous ways of doing and knowing health and wellbeing. On the one hand, a wealth of research demonstrates that Indigenous people still experience racism and discrimination while accessing health services—some 22% of Indigenous service users have experienced racial abuse (Paradies & Cunningham, 2009). On the other hand, many of the practices of the ‘protection’ era continue today, barely disguised. Much of the current discourse in welfare and public health still assumes that Indigenous people would benefit from assimilation. The assumption that Indigenous peoples’ views of health are wrong and need ‘modernising’ persists. Indigenous understandings of health are, by and large, entirely ignored in favour of western biomedical models of health. Considering this, Herring et al. (2013, p. 110) argue that it is fear, rather than just incapability or disinterest, that works to deter Indigenous service users: “Fear of having problems or illness attributed to being Aboriginal; of being asked questions that are not understood; of being found wanting as parents and statutory intervention occurring as a result,” they write (see also Ypinazar, Margolis, Haswell-Elkins, & Tsey, 2007).

6.3.5 Historical Distrust of Settler Institutions Considering this historical context and the continuing extension of the settler logic of elimination, it is unsurprising that research continually finds little trust between Indigenous service users and service providers. Taylor et al. (2013), for instance, found that historical mistrust worked to discourage youth and other community members in seeking help for suicide intervention. As McBain-Rigg and Veitch (2011, p. 73) write: “Word spreads through family and community networks about whether particular health professionals are trustworthy, or not”. This lack of trust affects not only individual services users, Taylor and Thompson (2011) argue, but also limits the capacity for partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations targeting health outcomes. They found that the “historical legacy causing Aboriginal mistrust of mainstream service providers” (2011, p. 302) was one of the main challenges facing Indigenous–mainstream health service partnerships. As de Leeuw et al. (2013) have argued, to be Indigenous in settler institutions is to always be a colonial subject. Formal services have continuously been a site of domestication and absorption for Indigenous peoples. They are functionaries of the

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settler state, operating as a mechanism through which settler power/sovereignty is enacted. And even while health services might not explicitly seek to work towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples, as during the protectionist era, they can still operate by the same logic and with the same efficacy. Considering this, actively avoiding formal help-sources can be understood as a political choice, an active (if not explicit) political statement against colonialism. In circumstances where a lack of trust in Indigenous-settler relations creates a barrier to accessing primary services, where might Indigenous peoples find trustworthy sources of help? Where might their needs be met? And where might they effect their own agency and sovereignty? In approaching these questions, in the next two sections we discuss recent research on the politics of Indigeneity and settler-colonialism on social media, unpacking some of the dynamics of trust in help-seeking online.

6.4 The Politics of Trust in Seeking Help on Social Media Considering the above account, it is perhaps unsurprising that research has suggested that Indigenous help-seeking is typically more ‘informal’ than that practiced by nonIndigenous people (Farrelly, 2008; Rickwood et al., 2007). The onus of help-giving typically falls to family, kin and other social networks, rather than formal service providers.

6.4.1 Help-Seeking on Social Media While researchers have documented a range of potentially negative effects on health and wellbeing that can result from social media use, including increased risk of depression (O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011), the spread of pro-suicidal attitudes (Luxton, June, & Fairall, 2012), and cyberbullying (Carlson & Frazer, 2018), a significant body of work has shown that digital spaces can also provide vital pathways of connection between people seeking help and those who can provide it. Social media can help users overcome barriers to care (Luxton et al., 2012). Research has found that many people feel empowered when help-seeking online and are more confident to access information and talk about sensitive topics (Manago, Taylor, & Greenfield, 2012; Rogers et al., 2009). Manago et al. (2012), for instance, found ‘emotional disclosure’ to be the major function of Facebook’s ‘status update’ feature—what they describe as “the key feature of intimacy” (2012, p. 369). Likewise, through interviews with people aiming to manage their diabetes through dieting, Newman et al. (2011, p. 1) found participants used social media to reach out to others for several reasons, including “emotional support, motivation, accountability, and advice,” with “receiving and providing emotional support” being the most commonly cited goal in interacting with others online. People engage with social media for help-seeking differentially—some actively seek help, others tending

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to more passively consume information. Ballantine and Stephenson (2011) argue that people work to tailor their online spaces to be maximally supportive in their own way.

6.4.2 Indigenous Help-Seeking on Social Media A growing body of research has shown that, for a range of social, cultural and political reasons, social media is often different for Indigenous people. Indigenous users experience different dynamics, benefits and risks to being online, which need to be accounted for if we are to understand the barriers to and facilitators of seeking help online. There are a range of social, cultural, and political benefits of social media for Indigenous people, including opportunities to claim and effect political agency (Berglund 2017; Petray, 2011); to maintain and augment cultural practices such as maintaining and revitalising language, fulfilling responsibilities around Sorry Business, and sharing knowledges (Carlson & Frazer, 2015); and to fulfil social responsibilities to often geographically distant kin. Researchers have only just begun to examine the potential of social media for Indigenous peoples in overcoming some of the relational barriers to help-seeking outlined above (Hefler et al., 2018; Sweet, Geia, Dudgeon, & McCallum, 2015). One strand of research has explored Indigenous youth’s use of social media for social support during stressful times. Price and Dalgleish’s (2013) study, for instance, revealed that Indigenous young people actively accessed self-help information online and peer support opportunities through social networking. Likewise, Edmonds et al. (2012, p. 12) found that Indigenous young people used social media for “maintaining connections and for pathways to assist them when facing big decisions” and that social media offered a sense of community that could provide support in stressful situations. In an analysis of mental health promotion on Twitter, Sweet et al. (2015, p. 636) argue that social media provide “powerful platforms for learning, exchange, advocacy and dialogue about the social and emotional wellbeing and mental health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. Similarly, Hefler et al. (2018) argued Facebook (as a so-called ‘natural network’, rather than formal or artificial network) offers effective health promotion opportunities relating to tobacco use among Indigenous Australian users. Finally, Carlson et al.’s (2015) research found Indigenous people appear to be engaging with Facebook to both seek and offer help for a range of issues including those relating to suicide and self-harm. A continuum of suicide prevention strategies is evident—from light emotional support to direct suicide intervention involving formal health services. Through building networks of kin, social media provides a space in which Indigenous users can seek help and support—overcoming the particular barriers that exist for Indigenous people in engaging with more formal help sources. In this and the following section, we draw on interview data collected across several Australian sites. While the previous section sought to develop an understanding of the ‘historic distrust’ of settler care institutions (or what are more commonly called

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formal service providers), these next two sections examine Indigenous social media users’ stories to unpack the politics of trust and distrust around using social media as a place of help. We are interested in whether these Indigenous social media users draw on the connections provided through social media to seek and provide help to people in their networks, and whether new social technologies can work to reconfigure existing or produce new sociopolitical relations in the act of help-seeking, or simply reinforce existing ones.

6.4.3 Help-Seeking for Health Nearly all the people we spoke to described moments of need and crisis in which they sought help through their online networks—for physical health, mental health, emotional wellbeing, physical safety and social support. They described the sense of trust, comfort and safety that connections facilitated through social media technologies could bring. We present below an array of participant accounts to demonstrate the great diversity of their online help-seeking practices. One participant explained that she will sometimes reach out to her Facebook friends by posting a status update in which she asks for help about a health-related issue, such as troubles with gallstones or weight loss. She described the support she received as ‘trustworthy’: And when you put something like that, people seem to be eager to help. And they make all these suggestions. ‘Oh try this, try that.’ So they save the guesswork and these are people that you know might have that experience of they’ve personally tried it. You know, that’s good. Cause then you can trust that information, that sort of thing, rather than just reading something off the internet, and just taking that as gospel truth. You know this person, they say they’ve tried this particular vinegar water, or something, to lose weight or something like that and they swear by it. You know? So you are more likely to take their word for it than some random people from off the internet from around the world. That you don’t know (Female, 35, Far North QLD).

Another young female participant, who lived in a relatively remote community that largely lacked the health services of larger towns, explained she joined a Facebook group for people who experience anxiety. For her, it offered a space where she could connect with others who share her experiences and find useful resources. Like, I suffer with anxiety and there’s a lot of groups on Facebook where you can go and read about other people like… Like their anxiety, so I go on and have chats with other people that are suffering from anxiety and depression. And there are a lot of groups that are on Facebook too, that you can just go and read people’s stories and they give you little memes for the day, just little quotes and stuff (Female, 30, regional NSW).

Participants also described reaching out directly to their Facebook friends in times of stress and need. One young woman described putting up a status update in the hopes of getting a supportive response—engaging in what has elsewhere been described as ‘emotional disclosure’.

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On Facebook, you can say stuff. You’re not talking to anybody, but you’re putting that forward out there. You know, ‘Feeling so depressed, I don’t wanna get out of my, I wanna stay in my room forever,’ or something like that. And people will respond. People do respond, they’re very reactive to stuff like that. […] And when you see that collective support that makes a difference. When people, and there’s just more than one, or even if it’s just one person that you, you can trust. But when there’s lots of people coming on board and they say, ‘Are you okay? What are you doing? Give me a call.’ You know, people actually show that they care. That makes all the difference (Female, 35, regional NSW).

A young man from the Northern Territory described reaching out directly to particular Facebook friends as he was going through drug withdrawals and experiencing suicide ideation. In this case, social media seemed to provide a literal lifeline in a moment of serious danger. So around 2007, 2008 and 2009, I was coming off withdrawal from heavy drug use, and so was experiencing temporary psychosis. On top of that was suicidal ideation and several attempts of suicide as well. […] But I was reaching out to friends via social media at that time. And I’ve gone back through it and read it, and a lot of it’s incoherent but […] It did serve like a purpose in friends being able to call ambulances for me and that kind of thing. […] I had a friend on social media who I didn’t actually know, I’d just randomly added, and we’d been talking for years, and… I actually wrote my frigging suicide note to this bloke as well. And he was like what the hell is going on? (laughs). Um, but he was actually quite supportive during the hospital visits and stuff as well (Male, 30, Northern Territory).

In this crisis situation, the participant’s online network themselves engaged the services of formal emergency help sources, in a situation in which the participant himself could or would not.

6.4.4 Help-Seeking for Social Support Alternatively, participants also described drawing on their Facebook networks for various forms of social support. For instance, the young woman who joined the group for anxiety also explained she was member of groups for gay women: And I’m gay as well… So I go on there and there’s a lot of gay people I can… You just read their comments and like I say, I keep in contact. […] You talk to people, like, things that you couldn’t talk to your family about, do you know what I mean? There are other people going through the same stuff as you’re going through. […] Some groups that you do join are good. […] Yeah. Like, because me being gay, I share a lot of things about gay people and that, and with my family and that, they all support it and… Yeah. So, yeah, it is. It is supportive. […] And there’s things on there where you can just… Like, just to let your family know about things, because some families don’t really know about being gay and… So you can just share things so they can read it, do you know what I mean? (Female, 30, regional NSW).

Another young mother explained she used Facebook’s status update feature to reach out for support and motivation for weight loss. I’ll post a lot as well, yeah. Just sort of like I said, with my weight loss and I’m a survivor of DV [domestic violence] and I’ve got friends who will say things like, ‘Aw, sis, I’m having a bit of rough patch.’ So I’ll sort of just [say], ‘Yeah, I’ve been there.’ Or I’ll say, ‘Sweet

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Finally, a middle-aged man from Cairns who was going through a breakup with his boyfriend explained that Facebook gave him the opportunity to reach out to friends for emergency accommodation. He had only recently started using Facebook, and it allowed him to connect with friends he’d fallen out of contact with. One instance, I actually posted ‘If there is someone that I could, like, stay for a night’— because I had to get out of where I was actually staying. And it was, because it was just really bad that night, and I just, I just posted something like really simple like, ‘Have to get out of here. Can someone like just put me up for a night?’ And yeah, and my good friend […] jumped on there like, ‘I can come and get you now.’ So it’s nice that it’s a bit informal because you could say something and your friends just know exactly what you’re sort of saying. Yeah, without actually going into too much. Because I didn’t have anyone’s number or anything. So that was a good thing about it. And it really, it connected quickly. It took like a couple of minutes or something (Male, 45, Far North QLD).

In these and other ways, participants described a whole range of activities in which they actively sought help on Facebook from informal networks of support. For some, it offers a more trustworthy source of physical and mental health information. Alternatively, it provided a pathway to emotional, social and material support—in times when one was simply feeling down or when one’s safety was in danger.

6.4.5 A ‘Clearing’ of Care The settler logic of elimination, as we argued in the previous section, works through many material, cultural, social and otherwise expressive registers. And, both historically and currently, it is often sustained and effected through formal sources of care for Indigenous peoples. Even ostensibly ‘well intentioned’ arrangements of care by the state can work to erase Indigenous alterity and sovereignty (de Leeuw, Greenwood, & Lindsay, 2013). As Veracini (2011) has argued, decolonisation in settler colonialism, rather than colonialism, must look very different. If the demand “is to go away”, Veracini writes, “it is indigenous persistence and survival that become crucial.” (2011, p. 3, emphasis added). It is clear that these participants are working to survive and be healthy. Through social media, they are producing networks of care on which they might draw on in times of need. Here, we suggest that social media can provide pathways to care outside of settler institutions—outside the often assimilatory forces of the settler state. It is working, as we have argued elsewhere, to produce “a people yet to come” (Frazer & Carlson, 2017, p. 1). Alfred (2005) developed the concept of a ‘clearing’ to describe these kinds of noncolonial spaces in which new relations might be produced outside the mediating logic of elimination. A Mohawk scholar, asserting powerfully the need for Onkwehonwe

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(original peoples) renewal and resurgence, Alfred (2005, loc.5007) argues that “the original treaty visions of peace and friendship” will only be realised through the creation of new spaces of encounter. ‘The clearing’ is one such space: “the space between the village and the woods, between home, family, safety and the dangerous space of freedom” (Alfred 2005, loc.5003). In other words, the clearing is situated between the world of Indigenous alterity and settler hegemony. It is a provisional, heterogeneous territory in which new relations might be possible and, as Barker and Lowman (2016, p. 203) explain, it “represents a space of political encounter”. Clark et al. (2016, p. 6), responding to Barker and Lowman (2016), are prompted to ask: “What would the clearing look like in the real world of politics?” We suggest that, here, we can see the workings of a kind of ‘online clearing’. If we understand a clearing not just as a metaphorical space, but as a material one— though one that is only ever provisionally achieved—we can understand the above accounts as articulating a space in which care beyond elimination is possible. If settler institutions can be treated only with suspicion, then social media offers a canvas on which more trustworthy arrangements might be produced. Extending this line of thinking, we argue that the seemingly mundane practices of care described by the participants can be understood as having political valency. They constitute what Askins (2015, p. 475) has called ‘quiet’ or ‘implicit’ activisms, which are centred around “small acts and kind words”. These local interactions are not purely parochial, but political; Askins argues “these relationships are about remaking society at the local level” (2015, p. 474). This is akin to what Wilson, Carlson, and Sciascia (2017, p. 1) describe as the “reterritorialization of social media,” whereby otherwise marginalized groups may voice opinions, develop collectives, and agitate for social change. Going online can be understood as a way of contesting the sovereignty, authority and legitimacy of settler institutions.

6.5 The Indigenous-Settler Politics of Seeking Help Online Alongside its uses for care-seeking practices, social media is also a significant point of encounter between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Seeking sovereignty, selfdetermination, and cultural safety through social media is a troubled exercise. Perhaps most significantly, social media can facilitate the spread and proliferation of racist hatred and violence. They provide space where hate groups congregate, organise and distribute their propaganda. Matamoros-Fernández (2017, p. 933) argues that social media are not neutral platforms of social engagement, rather “they ‘intervene’ in public discourse and often contribute, as has happened with other technologies, to sustaining whiteness”—what she describes as ‘platformed racism’. Mainstream media has reported on prominent Indigenous figures, particularly sportspeople and politicians, being targeted with racist abuse and threatened with physical and sexual violence. But the impact is not contained only to well-known figures. Instead, when violence in any form against Indigenous people attracts mainstream attention, Carlson, Jones, Harris, Quezada, and Frazer (2017) argue, negative

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effects can be felt across the broader online Indigenous population. They argue that “traumatic events in the public domain act as reminders of ongoing colonialism,” leading to what they describe as trauma through “shared recognition” (2017, p. 1). Social media, then, is “an arena for political struggle” (Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 460) for Indigenous peoples (Berglund, 2017; Dreher, McCallum, & Waller, 2016; Petray, 2011). While it might sometimes act as a ‘clearing’ in which more careful forms of sociality become possible, social media can also sustain and effect the settler logic of elimination. In this third section, we explore some of the more troubled dynamics of Indigenous-settler relations on social media.

6.5.1 Facebook: “A Tool for Racism” The vast majority of people we interviewed described encounters with antiIndigenous racism. While all participants acknowledged there were many benefits to using Facebook—particularly around seeking help in times of need—there was broad consensus that it often came at a great cost. Facebook, as one participant described, is “a tool for racism”. These encounters varied from the merely ‘unpleasant’ to the deeply traumatising. Many were of the more so-called ‘casual’ kind, in which supposedly humorous jokes and memes drawing on racist stereotypes of Indigenous people were shared. One participant described seeing “…general racist comments about identity and colour of skin. Ignorance about the plight of Aboriginals and myths about how we get all these handouts”. Many described encountering pages set up specifically to make fun of, discriminate against, and abuse Indigenous peoples— much like the ‘Aboriginal memes’ Facebook pages that were shut down in 2014 after considerable controversy. In many cases, merely being identified as ‘Indigenous’ was enough to attract abuse. “Par for the course,” one participant said. Another said “If anyone identifies as Aboriginal by standing up for anything Aboriginal they can get slammed by lots of bigots and people who hate anything Aboriginal”. This racist politics tended to intensify when stories of abuse against Indigenous people cropped up in media, particularly around Invasion/Australia Day.1 When it’s a death or something like that, it tends to get further out of control from an Aboriginal perspective when people just jump on that bandwagon. ‘Ra, ra, ra. Why do you guys keep bringing up the past? Stop living in the past, live in the now.’ They don’t understand the issues associated with that Aboriginal community, they don’t understand intergenerational trauma. They don’t understand grief and loss, they don’t understand.

1 Australia’s

in 1788.

national holiday, held on 26 January—the date that marks the arrival of the first fleet

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6.5.2 Who ‘Counts’ as Aboriginal? One of the most common ways in which participants directly encountered racism on social media was through other users questioning their Indigeneity. “Like some random white fella will be talking about, well, ‘What do you do?’ Or ‘Who are you?’ Or wherever it comes up. And, ‘You’re not Aboriginal. What are you, a quarter Aboriginal?’” As Carlson (2016) has argued, deciding ‘who counts’ as Aboriginal is one of the central ways in which the settler state has sought to control Indigenous peoples. By partitioning some as ‘not really’ Indigenous, others as ‘part’ Indigenous, others again as ‘authentically’ Indigenous—and then unpredictably modifying the parameters that distinguish between these groups—the settler state works towards the calculated elimination of Indigeneity. This mechanism was described by participants as constituting a common experience on social media. Many people described being told they weren’t ‘really’ Aboriginal because of their skin colour. One said they were repeatedly “questioned as to how I identify as Aboriginal given my white skin”, while another explained that “because I have fair skin I have had people say I am not really Aboriginal.” Another participant was asked “Is that fake tan?”, and another explained that “Apparently I’m not black enough for some”. These markers of ‘authenticity’ varied, with others being told they were ‘too articulate’ to be black; or engaged in activities that ‘aren’t Aboriginal’: • Because I am articulate, people have accused me of being white! • Sometimes white posters wrongfully believe I am non-Aboriginal because I’m very articulate with English… • A lot of the stuff, we run mountain-biking programs and stuff like that, and people question that blackfellas don’t ride bikes and stuff like that. These racist encounters worked to erase each user’s Indigeneity through questioning the legitimacy of their claim to Indigenous identity.

6.5.3 Responses to Racism For many users, the continuous presence or threat of racist abuse took considerable emotional energy, affecting their wellbeing and relationships with others. Social media became not a space of care for self and others, but a source of great stress, anger and trauma. One participant said: “Like one of the main things I do actually look for when I put on news, anything to do with Aboriginal issues. I’ll go through anything Aboriginal-related. Then go through the comments, and I just boil over,” they said. Seeing this content “just makes your blood boil,” the participant emphasised. Another explained that the constant encounters with racist abuse “…was really starting to impact on my emotional state. ‘Cause I follow a lot of news Twitter handles and pages. And seeing the constant things about racism and, and so on, I’d spend

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sort of the week feeling quite grumpy or a bit sad or a bit aggro [aggressive]”. This had started to significantly affect his day-to-day wellbeing and relationship with his significant other: And the worst thing about it is that my anger usually goes from really angry at a thing, to then angry at myself for getting angry. That can manifest in all different ways, you know, being down or overheating, or just being really sort of fuckin’ hard to deal with. Like being grumpy and sort of moody (laughs). [Interviewer: So it was having a real, tangible impact on your life as well?] Yeah definitely (Male, 30, Northern Territory).

Many of the participants that described being affected emotionally by their engagement online had implemented strategies to cope, generally through disengaging with social media in various ways. The constant stress, anger and hurt persuaded them to ‘switch off’ and self-censor: • Some comments make me just want to turn Facebook off. • So what I’m doing now is, during the week day, I give my girlfriend my password, and she keeps it until the weekend and… Gives me a new password for the weekend. • But on Facebook, I used to do it all the time, but it got me nowhere. Honestly, it got me nowhere. So I stopped. I control myself, contain myself. • …you don’t really want to get involved. So you just got to be careful what you write. Participants explained that another way in which they mitigated or avoided racist encounters online was by ‘not identifying’ as Indigenous at all. • I find that it’s sometimes safer to not identify as Aboriginal, due to discrimination and prejudice. • If I think there is a chance of being abused I won’t identify. • [I won’t identify] because I don’t want to be discriminated based on my identity. • I am not too open about my Indigenous background on social media sites, because I am light skinned and have found that people pass judgement and make assumptions about my entitlements. While social media can at times be a site of care and support—a ‘clearing’ in which Indigenous alterity becomes possible—it can also be a site of violent encounter between Indigenous and settler peoples. Social media is also a space in which settlers seek to establish their sovereignty, their ‘possessiveness’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015). And as the above accounts demonstrate, the logic of elimination is clearly at play in many of these encounters. Getting constantly ‘slammed’ by racist abuse; being told to ‘stop bringing up the past’; or being told that they’re not ‘really’ Indigenous— there are myriad discursive practices through which the settler logic of elimination can be effected online. The costs of these encounters can be profound; they can take a considerable emotional and mental toll on Indigenous users. Social media becomes not a site of care for oneself and another, but a source of fear, trauma and erasure. Trust and care are not possible in a space in which one is being constantly threatened with elimination. In response, and understandably, many Indigenous users decide to disengage with social media, or self-censor themselves.

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6.6 Conclusion Trust might be at the centre of social order, as Cook (2005) claims, but there are relatively clear limits to trust in settler-colonial society. Trust moves between points, it circulates between peoples, institutions, technologies. As Putnam (2000) has argued, trust is a form of social capital; life is easier in a community in which trust is abundant. However, trust is also differentially distributed. While government agencies and health researchers might focus on the ‘social determinants’ of Indigenous disadvantage, there is much to be learned in how economies of (dis)trust work to either block or facilitate different forms of care-giving. This chapter has sought to trace some of the dynamics of care and trust on social media, seeking to explore the conditions under which trust in care is possible. We have unpacked some of the opportunities social media technologies might provide in meeting the social and emotional wellbeing needs of Indigenous Australians— aiming to explore what O’Sullivan (2015) describes as the political determinants of health. There are good reasons why many Indigenous peoples have little faith in settler care institutions, for health, employment, education and so on. The ‘historic mistrust’ of these institutions is well-founded on a legacy of violence and elimination. Seeking help online, in this context, can be understood as a political decision—what we’ve described here as implicit activisms. It’s clear that social media provide new possibilities for trust in settler societies. For Indigenous users, social media offer both points of encounter and departure with settler logics. While these technologies can certainly be used violently, to continue the settler project of working to contain and erase Indigeneity, they also present powerful pathways through which Indigenous users might extend care to one another. And in small ways, provisional spaces—online ‘clearings’—between the workings of elimination and Indigenous alterity are already being created. Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the Aboriginal people who participated in this study. Your contributions, experiences and anecdotes have enriched this area of research. Additionally, we would also like to thank the research assistants in each community who generously provided us with information on local cultural protocols. Funding This research is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous, Project ID: IN160100049.

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Chapter 7

Capitalising on Success: Relationality and Indigenous Higher Education Futures Nikki Moodie

Abstract The type of future that a tertiary qualification can provide remains available to very few Indigenous people. Despite increases in the overall number of Indigenous people completing university, including research degrees, NAPLAN data suggests that the number of school students achieving National Minimum Standards in reading and writing standards has—at best—plateaued since 2008. In the context of ambitious new targets for Indigenous higher education these data are part of a broader conversation about indigenisation and governance of the academy. In this context, universities are not simply degree-conferring institutions. They are places of hope and change. They are employers and networkers and innovators and archives and lobbyists. They exist not simply to increase the number of tertiary qualified consumers but also to help us (re)create the future. These are relational challenges as much as they are policy challenges. They require us to rethink our expectations of both settler scholars and ourselves to consider how we enter academic spaces, how we govern knowledges, and how we reach beyond these walls to put ourselves in service of communities traditionally exploited by the academy. Keywords Indigenisation · Governance · Data sovereignty · Indigenous education · Higher education

7.1 Introduction This paper was presented as a keynote address to the Indigenous Higher Education Conference at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne on Friday 23 November 2018. It has been lightly edited for inclusion in this collection. What does success in Indigenous higher education look like? I know why I’ve dedicated my life so far to working in Indigenous higher education, and I daresay many people here are working in these spaces for similar kinds of reasons: social justice, equity, empowerment. Maybe to burn it to the ground, but also for knowledge, N. Moodie (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_7

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for solutions, for a better future. And, for the most part, as I’ll show here, there is an increasing evidence base for telling a good news story about Indigenous higher education. We continue to see data like that shown in Fig. 7.1. Data that seems to say that regardless of how our different universities go about working for better outcomes, we’re doing a good job. We’re having an impact. The numbers are going up. Figure 7.1 shows an 119% increase in the number of Indigenous peoples finishing university in 15 years. And in Fig. 7.2, with a consistent upward trend in the number of Indigenous Ph.D. completions each year. Still a tiny fraction of the nearly 9000 Australian Ph.D. completions each year, but improvement nonetheless. But still I find myself asking: for what? Is my goal parity? Or is it to change the higher education landscape? Or is it something else? In this chapter, I want to sketch out the very real, very positive achievements that have been made in Australian higher education for Indigenous students in recent years. But I also want to challenge this good news story. I want to push against the anxiety the sector increasingly has around ‘deficit’. Because I’m interested in a different kind of end game than these numbers drive us toward: I want to change the world. I want to make it better for Indigenous students, our families and our communities. But I can’t make anything better if I can’t talk about the problems that persist. I cannot capitalise on the success that is happening, if I’m not allowed to talk about the success that isn’t there. And if I can’t talk about that, then it’s harder to talk

Fig. 7.1 Indigenous Course Award Completions (2001–2016). Note Adapted from “Award Course Completions (2016)—Table 14: Award Course Completions for Indigenous Students by Level of Course (2001–2016)”, by the Department of Education and Training (2017). Retrieved from https:// docs.education.gov.au/node/45246. Copyright 2017 by the Department of Education and Training, Australian Government

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Fig. 7.2 Indigenous Doctorate by Research Completions (2005–2016). Note Adapted from “Award Course Completions (2016)—Table 14: Award Course Completions for Indigenous Students by Level of Course (2001–2016)”, by the Department of Education and Training (2017). Retrieved from https://docs.education.gov.au/node/45246. Copyright 2017 by the Department of Education and Training, Australian Government

about what’s possible and what might get us there: How important social networks are for academic success. How the focus in universities is on achievement, but how we’re really in the business of narrative change. How communities of practice are about lifelong learning and excellence.

7.2 The Good News It’s working. All of those people who’ve been designing enabling programs, working on changing our universities’ policies and procedures, all of those Heads of School who make additional funds available to get this work done properly, all of those fights we have in strangely-titled committees that no-one really knows about, all of those hours we spend with students de-mystifying and problem-solving and handing out tissues and extensions and referrals, all of the curriculum redesign is working. The numbers tell us this. But one thing that tends to happen in universities—perhaps more than other institutions—is that we tend to congratulate ourselves a great deal when we see numbers like this. And a healthy ego is a nice thing to have. We do good work; we’re rigorous and prolific and our impact metrics and our research income prove it. Our enrolment numbers go up. Our completion rates go up. We capture stories of young people and

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mature age students who find their pathway through university and go on to better things. It’s easy to prove to ourselves that we’re doing an excellent job. And someone needs to. It is desperately important that we improve access to education for our families and communities and recognise the success toward this goal that we’ve achieved. But I worry when we see things like this, we tend to have even more meetings where we sit in rooms and talk to ourselves about how well we’re doing. But when we then intervene by pointing out the problems that persist, we risk being accused of engaging with deficit discourse. So, I find myself asking, what is this all for? Is my goal parity, is it to halve a gap? Is to change the higher education landscape, and if so, into what? Or is it something else altogether? Despite the problems that persist and the always-complicated work of challenging deficit narratives, I keep finding good news, even if I can point out how qualified and contested and partial and hard fought that good news can be. We know that Indigenous students have more respect for their teachers at school, indeed feel happier and more confident at school than their non-Indigenous counterparts (Biddle & Cameron, 2012). And this seems to be the same pattern at university (Fig. 7.3). First year Indigenous students feel like they belong here, feel that university staff are welcoming, and that university life suits them—all at higher rates than non-Indigenous students (Baik, Naylor, & Arkoudis, 2015, p. 77). That’s great news. But this good news only holds true when test scores and self-assessed ability are controlled for (Biddle & Cameron, 2012, p. 7). At university, first year Indigenous students get higher marks than they expect (Baik et al., 2015, p. 77). We know what’s happening here right? We know that our kids start school with pretty high expectations of themselves, being told that education is important. But then we start comparing ourselves to non-Indigenous kids—or we get compared, or teachers have low expectations of us—and we’re subject to an erasive curriculum, and our expectations begin to shift downwards to get a little more adjusted in line with broader social expectations about Indigenous people. This is the deficit discourse that matters, this is the deficit discourse that needs to be challenged. But it shouldn’t stop us talking about the problems that persist. The actual and perceived academic ability of Indigenous students—test results, and expectations from students themselves, teachers, peers and families—can have a greater impact on the likelihood of post-school study than socioeconomic background (Biddle & Cameron, 2012, p. 7). The fact that 36% of our university students are surprised when they do well in semester one suggests that our students turn up at university without a good sense of their own abilities (Baik et al., 2015, p. 77). It’s important to state here that the issue is probably not self-esteem. How our students feel about themselves generally is likely not as important as about how they feel about specific academic abilities and skill sets in specific discipline areas (Bodkin-Andrews, Seaton, Nelson, Craven, & Yeung, 2010, p. 15). And the picture is further complicated by intersecting issues of curriculum, staffing, financial resources, support for people with health issues and disabilities, institutional racism and disregard (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew, & Kelly, 2012). As a general rule, we know

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At School Indigenous students have higher levels of wellbeing and feel happier and more confident at school, are more likely to see schooling as a benefit, and view their teachers more positively, than their non-Indigenous counterparts (Biddle & Cameron, 2012, p.24). At University Indigenous university students are “highly engaged, motivated and satisfied” (Baik, Naylor & Arkoudis, 2015, p.76), and more likely than non-Indigenous counterparts to report positive experiences on a range of issues: -

72% of Indigenous students (compared to 58% of non-Indigenous students) report that university life really suited them,

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88% agree that staff are approachable (compared to 74%),

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84% believe that their fellow students have a positive attitude to learning (compared to 66%),

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66% felt they belonged to the university community (compared to 46%) (Baik, Naylor & Arkoudis, 2015, p.76).

Fig. 7.3 Disrupting narratives of Indigenous disengagement

our kids don’t get access to the same kinds of resources that non-Indigenous kids get. But you know what? Overall this is a pretty good story to tell. And so I Find Myself Thinking: Is This Success? Don’t get me wrong, I would not for a second pretend that we are at any risk of actually decolonising tertiary education (Nakata, Nakata, Keech, & Bolt, 2012). Even if I agreed with that idea, it would raise a different set of questions. I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that our reading lists and curriculum and faculty meetings look the way they should look. Nonetheless, the numbers seem to suggest that we may well run the risk of succeeding against the metrics we’ve accepted for ourselves.

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More Indigenous students are coming to university. More students are completing qualifications at higher Australian Qualification Framework levels. Some universities are doing a better job of including Indigenous perspectives in their curricula than others. Some universities have more Ph.D. scholarships than others. But it is working. The trend is upward. We are making progress toward our goals. And the sector is reorienting to the normalisation of Indigenous inclusion and rethinking what it means to learn, teach and research on Indigenous land. Which Again Raises the Question: Is This Success? If we look at the new Universities Australia (UA) Indigenous Strategy 2017–2020 (Universities Australia, 2017), we get a pretty clear idea of what success is meant to look like. • Enrolment rates at least 50% above the growth rate of non-Indigenous student enrolment, and ideally 100% above • Parity in retention and success rates by 2025 • Parity in completion rates by field of study by 2028 • All UA members adopt Indigenous Research Strategies by 2018 • Cross-cultural training for executive staff from 2018 • Building opportunities for wider community engagement • Including Indigenous knowledge in curricula • Senior Indigenous executive employment and 3% Indigenous workforce. If achieved, these targets and policies will establish a new benchmark in quality and engagement for Indigenous higher education. If this is success, then still I wonder: is it enough?

7.3 Capitalising on Success? For me, the greatest risk inherent in policies and strategies like this is that we can mistake these targets for good and self-evident solutions to problems that have been defined within an increasingly neoliberal higher education industry (Manathunga & Bottrell, 2019). To draw on Bacchi (2015) all policies are someone’s idea of a solution. All solutions contain an implicit representation of the problem, and the representation of the problem in Indigenous higher education seems to rely on an assumption that we just need more students: • If the ‘solution’ here is represented as parity in retention and completion rates, then by extension, the problem is getting more Indigenous people in the door. • If the ‘solution’ is cultural competence training for university executives, then the problem is an incomplete awareness about Indigenous issues. • If the ‘solution’ is curriculum content, then the problem is subjects and courses that diminish and erase Indigenous knowledges.

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Statements like these feel like ‘common sense’. But as researchers and educators we are rightly trained to be sceptical of anything represented as self-evident (Ellerton, 2016). Parity is not equity. Nor is it clear to me why parity targets are necessarily better or more just or more Indigenous than any other kind of idea. I worry that our targets, that our ideas of success are adopted simply because they are easy to measure. Now, like a healthy ego, clear targets are good things to have. It is a ‘good thing’ if universities develop employment strategies that recognise the hidden labour we do, or give certainty to people on casual contracts. It certainly makes my life easier when I work in a school or faculty with an Indigenous research plan. But a rate is not a rationale, and statistics—as Professor Elizabeth McKinley is fond of saying—can only ever measure the health of a system. They are not goals in and of themselves. They certainly don’t tell us why we’re doing anything.

7.4 The Problems that Persist In higher education, there is only so much we can do if the quality of initial schooling is low. As universities compete harder for Indigenous students at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, all the parity targets and scholarships in the world can’t compensate for plateauing literacy rates. For example, if we recognise that the Table 7.1 Progress on Closing the Gap targets Target

Target year

On track

Close the gap in life expectancy within a generation • No improvement since 2006 baseline

2031

No

Halve the gap in mortality rates for Indigenous children under five • 3.7 versus 6.2 per 1000

2018

Yes

95% of all Indigenous four year-olds enrolled in early childhood education • 2015 = 87%; 2016 = 91%

2025

Yes

Close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school attendance in 5 years • (target = 93%, actual = 83%)

2018

No

Halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for Indigenous students

2018

No

Halve the gap for Indigenous Australians aged 20–24 in Year 12 attainment • Rate = 65.3%, non-Indigenous = 89.1%

2020

Yes

Halve the gap in employment outcomes

2018

No

Note Adapted from "Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s Report 2018", Commonwealth of Australia, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Retrieved from https://www.pmc.gov.au/indigenousaffairs/closing-gap

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Closing the Gap targets (CTG) (Table 7.1) are at best questionable, and dig a little deeper, we can see the picture on literacy rates is not so great. One of the problems with the CTG approach to education is that it focuses on measuring a rate of change towards halving a pre-existing gap. Extracting data from the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report data tables gives us a little bit of a different story when we only look at year-on-year changes to achievement of the National Minimum Standards (NMS) (Fig. 7.4). Put bluntly, all the parity targets, all the Indigenous research strategies, aren’t changing what happens out there in the real world, in our communities and our families. Sure, more of our kids are going to preschool and finishing Year 12, but are we happy to wait the 100 years that it will take to get parity if we continue with a business-as-usual approach (Biddle & Taylor, 2012)? Are we happy if more kids are finishing school but those schools aren’t shifting literacy rates? These are the problems that persist—amongst many serious and worsening human rights violations (Fig. 7.5)—and they require our urgent and sustained attention. For all the success that exists, for all the important progress that’s been achieved, for all the effort, there is still much, much more that needs to be done if our communities and our families are to reap the benefit of Indigenous peoples’ higher educational attainment. As Indigenous People We’re Used to Playing a Long Game I’m reminded that the first Indigenous people who received tertiary qualifications did so in 1957 and 1966—Margaret Williams Weir and Charles Perkins—which is 100 90 Reading

80

Writing 70

Numeracy

60 50 2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Fig. 7.4 Year 9 National Minimum Standards (2008–2015). Note Adapted from “Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2016,” by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, Productivity Commission, Australian Government. Data extracted from Chap. 4. Attachment Tables: (1) 2015 NMS data: Table 4A.4.13, Table 4A.4.14, Table 4A.4.15. (2) 2014 NMS data: Table 4A.4.25, Table 4A.4.26, Table 4A.4.27. (3) 2013 NMS data: Table 4A.4.37, Table 4A.4.38, Table 4A.4.39. (4) 2012 NMS data: Table 4A.4.49, Table 4A.4.50, Table 4A.4.51. (5) 2011 NMS data: Table 4A.4.61, Table 4A.4.62, Table 4A.4.63. (6) 2010 NMS data: Table 4A.4.73, Table 4A.4.74, Table 4A.4.75. (7) 2009 NMS data: Table 4A.4.85, Table 4A.4.86, Table 4A.4.87. (8) 2008 NMS data: Table 4A.4.97, Table 4A.4.98, Table 4A.4.99

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ human rights violations •

Most incarcerated peoples on earth (Anthony, 2017)

•

New forced adopted legislation passed in NSW (NATSILS, 2018)

•

Standing orders mandating English in NT parliament (Assembly Standing Orders Committee, 2017)

•

Persistent opposition to structural recognition (DPMC, 2017)

•

10-year life expectancy gap (SCRGSP, 2016, p.4.4)

•

Falling employment rates (DPMC 2018, p.76)

•

Doubling child removal rates since the Apology (Productivity Commission, 2018, Table 16A.2)

•

Only 13 languages considered strong & spoken by all ages (Marmion, Obata, & Troy, 2014, p. xii).

Fig. 7.5 Indigenous human rights violations

two generations ago. Two generations of Aboriginal people with university degrees. Maybe—and this is so incredibly rare—a handful of families that have multiple generations with doctorates. But two generations of tertiary education. Two generations of people to tell their stories about how they succeeded; two generations of research by Indigenous people; two generations of knowledge about these spaces. This isn’t just important from an equity perspective, or for social justice, or to measure or success, or close that remarkably persistent gap. It’s important because it predicts the kinds of conversations we can have about learning, in families, in schools and in universities. It predicts the way that family and friends can be involved in helping us decide what to do with our lives. We know that for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, family and friends are the largest and most important source of information about career options and post-school pathways (Craven et al., 2005, p. 17). We know that opportunity travels along social networks. We know that we only have two small generations of people to tell us about those opportunities. Two generations of advice. Two generations of introductions. That’s a very limited social network.

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7.5 The Purpose of a University It is impossible to divorce the narrative we weave for ourselves inside of universities from the very real politics that affect our families and communities outside these walls. Indeed, most of us are so deeply implicated in those struggles that they are precisely why we’re here in the first place. I want to open up a more expansive conversation about what the purpose is of a university that properly recognises Indigenous peoples, land and languages. For me, a university represents those most lofty goals of excellence and freedom of thought. Universities, I think, are probably one of the last remaining institutions that can accommodate thoughtful conversations about complexity. Certainly, for me, universities have always represented hope and the possibility of change. I know many of you will have heard me tell this story before, but when I was about 5 or 6, my Mum was a brickie’s labourer. She did pretty much everything when we were kids—fruit picking, cleaning, baker’s assistant. But one day—would’ve been about 1987—she was laying bricks in the car park on Baker Street at the University of Southern Queensland. Opposite the car park, in an old demountable, was the Indigenous student support centre; what became Kumbari Ngurpai Lag and now the College for Indigenous Studies, Education and Research. Mum literally walked across the road and asked if she could go to uni. So, the 2018 NAIDOC theme, ‘Because of her we can’, was a personal one for me. The astounding story is not that Mum’s lecturers were happy for us to sit in her tutorials after schools, or that people still smoked in those tutorials, or that I then met professors and Elders who gave me books and invited me to reading groups. The astounding story is that a 27-year-old single Aboriginal mum with two little kids walked into a university and someone said ‘yes’. So, my childhood was spent in fairly suffocating poverty but with this incredible commitment to learning, against all odds. It was an abiding reassurance from my mother that it didn’t matter how poor we were. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have the things other families did. It didn’t matter that the car didn’t work, or there wasn’t enough money for anything, ever. The only thing that mattered was getting a good education. That, she said, would be the only thing that would change anything for our family and for any Indigenous people. As the eldest kid in a single parent family you get pretty good at following instructions… So, alright Mum—got it. Education it is. Universities then, for me, have always represented the possibility of change. A way out of poverty. A hope for the future.

7.6 What Is Indigenous About Our Success? But what is Indigenous about our success? How do our good stories and ambitious targets and increasing completion rates tell a story that’s not just about Indigenous

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people being as successful as everyone else according to the same benchmarks, but achieving qualitatively Indigenous success? How does this position our universities at the front and centre of a new national narrative that re-imagines what it means to be Australian? I look at my achievements and I can objectively state that, according to the performance indicators and parity targets established by the higher education sector, I am successful. But I am not sure that’s the same thing as what it means to be a successful Gomeroi woman. Can I speak my language? When was the last time I went back to my mother’s Country? How many of my family stories do I know? I am not Aboriginal, I am not Gomeroi, just because I say I am. I am Gomeroi because I know my genealogy and my family stories. I am Gomeroi because other Gomeroi people tell me I am. I exist in relation to other Indigenous peoples and their countries and stories. Perhaps it’s not the role of universities to consider success in any terms other than those I’ve already described. But for me, universities offer a value proposition I can’t find anywhere else. They offer hope and rigour and opportunity. Without doing anything else, or anything more than the jobs we’re already doing—and I know there’s more to be done and the struggle is overwhelming sometimes—but we’re getting on with it and we’re doing it. But maybe parity targets are not the endgame here. Maybe if we manage to hit the UA target of 100% growth in enrolment rates we’ll still be dealing with regressive child adoption legislation and the most heavily incarcerated population rates in the world. Maybe parity targets are the stick to encourage our recalcitrant colleagues along the pathway with us. Maybe equity in access and outcomes is what we’re aiming for. But, I wonder if there aren’t more generative, more ambitious desires we might have for ourselves that could recognise the ways in which Indigenous success is different.

7.7 Indigenous Wellbeing Rethinking Indigenous success away from metrics and parity targets is a challenge for universities, and more broadly it is a challenge at the heart of Indigenous-settler relations. In universities, Indigenous students find themselves navigating a range of Indigenous-settler relations that we are only just beginning to articulate, understand and respond to. Indigenous students’ relations to family and community may take on a new dimension, especially when those students are first-in-family or first-incommunity to reach higher education. Their relation to the “Indigenous” subjects of knowledge they encounter in the classroom, we know differs radically from their relation to their own sense of self. Their relation to the ‘settler’ order is transformed

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in these classrooms, not just as they grapple with the disciplining practices of knowledges, but as they in turn speak back to and challenge those knowledge practices. We know that Indigenous wellbeing is about the strength of connection to culture (Fig. 7.6). For example, knowing your language is associated with better health. Being strong in your identity as an Indigenous person is associated with higher educational attainment. And for kids in out-of-home care, knowing your family stories is a significant protective factor. Indigenous success is a result of being in relation, of being connected, of being tied and claimed and located. Of course, the picture is complicated. There is some evidence to suggest that a strong cultural identity leads to increased psychological stress for Indigenous people living in non-remote areas; feelings of discrimination increase directly with the strength of cultural identity (Dockery, 2012). So, whilst Indigenous peoples’ wellbeing is improved in line with the strength of cultural connection, the maintenance of that identity in contexts that undermine, diminish or neglect Indigenous cultures is likely to increase rates of psychological distress. Whether through our work on strengthening cultural identity, working with Indigenous learners or developing the capabilities of non-Indigenous people, we are here precisely because we have good things to talk about. And we are good at having ‘conversations about learning’. We are good at developing metacognition and metalanguage skills, and we are getting better at doing this in Indigenous education research (Table 7.2). But we are not where we need to be, and we are not having the impact we need at the rate we need it in order to ensure better outcomes for our families and communities. A few years ago, the Australian Council of Educational Research (Asmar, Page, & Radloff, 2011) put out a paper that included all the things we expect: • Indigenous students are much more likely to be from low SES families, and to be first in family than non-Indigenous students. This has all the implications we

•

A stronger cultural identity is associated with higher educational attainment and employment rates as well as better mental health and feelings of happiness (Dockery, 2012, p.290).

•

Speaking an Indigenous language is associated with markedly superior health, and a lower likelihood of abusing alcohol or of being charged (Dockery, 2012, p.290).

•

Knowing family stories is a major factor predicting strength of connection to culture for Indigenous children in out-of-home care (McDowall, 2016).

Fig. 7.6 Supporting Indigenous wellbeing

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know about in terms of finding your way, feeling like you belong and staying on to complete. • But that paper also found that while 27% of Indigenous students were from low SES backgrounds, by inference—nearly three quarters—73% of Indigenous students did not fall into a low SES demographic (Asmar et al., 2011, p. 3). Similarly, whilst Indigenous students are indeed more likely to be first-in-family, 44% of Indigenous students did not fall into this category (Asmar et al., 2011, p. 3). The type of future that a tertiary qualification can give you is still available to precious few Indigenous people. But universities are not only degree-conferring institutions. They are places of hope and change. They are employers and networkers and innovators and archives and lobbyists. They exist not simply to increase the number of tertiary qualified consumers but also to help us create the future. These are relational challenges as much as they are policy challenges. They require us to rethink our expectations of both settler scholars, their institutions and ourselves.

7.8 Imagining a Different Community I’m not here just to increase your parity rates or get good impact metrics. I’m here to change the world. Within universities, you could be forgiven for thinking that the future is bright, that we are on an inexorable path to success. We are delivering better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and we are working with non-Indigenous staff and students to increase awareness, develop their skill sets and support their decision-making capability in professional contexts. But working towards a community of practice in Indigenous higher education, I think, means very little, unless the community in here is acting at the direction of the community out there. Table 7.2 Metalanguage for Indigenous education research Indigenous education

Teaching Indigenous knowledges and languages (United Nations, 2007, s14.1; s15.1)

Indigenous teaching and learning

Working with Indigenous learners (Craven, Yeung, & Han, 2014)

Indigenous Studies

A cross-discipline focused on the intersection of Western & Indigenous knowledge systems (Nakata, 2006)

Indigenous research

Systematic investigation, with Indigenous people as researchers or partners, to extend knowledge that is significant for Indigenous communities (Castellano, 2012)

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The science fiction author William Gibson is often attributed the quote: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed”. If we are unable to more fairly distribute the gains of higher education, if we cannot imagine metrics and targets that support Indigenous wellbeing, or ambitiously re-imagine how communities are engaged within universities, or consider how it is possible that in 2018, people with university degrees just wrote legislation authorising the “permanent adoption” of Indigenous children in NSW, then all our parity targets and self-congratulatory introspection isn’t worth the venue hire. Because we are so deeply implicated in our families and communities, and whilst we are busy trying to get more people inside—for refuge or to alleviate poverty or to create opportunities—the ways in which we understand and define how we are successful depend on the type and quality of connections we can create not just between higher education practitioners, students, alumni and staff, but the ways in which we place this community in service of others. For me, the great possibility of a community of practice is that it creates the potential for imagining how we might break down old barriers, and reimagine new ones. Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, was famous for coming up with new way to define what a nation is. He said that all nations are ‘imagined communities’— not imagined in that we make them up, but rather in the sense that we together create a shared sense of self (Anderson, 2016, p. 6). To that extent, nations—any nation—is firstly an agreement between a group of people who carry similar pictures around in our heads about what it means to be ‘us’, and not ‘them’. It is imagined in that an image of the community exists in the mind of members, even though we’ll never meet most of those other members (Anderson, 2016, p. 6). Anderson suggested that our communities are limited. Boundaries exist, even if they are elastic or porous (Anderson, 2016, p. 7). He also talked about sovereignty, the rationalism of the Enlightenment in response to the divine right of kings (Anderson, 2016, p. 7). While we now recognise many different types of sovereignty, in a university our allegiance I think is firstly to the ethical pursuit and governance of knowledge (which necessarily requires the recognition of Indigenous authority over different types of Indigenous knowledges). And so, Anderson lastly talked about the idea of community. A deep, horizontal comradeship that exists amongst a people regardless of the inequality between them (Anderson, 2016, p. 7).

7.9 Conclusion So, while we might talk about a community of practice as a loose collection of people united by a similar concern, or professionals working in the same field, or collective learning, Indigenous higher education and all our incredible work is trying to change the world. We’re trying to change what it means to be a community and what it means to be a nation. Our imagination of what might be possible is both enabled and limited by what we conceive of as success. It is both enabled and limited by our capacity to transform relations between ourselves, with our non-Indigenous colleagues, in

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classrooms and hallways, so that we might together rethink what is possible and how we understand success. Universities are not, by definition, bold creatures. Our work is incremental, our projects tend to be one-off. The nature of research—the scientific method—is not actually to propose answers; it is falsification, to disprove theories, to be incrementally less wrong (Popper, 2010). But if we are to imagine new communities and new ways of honouring the past as well as imagining bold new futures, then we must not only be incrementally less wrong, or satisfied with the measures of success we have established for ourselves, but use the community of practice that we have created here to seize the future and imagine bold, new— Indigenous—futures.

References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised ed.). London: Verso. Anthony, T. (2017, June 6). FactCheck Q&A: Are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth? The conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qandaare-indigenous-australians-the-most-incarcerated-people-on-earth-78528. Asmar, C., Page, S., & Radloff, A. (2011). Dispelling myths: Indigenous students’ engagement with university, AUSSE research briefings, v.10. Camberwell, Vic: Australian Council for Educational Research. Retrieved from https://research.acer.edu.au/ausse/2/. Assembly Standing Orders Committee. (2017). Report on Consideration of Reform to Standing Order 23A (Speaking of Languages other than English during Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory). Darwin: Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory. Retrieved from: https://parliament.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/443563/400-StandingOrders-Committee-report-to-the-Assembly-August-2017-on-Standing-Order-23A.pdf. Bacchi, C. (2015). The turn to problematization: Political implications of contrasting interpretive and poststructural adaptations. Open Journal of Political Science, 5(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10. 4236/ojps.2015.51001. Baik, C., Naylor, R., & Arkoudis, S. (2015). The first year experience in Australian universities: Findings from two decades, 1994–2017. Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne. Retrieved from https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0016/1513123/FYE-2014-FULL-report-FINAL-web.pdf. Behrendt, L., Larkin, S., Griew, R., & Kelly, P. (2012). Review of higher education access and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: Final report. Canberra: Department of Education and Training. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/review-higher-educationaccess-and-outcomes-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people. Biddle, N., & Cameron, T. (2012). Potential factors influencing Indigenous education participation and achievement. Adelaide: NCVER. Retrieved from https://www.ncver.edu.au/researchand-statistics/publications/all-publications/potential-factors-influencing-indigenous-educationparticipation-and-achievement. Biddle, N., & Taylor, J. (2012). Demographic consequences of the ‘Closing the Gap’ Indigenous policy in Australia. Population Research and Policy Review, 31(4), 571–585. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s11113-012-9235-8. Bodkin-Andrews, G. H., Seaton, M., Nelson, G. F., Craven, R. G., & Yeung, A. S. (2010). Questioning the general self-esteem vaccine: General self-esteem, racial discrimination, and standardised achievement across Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Journal of Psychologists and Counsellors in Schools, 20(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1375/ajgc.20.1.1.

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Castellano, M. B. (2012). Indigenous research. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The Sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (pp. 424–429). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Craven, R., Tucker, A., Munns, G., Hinkley, J., Marsh, H. & Simpson, K. (2005). Indigenous students’ aspirations: Dreams, perceptions and realities. Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training. Retrieved from: http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/82002 Craven, R. G., Yeung, A. S., & Han, F. (2014). The impact of professional development and Indigenous education officers on Australian teachers’ Indigenous teaching and learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(8), 85–108. Department of Education and Training. (2017). Award Course Completions, 2016—Table 14: Award Course Completions for Indigenous students by Level of Course, 2001 to 2016. Retrieved from https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/2016-award-course-completions. Dockery, A. M. (2012). Do traditional culture and identity promote the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians? Evidence from the 2008 NATSISS. In B. Hunter & N. Biddle (Eds.), Survey analysis for Indigenous policy in Australia: Social sciences perspectives (pp. 281–306). Canberra: ANU Press. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24h8br. DPMC (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet). (2017, 16 October). Response to Referendum Council’s report on constitutional recognition. Transcript ID 41263. Canberra: DPMC. Retrieved from https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-41263. DPMC (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet). (2018). Closing the gap prime minister’s report 2018. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from http://closingthegap.pmc. gov.au/. Ellerton, P. (2016, February 2). We can’t trust common sense but we can trust science. The conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/we-cant-trust-common-sense-but-we-cantrust-science-53042. Manathunga, C., & Bottrell, D. (2019). Prising open the cracks in neoliberal universities. In C. Manathunga & D. Bottrell (Eds.), Resisting neoliberalism in higher education volume II: Prising open the cracks (pp. 1–22). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Marmion, D., Obata, K., & Troy, J. (2014). Community, identity, wellbeing: The report of the second national Indigenous languages survey. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Retrieved from https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/products/report_ research_outputs/2014-report-of-the-2nd-national-indigenous-languages-survey.pdf. McDowall, Joseph J. (2016). Connection to culture by Indigenous children and young people in out-of-home care in Australia. Communities, Children and Families Australia, 10(1), 5–26. Nakata, M. (2006). Australian Indigenous Studies: A question of discipline. Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17(3), 265–275. Nakata, M., Nakata, V., Keech, S., & Bolt, R. (2012). Decolonial goals and pedagogies for Indigenous Studies. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 120–140. National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services. (2018, 12 November). Joint statement from national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak agencies on proposed legislative reforms to the NSW statutory child protection system. Melbourne: NATSILS. Retrieved from http://www.natsils.org.au/portals/natsils/20181112%20Joint%20Statement% 20NSW%20Amendments.pdf?ver=2018-11-12-162616-743. Popper, K. (2010). The unity of method. In J. M. Bynner & K. M. Stribley (Eds.), Research design: The logic of social inquiry (pp. 17–24). New Brunswick: AldineTransaction. (Reprinted from The poverty of historicism, pp. 130–143, by K. Popper, 1957, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Productivity Commission. (2018). Part F, Chapter 16: Child Protection Services. Chapter 16 Attachment Tables. Table 16A.2 Children in out-of-home care: number and rate per 1000 children aged 0–17 years by Indigenous status. In Report on government services 2018. Canberra: Australian Government. Retrieved from https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/reporton-government-services/2018/community-services/child-protection. SCRGSP (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision). (2016a). COAG targets and headline indicators. In Overcoming Indigenous disadvantage: Key indicators 2016. Canberra: ACT, Productivity Commission. Retrieved from https://www.pc.gov. au/research/ongoing/overcoming-indigenous-disadvantage/2016/report-documents/oid-2016chapter4-coag-targets-and-headline-indicators.pdf.

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Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision. (2016b). Overcoming Indigenous disadvantage: Key indicators 2016. Canberra: Productivity Commission. Retrieved from http://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/overcoming-indigenous-disadvantage/2016. United Nations. (2007). United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. A/RES/61/295. Retrieved 13 September, 2007, from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Universities Australia (2017). Indigenous strategy 2017–2020. Canberra: Universities Australia. Retrieved from https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/SOSSFile/FINAL_Indigenous_ Strategy.pdf.

Chapter 8

Preparing for the Gift: Two Educator’s Perspectives on Practicing Indigenous-Settler Relations in the Classroom Lilly Brown and Dave Collis Abstract This chapter explores the dynamics of collaboration among the Bachelor of Arts (Extended) teaching staff in the process of curriculum development. Based around the concept drawn from the Uluru Statement, that Indigenous students’ knowledge and experience is a ‘gift’ they bring with them into the teaching and learning space, this presentation understands curriculum development and pedagogical reflection as a type of ‘preparation for the gift’. This framework provides an alternative to the deficit discourses that frequently frame teaching and learning environments in the context of Indigenous education. It provides a way to conceive of best practice in a pedagogical context, which seeks to position Indigenous perspectives at the centre of the teaching and learning endeavour. The authors present an overview of key concepts drawn from Indigenous scholarships that have shaped curriculum development, such as Martin Nakata’s Indigenous standpoint theory, illustrating how these core concepts can work across a range of subjects to strengthen students’ intellectual and critical engagement as part of their academic practice. In describing this curriculum work, Lilly Brown and David Collis will tell the story of how these developments occurred within the BA (Ext) program over recent years, and the principles of collaboration that were involved in making it a reality. Keywords Indigenous · Perspectives · Curriculum · Pedagogy · Collaboration · Gift · Uluru nakata

8.1 Introduction by Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata The chapter that follows was, like Nikki Moodie’s contribution to this collection, first presented at the Trinity College Indigenous Higher Education Conference in November 2018. Sana asked Lilly Brown and David Collis, who both develop and L. Brown · D. Collis (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Brown e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_8

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deliver curriculum in the Bachelor of Arts (Extended) program at Trinity College and The University of Melbourne, to contribute their conversation to this book because it offers a valuable perspective on the relational aspects of Indigenous higher education as practiced in the classroom. In this way, it picks up on Nikki’s call for a new imagination for the Indigenous higher education community and the ‘ways in which we understand and define how we are successful’. Additionally, it offers a counternarrative to the ‘deficit discourse’, instead bringing sharp emphasis to the immense value that Indigenous Australian students bring to the classroom while also refusing to shy away from the challenges that remain. It is also an example of Dave and Lilly’s efforts to produce lawful relations with one another as educational practitioners, and to work toward establishing lawful relations with their students and the land upon which they educate. We would like this conversation to serve as a reminder to academics who read this work that our scholarly responsibilities encompass the classroom and not just research metrics.

8.1.1 Lilly We’d like to begin by acknowledging the people of the Kulin Nations, but particularly the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people, as the sovereign custodians of both the place in which we meet today, and where we do most of the work we’ll be talking about in this brief presentation. As an educator and a researcher, as a Gumbaynggirr woman and someone who has been a guest on the country of the Kulin peoples for eight years now, today in conversation with Dave, we’d like to share what generative collaboration means for each of us as practitioners working in the extremely fraught space of ‘Indigenous education’.

8.1.2 Dave As a person of a British and Western European migrant ancestry, in sharing this acknowledgement of the sovereign peoples of the Kulin Nations, I’d note that this puts into perspective the education work that is practised here within the University of Melbourne, which was founded in 1853, and Trinity College, which was founded in 1872—both relative newcomers in comparison to the systems of education that have been practised here for tens of thousands of years. It’s crucial to also acknowledge the 130 or so amazing students who have taken the leap to come into the University of Melbourne via the Bachelor of Arts (Extended) (hereafter BA (Ext)) program over the past decade. And the excellent teaching staff within the BA (Ext), both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who teach so professionally and care so deeply for the students.

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8.1.3 Lilly For Dave and me, it’s important to introduce ourselves in this way to enable us to ask questions of the work we do and the approach we undertake in doing so. What does it mean to engage, for example, for me as an Aboriginal woman working in higher education, in an institution that I recognise, historically and into the present, as having a role in subjugating Indigenous knowledge and peoples (Bunda, Zipin, & Brennan, 2012; Smith, 2012).

8.1.4 Dave Following Lilly’s lead, a key challenge for me as a non-Indigenous man is to try to create a learning context that gives students a pathway to success, but which doesn’t repeat the logic of assimilation that is so pervasive in education. It’s a reality check to do a Google search of the most cited authors in each discipline, and take note of their ethnicity and gender. There’s a clear evidence base for the ‘ongoing subjugation’ that Lilly describes. The only question is whether we allow ourselves to see it, and if we can truly respond to what we see. The core challenge I see is for the BA (Ext) to be a point of deeper transformation, not just a minor amendment to business as usual. When I was a kid, my Nana used to take me to the garden and show me how to remove weeds. Never just pull the top off, because it leaves the root structure intact, and gives a false appearance of achievement. You need to get under the surface, get your hands deep into the soil, then you’ve done your job. That’s the challenge that we have to root out the ongoing logics of the colonial paradigm, not just change the surface appearances. The BA (Ext) program, through its teaching practices, needs to reach deeply into the soil of student experience as well as our own. We want students to succeed, and to do so on proper non-assimilatory terms, where they learn from a point of strength as Indigenous students. In adding these descriptors of ‘non-assimilatory success’ and students ‘succeeding as Indigenous students’, I’m drawing attention to the unspoken assumptions that generally equates success with high grades. To make an extreme example, if a hypothetical university subject were drawing from a racist set of assumptions without challenge, and students were being assessed on their compliance with that line of thinking, then what would it mean for students to get a high mark in that subject? I’d consider a student successful in a deeper sense if they disrupted that subject through intelligently questioning its assumptions, even if that risked the possibility of lower grades. It’s really important for non-Indigenous educators to try to understand the stressful choices that Indigenous students face. At this point, it’s worth briefly outlining the program we’re talking about. Established ten years ago, the BA (Ext) is a pathway program for Indigenous students who have not achieved a sufficient ATAR for direct entry into an Arts Degree at the

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University of Melbourne to instead do a four-year Arts Extended degree, in which there are a series of transition subjects front-ended in the degree, alongside other supports. It’s timely to be speaking about the BA (Ext) structure now, because we are on the verge of implementing a new suite of BA (Ext) subjects, due to begin in the 2020 academic year. This is the first major change to BA (Ext) curriculum in its history, and involves a first principles rethinking of the logics underlying the curriculum. Most subjects will continue in modified form, some will cease, and one new subject will begin—all giving a greater clarity to supporting students to transition into and through the University. This has been a long-term process of revision, led by the teaching staff, grounded in Indigenous scholarship, and in response to student feedback. For me, having been there as one of the original designers of the BA (Ext) back in 2008, it’s a dream come true to see the program re-established on these new foundations, to see its great potential being realised. For Lilly and I, the energy of this current presentation comes out of this unbelievably exciting work, imagining what this will mean for future generations of students. Returning to your earlier comments, Lilly, I’m wondering what you have in mind when you describe the ‘fraught space’ of ‘Indigenous education’, and particularly why you apply parentheses when you use the phrase, ‘Indigenous education.’ Or, perhaps a related question, what is your hope for an ‘Indigenous education’ that doesn’t subjugate?

8.1.5 Lilly As Dave has noted, the conversation presented in this chapter is occurring at a pivotal cross-roads for the program. In this way the ideas expressed here are tentative and represent the shifting ground we are working on as educators. This conversation reflects the inductive process we continue to undergo as we have responded to students and the broader discourses that circulate in Indigenous education while working within the constraints of higher education. As we have been imagining the future of BA (Ext) we were mindful of the assumptions underpinning the space within which we work. When we hear talk of Indigenous education, overwhelmingly it is in response to the underachievement of Indigenous people in education and to closing the gap between Indigenous peoples and other Australians. Non-Indigenous educational researcher (Vass, 2012, p. 88) suggests that these constant references to underachievement and gaps enables “Indigenous education” to function as a regime of truth that inherently positions Indigenous people within deficit frameworks as less than. Deficit thinking, he argues, potentially leads to lowered expectations of Indigenous students academically and behaviourally in the classroom; poor education policies that fail to negotiate systemic concerns; and, research that fails to respond to the needs of Indigenous people. If Indigenous students, people, communities and families are always represented as the problem in Indigenous education (Bacchi, 2012), then we lose

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sight firstly of the exceptional knowledge and experience we as Indigenous people hold, and secondly of the structural (and racialised) nature of educational inequality that Indigenous people face, and of the historical legacy of exclusion that informs the relationship between Indigenous people and the education system in Australia. In response to earlier iterations of the BA (Ext) program students often provided critical feedback which signified not only the way the certain aspects of the program may have been experienced negatively, but also how in their experience it continued to reinforce deficit based assumptions. For example, a former student, Ethan Taylor, made this critique in an essay, which was subsequently published in the student magazine Under Bunjil in (2017). Taylor wrote the essay in one BA (Ext) subject about different subject. In critiquing a compulsory subject that aimed to develop the confidence and skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal communication of Indigenous students, Taylor argued that this aim: …mirrors colonial practices designed to socially control Indigenous people through humiliation. While the retort to this would be that confidence at the cultural interface is necessary for educational success (Day et al., 2015, p. 503). I would reaffirm that regardless of intention, creating a compulsory unit designed to increase the confidence of Indigenous students posits dangerous assumptions with potentially disastrous consequences.

Taylor calls the assumption that Indigenous students lack confidence into question, suggesting further: If confidence and self-esteem are the end goal, then it can be assumed that failing the subject—the ultimate form of punishment in this case—must mean a student lacks these qualities.

For Dave, other staff in the BA (Ext) program and myself, in recognising the tensions that circumscribe our work with Indigenous young people in higher education in the BA (Ext) program, many of our conversations are part of a process of responding to these assumptions. In doing so we have sought to consider the following questions: how do we translate this precarity in our praxis for the benefit of the Indigenous students we work with? How can we work in ways that not only challenge the accumulated intergenerational structural inequality in education and what’s privileged here, but also provide our students with opportunities to reveal the intellectual brilliance they carry with them when they make the strategic decision to come to this university? How does our curriculum development and pedagogical reflection contribute to our praxis as educators, which includes, for us, preparing for receiving and responding to the gift of brilliance our students bring with them? And in doing so, how do we prepare students to use this gift strategically in their own engagement with the university when they leave our program?

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8.1.6 Dave The idea of ‘gift’1 is something that I’ve found very helpful as a framework for understanding the work that we do, and to do so in a way that breaks out of the deficit framework named by Greg Vass and many others. A few months ago, here in the Gateway building, Trinity hosted Thomas Mayor who was taking the physical Uluru Statement around Australia. It was during this visit that I realised that the incredible words of the statement give clear guidance for educators. As Indigenous parents, the authors spoke about links between sovereignty, the wellbeing of their children, and the social transformations that must necessarily occur in education. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

In this Uluru Statement gift framework, there’s not a trace of deficit in sight! For me, as a non-Indigenous person, this helped consolidate a non-deficit ground for explaining my approach to teaching. I remember, back in the old days, some of the comments and attitudes that would occasionally filter through: ‘these students are lucky to be here’; and ‘it’s hard work teaching them.’ These types of comments, with their downward gravitational pull of deficit, always really bothered me, because it wasn’t my experience of the students—who to me are creative, interesting, fun, and, quite often, brilliant. But, still, I found it hard to find the language to communicate this. The gift framework of the Uluru Statement completely reworks deficit assumptions and attitudes. If students are sovereign First Peoples of Australia, bringing into the present-day knowledge and practices that go back tens of thousands of years, then we educators should feel fortunate to work with them. And our curriculum should, above all, be a place of hospitality to receive students as they share the gift. All our work as teaching staff in all its everyday glory—writing curriculum, designing assessments, preparing classes, marking essays, uploading lectures—should be conceived of, and experienced as, a process of preparing for the gift. A couple of months ago, I got together with Miriam Nicholls, a non-Indigenous member of the BA (Ext), and we presented a session to the wider teaching staff here at Trinity College Pathways School, entitled, ‘Preparing for the Gift.’ It was the clearest description of our work that we’ve ever been able to give from our perspective as non-Indigenous staff.

1 The idea to reframe teaching practices in terms of ‘preparing for the gift’ came about in response to

the wording of the Uluru Statement, as described below. However, the idea of ‘gift’ as a framework for university’s responding to First Nations students—to prepare for, and respond to, the gift—is also explored by Rauna Kuokkanen in the Canadian higher education context. See Kuokkanen (2007).

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8.1.7 Lilly Something perhaps worth sharing is the kind of preparation required each of us to receive this gift, for Dave as a non-Indigenous man and (importantly) as the program leader, and, for me, as an Aboriginal woman. If our preparation differs, what does that mean for our collective praxis/collaboration?

8.1.8 Dave Responding to Lilly’s question, the gift calls Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to prepare in different ways. For non-Indigenous people, part of the preparation has to be a process of being ready to firstly recognise, and then receive, the gift. At the risk of over-reliance on my Nana’s gardening metaphor, us non-Indigenous people have a lot of absurd and demeaning stereotypes that have, like weeds, taken root in our hearts and minds. We need to pull these out by the roots, so that we can recognise, and be affected by, the gift, so that it can take root in us. Speaking practically, this has meant regular and sustained work—the sort of work that I ask of my students in their studies. For me, this also involves a structured process of self-reflection with mentors, plus deep and wider immersion in Indigenous scholarship. Professor Nakata’s (2007) work has been foundational for me in understanding the social position from which I teach, and to be increasingly explicit about these social relations that frame the production and inter-relatedness of knowledge systems. Another key influence on my teaching has been Russell Bishop, whose concept of ‘extended family-like-relationships’ has been foundational to the way in which I seek to construct the learning environment as a place where students can belong and feel supported, which is a pre-requisite for all other teaching strategies to be successful (Bishop, Ladwig, & Berryman, 2014). For me, it has taken years of work, reading Indigenous scholarship, and using that as a lens through which to make sense of my experiences with students, in order for the gift to come to life inside me. In terms of the structure of the teaching team, as Program Leader I’ve endeavoured to curate something similar, a space where Indigenous scholarship is the organising principle of the curriculum and the teaching. In this I don’t want to take too much credit. In reality it is the teaching team, led by Lilly and including people like Maddee Clark and Fiona Belcher, who have brought the vision and done the hard work. My job, if anything, has been to recognise their vision, support it, and put my full weight behind it. I think most Indigenous staff in Australian workplaces at some stage look to their boss to see if they really are being supported. Regardless of the context, I want my staff to know the answer is a calm, clear, and reliable, ‘Yes, you have my full support.’ The realisation for me is that the challenge is not to merely include Indigenous perspectives in the curriculum but, rather, to bite the bullet and support Indigenous

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people, and others who are attuned to the gift, to lead the development of curriculum. In order for our work to make sense, we needed to make the crucial distinction between the superficial inclusion of Indigenous perspectives, and a deeper and more equitable engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems and practices. And so, kicking the footy back to you Lilly, I’d be interested to hear any responses to the gift and this description of collaboration, or if there are any other angles you want to highlight. I note that you recently ran two focus groups with BA (Ext) students, so I’m wondering if there are any aspects of your engagements with students that you’d like to share.

8.1.9 Lilly For me, as an Aboriginal woman who might be perceived as having succeeded in education: I’ve lectured here at the university since 2012 and I’m currently completing a Ph.D. Yet I did poorly in high school and only just gained entry into the University of Western Australia through a provisional entry scheme because my grades were not good enough to get me in otherwise, not unlike the students we work with in the BA (Ext). Throughout my university journey I’ve had crucible moments that have given me the energy to navigate and negotiate the university as a contested space. Both as a student and as an educator and researcher. These crucible moments have often involved Indigenous mentors, my family and Elders, and texts written by Indigenous scholars who have demanded academic rigour, supported me to cultivate generative strategies and tactics to challenge ‘the system’ while also, most importantly, giving me the tools to ensure, in doing so, I was not forgoing important aspects of my complex identity as a Gumbaynggirr woman. These four things: Access to mentorship and support from Indigenous educators; high expectations as reflected in the demand for intellectual and academic rigour; generative strategies that augment this demand, which also provide an enabling space to challenge the system; and, acknowledging the complex identities of students, inform every aspect of my teaching practice and curriculum development in the BA (Ext) program. These four principles challenge the deficit assumptions that circumscribe ‘Indigenous education’ and inform the way Indigenous children and young people are often responded to. They enable us as educators to recognise the knowledge students bring with them into the classroom, and in addition to recognising some of the academic challenges students face—importantly, this framework also supports students to creatively navigate these challenges. The program Dave is working to establish in collaboration with other educators in the BA (Ext), and the staff at Trinity who support his endeavours, means that not only do we feel supported as Indigenous staff, but that the level of subject and program innovation undertaken by all staff is profound. This includes the role of Indigenous educators as guides to students coming through both in relation to the formalised curriculum and also as participants in a broader community of practice within which

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both educators and students are active participants. The Indigenous educators on the program are, in all our diverse experiences within academia, dedicated to sharing with students our theorisation or meaning-making of these experiences and how that translates to our academic practice. This modelling is woven into the curriculum and also in our engagement/relations with Indigenous students within and beyond the classroom and university, and is a conscious and active part of our pedagogy, which we acknowledge as being delivered on the land of the Kulin peoples. I wonder Dave, as the program leader and a non-Indigenous person working in ‘Indigenous education’, if you have any reflections on the role of Indigenous staff not only in guiding Indigenous students, but as foundational to the success of the program?

8.1.10 Dave When I came to be the leader of the BA (Ext) program in 2014, the first major change I made was to invite Indigenous staff who could lead the first principles rebuilding of the BA (Ext) curriculum to do so. In this, it’s important to acknowledge friends of the program, such as Odette Kelada, Dianne Jones, Todd Fernando, Emily James, and others, who helped me to understand why this was so vital. I also encountered a strange hint from people that it’s nice to support Indigenous staff, but don’t let the academic standards slip. What an incredible moment to unpack in terms of the underlying racialised assumptions that continue to swirl around higher education! As much as I found these views distasteful, they were a good reference point for me to clarify my thinking as to why it was vital to invite Indigenous teaching staff to come into the program. In my mind, the involvement of Indigenous teaching staff is simply best practice. It is not a nice thing to do; it is the way to get this highest quality curriculum and teaching in this context of transitional pathway education. As someone who has taught international students for almost a quarter of a century, my core skill set is transition pedagogies. And, as the literature in this area attests, best practice is to have curriculum that is responsive to the experiences of students (see Kift, 2015). When it comes to understanding the experiences of Indigenous students, many non-Indigenous educators are at a disadvantage. We non-Indigenous educators need to recognise that we don’t have the expertise here, and that the only appropriate posture for us to adopt is humility. Turning this around, one reason Indigenous teaching staff are so vital is because they can draw from a greater range of experiences in designing appropriate curriculum and adopting appropriate pedagogy, a process that Lilly has described above. Even if I were a raging racist, but committed to best practice transition pedagogy, I’d still have sought to employ Indigenous teaching staff to lead the program. So, first and foremost, the employment of Indigenous teaching staff is about the quality of the curriculum and teaching. But it also flows over into a strength-based form of mentorship. Students see that Lilly, Maddee, Natalie, Emily, Neika, and others have taken on a leadership role, and so that becomes a possibility for them as

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students too, to be involved in more than a token way. It’s visible, it’s tangible, and it opens up the horizons of possibility for students to have their views taken seriously, and to be co-creators of knowledge.

8.1.11 Lilly Recently we sought feedback from BA (Ext) students and overwhelmingly they emphasised the importance of curriculum content and teaching methods that were high-level with high expectations. Subjects that students felt were underpinned by low expectations or deficit-based assumptions made students feel like they didn’t deserve to be at or belong at university, students felt less likely to want or try to succeed. Whereas, when we talked to students who had undertaken subjects underpinned by high expectations, students overwhelmingly noted that it made them want to try harder and do better. And importantly, they completed these subjects more prepared to engage at a high-level with the rest of their study. One student said: …my best mark was for a subject which [might be considered hard and high expectations] and worst, [a subject which might be considered easy but had low expectations] and that’s largely because when you’re [supported in a difficult subject], I think most people would say it’s one of the harder subjects you do but because it is challenging, you’re sitting there and you’re like, “This is why I’m at university. This is what I thought it would be.”

In relation to a subject taught in the program (by a non-Indigenous educator), which enabled students to intellectually engage with the importance of place, another student stated: It sets up our ethics for how we present ourselves. It’s amazing. The stuff talked about in that subject, I still talk about today, and you still reference the people you’re talking about and wrote about and everything is relevant. It’s relevant to our identity in this place.

In recognising and responding to the desires in one subject in the program we actively identified some of the deficit assumptions that often inform ‘Indigenous education’ and made explicit how the racism of low expectations was being challenged through the curriculum and course content. In addition to the generic skills student’s would acquire in their participation in the subject, like the capacity to critically analyse ideas, or write in the essay form, we also supported students to complete the subject being able to: – Deploy the work of Indigenous and other critical scholars to assert your sovereignty academically as Indigenous peoples; – Feel entitled to be at the University of Melbourne rather than grateful; – Understand the immense importance of your presence at this institution; – Continue developing, articulating and extending a critical intellectual standpoint informed by who you are, where you’ve come from and what you imagine for the future.

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Students gain entry into the BA (Ext) because they have not achieved the grades to get into university otherwise and because they identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. The BA (Ext) was established as a preparation program to support these students to succeed in ‘mainstream’ university. But key to their success, we are finding, is not meeting students as underachievers or as individuals who have comparatively failed at school, but rather meeting students as young people who have been failed by the school and broader education system. Flipping the focus from responding to students that have failed, to responding as educators who are part of a system that has failed its Indigenous students, is a profound shift. This shift has informed, for example, the revised first semester subject Knowledge Practices 1. Drawing on Australian and transnational Indigenous theorists and theories and non-Indigenous scholars who engage with key concepts relating to the politics of knowledge production, the subject: guides students to analyse the historical and axiological contexts out of which these theories and concepts arise including the emergence of the modern university. Students will be supported to develop and articulate a critical reading praxis through an engagement with academic practices and theoretical positions including the politics of citation, Indigenous and Indigenous women’s standpoint theory, Indigenous queer and feminist theories and decolonising methodologies. In doing so students will complicate limiting and limited notions of Indigenous methodologies, by considering the role of non-Indigenous theorists and academics in doing ‘Indigenous work’. Throughout the semester students will evaluate the utility of these theories in making meaning of their own practice as students, and in doing so cultivate tools and strategies to engage successfully at the interface of Indigenous knowledge practices and Western knowledge systems.

In this subject students are supported to critically assess the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) system as the requirement designating university admission and its impact on attendance of students from diverse backgrounds. This enables students to more deeply understand the educational processes that not only justify the existence of the BA (Ext) program but how these processes have also positioned them as ‘Indigenous students’.

8.1.12 Dave As Lilly and I were researching data on student outcomes, one of our colleagues talked about the descriptor, ‘Indigenous students,’ as a ‘closed marker’ for the identity of our students. We paused, and realised just how useful this phrase is for capturing the dynamic of being categorised that our students experience. Our students self-identify as Indigenous as they come into the BA (Ext), but it’s a category that has a life of its own, and functions a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot where people project onto our students their presuppositions as to what an Indigenous student is, or should be. It’s a closed marker in the sense that the ‘Indigenous’ marker tends to take over in people’s minds, crowding out other aspects of identity. This is one area where curriculum can be useful to students. Martin Nakata’s framework of ‘Indigenous Standpoint Theory’ (2007) gives a conceptual framework

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where it is possible to overcome simplistic binaries between Indigenous and nonIndigenous, and move into the more substantive task of being active generators of knowledge at the cultural interface, actively navigating identity by drawing upon, and synthesising, elements of various knowledge systems. In concluding, the ongoing challenge for the BA (Ext), and Indigenous education more widely, is to fully remove the deficit blinkers so as to see the gift—because truly looking our students and seeing what they bring, is the transformative gaze within which they thrive. This requires an epistemological humility on our part, particularly on the part of non-Indigenous people, to accept that we only ever partially see what we need to see and to commit to the caring and trusting partnerships that will enable all of us to thrive. Thank you.

References Bacchi, C. (2012). Introducing the “What’s the problem represented to be”? approach. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic interventions and exchanges (pp. 21–24). Bishop, R., Ladwig, J., & Berryman, J. (2014). The centrality of relationships for pedagogy: The Whanaungatanga thesis. American Educational Research Journal, 51(1), 184–214. Bunda, T., Zipin, L., & Brennan, M. (2012). Negotiating university ‘equity’ from indigenous standpoints: A shaky bridge. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(9), 941–957. Day, A., Nakata, V., Nakata, M., & Martin, G.( 2015). Indigenous students’ persistence at higher education in Australia: Contextualizing models of change from psychology to understand and aid students’ practices at a cultural interface. Higher Education Research and Development, 34(3), 501–512. Kift, S. (2015). A decade of transition pedagogy: A quantum leap in conceptualising the first year experience. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 2(2015), 51–86. Kuokkanen, R. (2007). Reshaping the university: Responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. Toronto: UBC Press. Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages: Savaging the disciplines. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, England and New York: Zed Books. Retrieved from https://ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/login?url= https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00006a&AN=melb.b5940521& site=eds-live&scope=site. Taylor, E. (2017). Undergraduate Essay, Bachelor of Arts (Extended). University of Melbourne. Melbourne. Vass, G. (2012). ‘So, what is wrong with indigenous education?’ Perspective, position and power beyond a deficit discourse. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 41(2), 85–96.

Chapter 9

Learning to Live Lawfully on Country Libby Porter

Abstract “I acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples and pay respects to Elders and Country”. Acknowledging, indeed coming to know, this simple fact as a white settler woman at home in the place now called Melbourne seems unremarkable. Yet such an acknowledgement surely demands more than simply uttering the statement. It should activate both response, and responsibility. What are the possibilities of response and responsibility of settlers in the Indigenous-settler relation? How can non-Indigenous people think and practice a relationship of responsibility, and becoming response-able, in relationship with Indigenous sovereignties? How in particular can these responsibilities be reconsidered in light of current Treaty negotiations, underway in Victoria as I write? In this chapter, I trace some of the faultlines of my own journey toward a practice of learning to live lawfully on Country and in relationship to Indigenous sovereignties. This is a journey experienced in coming to unlearn my own disciplines of urban geography and planning. These faultlines, as they track across these disciplines, reveal some of the dimensions at play in contemporary Indigenous-settler relations, which remain firmly bound into settler-colonial orders: whiteness and its privileges, the obligations of a treaty relationship and the importance of place-based systems of law to imagine decolonial relations of belonging. Keywords Indigenous · Place-making · Urban planning · Settler colonialism · Indigenous urbanism

9.1 Something like Beginnings This is a story of waking up. Growing up white, middle-class and cis-gender female in rural Australia, I was born into a structure of privilege and relation of whiteness that I have only just begun to be able to name. I was born on Jardwadjali Country, and have lived much of L. Porter (B) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_9

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my life moving between Dja Dja Wurrung, Boonwurrung/Bunurong and Wurundjeri Country—these are places that have and continue to sustain me and my family, just as they have nourished life for so many thousands of generations. I pay my respects to Country, ancestors and Elders. Born into a lefty, progressive, Christian family I lived the first 20 years of my life with literally zero knowledge of the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians and no appreciation that my own privilege was entirely constructed from the dispossession and oppression of the peoples whose Country/ies I occupied. As a child at school in rural Victoria, I was taught the perniciously racialised version of Australian history where Indigenous people were either invisible, somewhere else, or dysfunctional. Except when we did ‘ancient history’ at school, in which I remember a particularly troubling project that asked me to believe that a time long ago darker people roamed Australia looking for food. Becoming more conscious of the presence of Indigenous people in my own community through my teenage years, I began to wonder whether things were not as I was taught. Getting involved in a young people’s faith and cultural exchange program took me and a bunch of other, rather earnest, young white Australians to visit Indigenous communities in far north Queensland where the inaccuracies—indeed failure—of my education and the full extent of my own racism was finally exposed. Part of me began to wake up. A response perhaps typical for a white, educated woman like me was to want to ‘work in the field’, to contribute something in order to undo the basis of these lies I had been sold, to ‘fix’ things. I duly enrolled in a Ph.D. program with a research focus on the relationship between my chosen discipline—urban planning—and Indigenous land rights. Of course, I really wanted to be a ‘good white woman’ (Nicoll, 2000) and do the right kind of research that was socially progressive, appropriately reciprocal, and reflexively ethnographic (see also Kowal, 2015 for a reflection on these earnest dynamics). I was earnest in my reading and intention to design a study that would ‘give back’ and take into account power relations and the sensitivities of crosscultural encounter. Literally, I was learning how to be and perform being a ‘good white woman’. Initially, I framed my Ph.D. research around the idea of ‘spaces of inclusion’ (this was my original title). I set out to look for something I thought would be evident as ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and see how ‘it’ was included (or not) in planning processes. Of course, this assumed that there was a ‘thing’, knowable to me, called ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and that I would know it when I discovered it. It was not until very late in my Ph.D. (just a few months prior to submission) that I realised I’d been asking the wrong question all along. And it was a realisation offered, in very generous terms, by one of the participants in my research—a strong Wadi Wadi activist—who reminded me in a conversation in the car one day as we bumped along the dusty roads in Nyah Forest that actually the aim was not necessarily just to be ‘included’ in the white system. I wrote a reflective piece (Porter, 2009) on this learning, and the awakening that despite the various myths I’d told myself about how I was a good white researcher, I too have ‘imperial eyes’ (Smith, 1999, p. 42).

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Waking up to this realisation forced what was, for me, a new personal and political reckoning. It radically unsettled the presumption, designed right into the heart of my study: that there was no sovereign Indigenous domain, and that ‘our’ (white) system could unproblematically offer itself as a forum to this ‘excluded, marginalised Other’. How could such a framework account for the complicity of that system in the very violence of colonisation itself and its perpetuating logic? While this story appears to be personal and subjective, I do not intend to tell it as an experience-sharing exercise. There are inherent dangers in presenting an account, using first person, of one’s own life story, for instance, it might be dismissed as simply the idiosyncrasies of merely one human experience, and/or as a form of (white) navel-gazing. Instead, following scholars such as (Nicoll, 2004), my intention is to use these starting points as an entry point into the condition of whiteness and its operation in contemporary Indigenous-settler relations in Australia. In so doing, my aim is to account for the necessary practice of abandoning the desire to find a correct perspective (what Nicoll calls ‘falling out of perspective’) toward knowing oneself as being in, and responsible to, a relationship with Indigenous sovereignty and of becoming response-able (able to respond) to the question and demand posed by the statement: ‘sovereignty was never ceded’.

9.2 Unlearning the Discipline Becoming response-able requires a truthful basis from which to respond. The structure of denial endemic to the scholarly disciplines in the settler-colonial university does not provide such a base. For those disciplines are essential components to what Taussig has described as the public secret—of knowing what not to know (1999). The organisation of western knowledge and its institutionalisation in forms such as universities works continuously in the service of maintaining that public secret. Bruce Pascoe puts it best: Almost no Australians know anything about Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years. Think of the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it. Imagine the organisation required in the publishing industry to fail to mention Aboriginal agriculture, science and diplomacy (Pascoe, 2018, p. 65)

This is no mere forgetfulness. As Nakata (2007) has demonstrated so well, academic disciplines are organised precisely to coordinate power and knowledge in the service of disciplining Indigenous knowledge. A vital activity, then, of becoming response-able is to learn anew the white supremacist intention built into the structure of western knowledge disciplines and begin to make inroads toward unlearning the disciplines. Here I am drawing from Spivak’s notion of unlearning (1994), a practice that I interpret as working to make available for critique the formations, institutions, norms and silences that enable oneself as a speaking subject within a discipline to persistently critique the structures we inhabit and perpetuate (see Porter, 2010).

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Practices, institutions, power, and material realities sustain disciplines. The configuration of these elements enables my discipline—urban planning and geography—to structure its foundational story and knowledge base in a way that assumes it is the only, natural and universal knowledge system for knowing the relationship between people and place. Unlearning the knowledge base of my discipline from where I write, in Melbourne, invites important questions. Why was the knowledge system of the Kulin Nation—where I have lived much of my life—absent from how I came to know the relationship between people and place? Why was the governance system of the Kulin Nation absent from how I came to understand the possibilities of governing the relationship between people and place? How is the discipline of urban geography/planning continuously coordinated to sustain its centrality and power in the face of these blatant occlusions and denials? Answers to these questions are principally about power, and power relations that are organised through the structure that is settler-colonialism. That Australia has colonial origins is not in dispute. But that this reality of colonisation is a perpetual logic that structures our very social and political fabric today is not only unacknowledged, but vehemently contested—most overtly every year around 26 January. This exists across the socio-political spectrum and is not merely the mantra of shock jocks. Indeed, it is a story foundational to my discipline, as demonstrated by a simple exercise. Look up any history of Melbourne and it will cast the colonial city of Melbourne as existing in a time long past, in the early frontier period of establishing the city, and the foothold of white privilege in this part of south-eastern Australia. When we consider Melbourne as a city in a settler colony, it becomes clearer that sociality in Melbourne remains fundamentally steeped in the asymmetric power relations of colonisation. The form has changed—we no longer live in the frontier or first contact moments. However, in a settler colony the ‘settlers’ come to stay, with the specific purpose of usurping land and replacing the existing social structure with their own. I speak as a settler, descended from people who did the usurping and were intimately involved in the violence intrinsic to replacing one social structure with another. I’m here to stay, as the structure of the settler colony enables (Wolfe, 2006). What is important here though is to come more accurately to grips with the social, political and governance structures that enable and ‘hold up’ (Keenan, 2015) the structure for staying. Private property, urban development, the separation of cultures from natures, the institutionalisation of knowledge making in universities, Westphalian sovereignty, liberal democracy, the sheer power of population numbers, markets and so on are just some of the features that normalise the settler-colonial order, rendering it invisible and (seemingly) unassailable. The work of geographical imaginations, spatial organisation, town building, and property remain central to the everyday work of settler-colonialism, of sustaining the structure of violence that is the settler colony. That these are the tools, activities, institutions and knowledges of my own chosen disciplines exposes the grave importance of holding these disciplines to account. This involves more than simply bringing a critical lens to bear on disciplinary presumptions. It involves unlearning the disciplines, in the spirit Spivak suggests, and of unlearning them as loss. For me, this means that the privileges disciplines enable and sustain be relearnt as losses, both to myself as a being always coming

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toward learning and more generally. For knowing only through disciplines, while illuminating some aspects, has come at the grave cost of obscuring and rendering invisible other ways of knowing. This is how I understand my privilege of whiteness within this settler-colonial relation. Here, I’m considering whiteness very much through Ahmed’s work (2007) on whiteness as a habit, not a skin colour (though it also carries that). My whiteness in settler-colonialism is a very specific location that I cannot escape or transcend— though I remain convinced I can know it better and more accurately and that knowing it matters. Part of the way it matters, is how this process of unlearning exposes western ways of knowing as performing into being individuated, discrete ‘knowers’ where knowledge is quite often separate from being and doing (differently from, for example, Indigenous knowledge systems as shown by Martin (2003)). Knowing my whiteness thus also arises through the very act of being white and doing whiteness, enabling me to become a more intimate knower of whiteness minute by minute. My whiteness, carried in my appearance, also exceeds my appearance as it formulates what is reachable (for me) by already orienting me in specific directions, because my whiteness is already anticipated and ready to be performed in all of the social settings in which it is already assumed and taken for granted. The category of white settler that I occupy is as Ahmed says ‘a category or experience that disappears as a category’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 150). It allows the form and sustenance of specific behaviours where those behaviours have not only been taken for granted but are in the same moment rendered unseen and indeed unseeable. One of settler-colonialism’s great conceits is to render itself invisible, entirely normal and natural, indeed expected and welcomed. This has always seemed to me to beg an essential task to examine more explicitly our scholarly disciplines in the light of this understanding. For not only are so many of us (overwhelmingly so when I look around at conferences and meetings) carrying white privilege in our bodies, but whiteness pervades disciplines themselves. That it is normal to commence an understanding of the origins of a city from the moment of colonial conquest is whiteness at work. That the histories of placemaking, architecture and engineering in Australia have been written so as to erase the global origins of towns, large-scale aquaculture and democracy right here on this continent (Pascoe, 2018) is whiteness at work. To now invite Indigenous people to get involved (usually expected for free) in western institutions of knowledge making, and then get fragile and frustrated when challenged by Indigenous people, is whiteness at work. My field of urban studies and planning has been a miserable failure (see Porter, 2017) at doing even the most basic work of acknowledging complicity with colonial processes and structures. This enables us to literally get away with whitewashing history, and with reconstituting the places where most of us live as if they were naturally white possessions. As I have written previously: Evidence of this denial is everywhere in Australian urban studies. Everybody knows that there were people here before the establishment of the cities and towns we now live in, yet there is a wilful ignorance of those first peoples and their practices. Everybody knows that those people had their lands, and livelihoods, stolen—unlawfully as the Australian High Court agreed in the Mabo case in 1992. Yet we proceed with our analyses as if theft and

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genocide never happened and are irrelevant, rather than foundational, to urban Australia. …The categories in which urban Australia is understood, the time-frames marking eras and shifts, the theoretical frames for explaining urban process are all fundamentally silent on the underlying endurance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignties. Consequently, we describe and understand place in Australia not only unjustly but incorrectly (Porter, 2018)

There is open hostility in the field, by the way, to this kind of statement. So to come back to the moment of waking in my Ph.D. that I’d been asking the wrong question: of what it would take to ‘include’ Indigenous knowledge within the discipline of planning, instead, the question now becomes how is the discipline of planning sustained and maintained as if it were the only authority on people-place relationships, in a context where systems and knowledges for governing people-place relations have in fact existed for tens of thousands of generations. This question has prompted me to think about reorienting my own work and activities to the task of unlearning the discipline.

9.3 Locating a Cultural Standpoint Western knowledge systems and disciplines assume they hold the ‘view from nowhere’, an ahistorical, acultural and universal system that has none of the cultural roots or ‘loci of enunciation’ it happily imposes on all other knowledge systems. From my own observations and experiences, this peculiarity creates fertile conditions for what a number of scholars have defined as a cunning politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2014; Povinelli, 2002; Simpson, 2014), where states seek to reconcile Indigenous assertions and practices of sovereignty with settler-state sovereignty through mechanisms such as settlement of land claims, employment strategies and other economic development initiatives, and enrolment in state and corporate initiatives of difference and belonging. When these come to ground in urban geography and planning, they rapidly and easily align with a communicative ‘turn’ in policy and governance, which invites diverse stakeholder groups into policy and decisionmaking forums to have a ‘voice’ in decisions that affect them. This trend has been especially pronounced in planning theory over the past 25 years and continues to drive a plethora of research, much of it highly uncritical, about ‘participation’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’ in decisions about the future of cities. While obviously not wishing to suggest that participation in decisions about how we collectively live is a bad thing (I’d prefer that over other forms of oppression and co-optation), it invites some especially problematic practices across the Indigenous-settler relationship. Chief among these is the arrogance of the presumption that the settler-state’s urban planning and policy governance system is an acultural backdrop that can provide an equal ‘planning table’ around which all voices can be equally heard and the positioning of Indigenous peoples as one more ‘stakeholder’ among many ethnically diverse ‘others’, rather than sovereign peoples on whose unceded lands settler-state interventions are enacted.

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It is precisely these politics that play out in the range of ways that Indigeneity is now being incorporated, sometimes highly problematically, into different spheres of urban planning and development. At present, there is an observable and tremendously belated push to acknowledge the relationship and responsibility of planning and geographical knowledges and settler-state actions toward Indigenous peoples, lands and laws. There are (finally) efforts to ‘Indigenise’ urban planning and human geography curricula across Australia, and to consider Indigenous perspectives in a number of policy domains such as ‘urban greening’ (a policy push for enhancing green infrastructure and biodiversity in urban areas), protected area management, and urban cultural policy. Little awareness exists among the overwhelmingly nonIndigenous research and policy community about what it means to ‘engage’ without being aware of the structural conditions under which such engagement can be catalysed and invited. When the going gets tough, as it so often does, the deeply inculcated conditioning of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) kicks in, and the common moan I hear of ‘we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t’ just gets louder. I want to suggest that it is precisely in this response that white privilege and the settler-colonial order is revealed.

9.4 Refusing the Right to Know Unlearning one’s privilege is surely quite a different orientation to that of ‘including’ or ‘Indigenising’. It is also quite different from suggesting that scholars in disciplines everywhere should be ‘doing Indigenous research’. Quite apart from the sheer exhaustion this would wreak on Indigenous people and organisations, already often overwhelmed and under-resourced, managing the sudden interest in their practices after centuries of being totally ignored may turn out to be harmful. It is not my place to have a view on whether being ignored, discarded and denied is better than being incorporated and co-opted in conditions not of your choosing, but my observation is that this surge of interest is not inclusion, but enclosure. The failure to appreciate that there is no right to research or knowledge, is not just an oversight or error, but a feature of white settler privilege. For those, like me, with imperial eyes, we assume that the world is open to us as knowing subjects, that we can make the world knowable to us through our empirical endeavours. Learning is our privilege, knowledge of the world virtually a right. The ‘arrogance of conscience’ (see Spivak, 2001) that enables disciplines to yearn for knowledge or their Other, usually in entirely transactional modes of knowing, cement this right to know in the very fibre of research practice. That it is possible to be in the ‘us’ position, observing ‘them’ in that position over there (even when we seek to be ‘good’ and in partnership), must be recognised as a construct of historically constituted social relations. The naturalness with which researchers with imperial eyes assume that position must continuously be the subject of analysis. To not apprehend these conditions of white privilege is to deny the need to become response-able in and to a relationship.

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We can look at this more closely in the application of the word ‘Indigenous’ as a prefix to mark out new sub-disciplinary terrain. There is ‘Indigenous geography’ and recently ‘Indigenous planning’ and even ‘Indigenous urbanism’ (my own work is complicit in all of them). While acknowledging that visibility is perhaps better than erasure it seems important to keep a keen eye on the disciplining and coordinating work of this prefix-ing. A story can illustrate. In 2017, some colleagues and I co-organised a small conference called ‘Decolonising Settler Cities, with the aim of interrogating the systems of knowledge that underpin Australian urban geography and placing them into a more productive and mature conversation with already existing place-based urban sovereignties. We had hoped to draw attention to the erasures and problematic politics of whiteness so prevalent in the discipline of Australian urban studies, and to explicitly position these issues as central to Australian urban theory debates. Despite being billed as an Australian urban theory symposium, almost nobody from the Australian urban geography community participated. When we dug a little deeper with our colleagues, we heard people respond with positive affirmation about the idea, but that their own work ‘didn’t fit’ because our colleagues suggested that they ‘don’t do Indigenous geographies research’. There is a kind of disciplining effect, then, of the prefix that renders irrelevant some areas of knowledge production to the question of Indigeneity, and at the same time reinforces that anything with the prefix ‘Indigenous’ sits at the periphery, a side-story, of the main event of Australian urban scholarship and practice. Another way of putting this is to consider how the model of ‘inclusion’ and incorporation further displaces white responsibility and entrenches white privilege. This is because much of the work that needs doing is on the ‘settler’ side of the ledger. We (meaning specifically settlers) cannot participate genuinely in a sovereign relationship if we have not made the effort to unpick the complicity of our social structures, our knowledge systems, our disciplines in the colonial project. To put it differently, the burden of reconfiguring history usually rests far too much on the people whom that history denies. Settlers need to become intelligent enough to see and interrogate these structures of racialised privilege. In this sense, one of the practices of becoming response-able in a relationship with Indigenous sovereignties is to become more mature and intelligent (yes, to grow up) to the difference between work that can only be led by the right knowledge holders, and the work which should be borne by us. In other words, we would do well to become more adept at working in different registers—there are times when we need to lend our bodies, intellects, resources and solidarity to help hold a space (use the privilege our whiteness affords), but not take it up. This means a relinquishing of privilege, to not create space for ourselves, but for those who have too often been erased from space. There are moments when it is not appropriate to keep asking Indigenous people for validation, but instead to find a way to develop our disciplines ourselves in the sovereign relationship. The practices involved in becoming responseable in a relationship with Indigenous sovereignties surely begin with unlearning the notion that white people have a right to own knowledge, and to newly learn the fact and the implications of our positionality. We expose our deployment of an ‘invisible standpoint’ from which we construct our knowledge of the world (Mignolo, 2009).

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9.5 Conclusion Of course, recognising privilege, acknowledging that you have imperial eyes, doesn’t remove your eyes, or shift racialised relations of power. As Tuck and Yang (2012) teach us, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settlercolonialism, or in their words, ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’. There is no comfortable place from which to undertake ‘good white’ research, no safe or ethicallybounded place from where we can wait for an acceptable model. I have no prescriptions and am always suspicious of such, but surely what is at stake here are more mature ways of responding to the invitation to a sovereign relationship. In other words, coming to terms with living lawfully on Country.

References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–167. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skins, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Massachusetts: Beacon Press Books. Keenan, S. (2015). Subversive property: Law and the production of spaces of belonging. London: Routledge. Kowal, E. (2015). Trapped in the gap: Doing good in Indigenous Australia. New York: Bergahn Books. Martin, K. (2003). Ways of knowing, being and doing: A theoretical framework and methods for Indigenous and indigenist research. Journal of Australian Studies, 27(6), 203–214. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(8), 159–181. Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nicoll, F. (2000). Indigenous sovereignty and the violence of perspective: A white woman’s coming out story. Australian Feminist Studies, 15(33), 369–386. Nicoll, F. (2004). Reconciliation in and out of perspective: White knowing, seeing, curating and being at home in and against Indigenous sovereignty. In A. Moreton-Robinson (Ed.), Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism. Pascoe, B. (2018). Australia: Temper and bias. Meanjin, 77(3), 64–69. Porter, L. (2009). On having imperial eyes. In F. Lo Piccolo and H. Thomas (Eds.), Ethics and Planning Research (pp. 219–232). Farnham: Ashgate. Porter, L. (2010). Unlearning the colonial cultures of planning. Aldershot: Ashgate. Porter, L. (2017). Indigenous people and the miserable failure of Australian planning. Planning Practice & Research, 32(5), 556–570. Porter, L. (2018). From an urban country to urban country: Confronting the cult of denial in Australian cities. Australian Geographer, 49(2), 239–246. Povinelli, E. A. (2002). The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Michigan: Duke University Press. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

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Spivak, G. C. (1994). Can the Subaltern speak? In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and postcolonial theory: A reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, G. C. (2001). A note on the new international. Parallax, 7(3), 12–16. Taussig, M. (1999). Defacement: Public secrecy and the labor of the negative. Stanford University Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.

Chapter 10

Separatism as a Mode of Relations: Practicing Indigenous Resurgence and Nationhood in the 21st Century Sarah Maddison

Abstract This chapter argues that a politics focused on reorganising Indigenoussettler relations to facilitate Indigenous autonomy and separatism is not beyond imagining. Indigenous peoples have contested colonial domination since the first invasion of this continent began, struggling to regain and sustain their independence from settler authority and control in ways that have come to define Indigenous movements. While a focus on national politics, and particularly on changing the policies of the federal government, was a feature of much of the twentieth century, more recently there has been a profound shift in emphasis. In response to the seeming imperviousness of settler structures and institutions, there has been a growing call for Indigenous people to turn away from hostile political environments in favour of decolonising programs focused on local, place-based politics and cultural rejuvenation. This chapter examines some of what is happening in contemporary Indigenous separatist moves in Australia—moves that will inevitably reshape Indigenous-settler relations in profound ways. It argues that the ability for Indigenous peoples to live genuinely self-determining lives will depend on a careful disentangling of Indigenous and settler modes of governance, combined with extensive work to reconstitute Indigenous jurisdiction, decision-making and control. Keywords Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander · Indigenous · Settler colonialism · Autonomy · Self-determination · Separatism · Australia

10.1 Introduction The British invasion of the territories now known as Australia forced several hundred First Nations into an unwelcome relationship with settlers. The terms of this relationship have been an ongoing source of conflict, which has played out through violent confrontation, coercive ‘consent’, physical removal and confinement, and assimilation, all deployed as means of neutralising Indigenous sovereignty over their S. Maddison (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Maddison and S. Nakata (eds.), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9205-4_10

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lands and advancing the ‘logic of elimination’ that is constitutive of settler colonial societies (Wolfe, 2016, pp. 35–36). Even apparently more benign approaches to the fundamental conflict in Indigenous-settler relations, such as reconciliation, have focused on the inclusion of Indigenous peoples within the settler state (another form of elimination) rather than on advancing Indigenous demands for greater autonomy, self-determination and self-government. Indeed, while Indigenous policy from colonisation to the present is usually framed as a positive progression from exclusion to inclusion, in reality these are ‘twin strategies of settler colonialism’ that effectively trap Indigenous resistance in the continual oscillation between the two (Macoun & Strakosch, 2013, p. 429). In the face of this ongoing conflict, Indigenous peoples have consistently resisted and contested colonial domination. At times this resistance has been focused on securing rights, recognition, and programmatic support from the settler state, through struggles for civil rights, improved policy, constitutional reform and recognition, and for greater representation in settler parliaments. In other words, Indigenous political action has at times also focused on inclusion in the settler order. But this has not been the primary driver for Indigenous resistance. Across the decades and all over the continent, achieving independence from settler authority and control has been a ‘defining characteristic’ of Indigenous resistance (Burgmann, 2003, p. 60). In New South Wales during the 1920s, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association formed under the leadership of Fred Maynard, demanded land for every Indigenous family in the state and pioneered the call for Indigenous control of Indigenous affairs (Maynard, 1997). In Victoria through the 1930s William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines League rejected settler control of Indigenous lives, and articulated the demand that Indigenous peoples should govern themselves as central to their campaigns (Attwood & Markus, 2004, p. 15). When the Australian Black Power movement emerged in the late 1960s it embraced Cooper’s emphasis on the need for ‘thinking black’ and explicitly rejected settler control and assimilation. In the years that followed the 1967 referendum, struggles for recognition began to focus more explicitly on Indigenous claims as ‘a colonised people demanding liberation’ rather than as an excluded minority seeking civil inclusion (McGregor, 2011, p. 164). The tension between inclusion and independence became explicit, as claims for equality within the Australian state were increasingly rejected in favour of claims for recognition as a separate entity that called into question the legality of Australian institutions to rule over Indigenous lives (Behrendt, 2003, p. 14). From the late 1970s onwards, across the Australian continent, Indigenous groups and organisations demanded the recognition of rights that stemmed from their prior occupation of the territories colonised by the British. Today, listening to Indigenous voices from across the country it is evident that calls for radical change in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Australian settler state continue. While in non-Indigenous circles the call for decolonisation is usually regarded as a fringe position, in Indigenous circles it is far from marginal. Drawing on, or at least echoing, critical Indigenous theories of refusal and resurgence (see Alfred & Corntassel, 2005; Simpson, 2014), Indigenous peoples are asserting their abiding sovereignties and nation- or clan-based identities to articulate a turn away from the state towards a more separatist mode of politics. While for much

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of the period from the 1960s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a great deal of Indigenous effort and energy was directed at national politics, and particularly towards changing the policies of the federal government, more recently there has been a profound shift in emphasis. In response to the seeming imperviousness of settler structures and institutions, there has been a growing call for Indigenous people to turn away from these hostile political environments in favour of decolonising programs focused on local, place-based politics and cultural rejuvenation (Elliott, 2016, p. 413). This turn, also evident in other settler colonial societies, is significant for its renewed emphasis on Indigenous autonomy and nationhood, and the foregrounding of surviving Indigenous languages, cultural practices, geographies, and modes of political organising. Whereas the ‘Indigenising’ agenda once focused on inclusion and equality within settler institutions, today Indigenising work has become more overtly decolonial in intent, seeking to transform institutions to put Indigenous peoples in control. This trend is neither complete nor exclusive, but it is seeing ‘growing numbers of Indigenous nations pursuing their own political goals and engaging in innovative political action and institution building’ (Cornell, 2015, p. 6). Separatism generally refers to a political agenda or movement seeking more separate or autonomous political arrangements, driven by a sense of political alienation from the state (Abedin, 1989). In Australia (as in other settler colonial societies), separatism has long been fueled by Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of themselves as holding a distinct politic status as sovereign Indigenous peoples, with a unique claim to their territories. Indigenous peoples have sought institutional arrangements that might reflect their distinct status, ranging from calls for a separate Indigenous state (see Mansell, 2016) to relatively autonomous governance arrangements such as regional councils and authorities. As Bradfield (2006, p. 81) has pointed out, between ‘assimilation and secession lies a multitude of possibilities for realising aspirations to both retain rights as citizens and a unique status as Indigenous peoples recognised by the state.’ This chapter examines some of what is happening in contemporary Indigenous separatist moves in Australia—moves that will inevitably reshape Indigenous-settler relations in profound ways.

10.2 Indigenous Disillusionment and Settler Colonial Shape-Shifting Settler colonialism has proved profoundly harmful for Indigenous peoples. In his foundational writings on settler colonialism as a distinct mode of political organisation, non-Indigenous historian Patrick Wolfe famously argued that invasion is ‘a structure not an event’ (1999, p. 2). Founded on violence, the settler state invests in sustaining the colonial order, structuring institutions and practices that maintain inequalities and injustice ‘for the purpose of sustaining the life and continuity of the state’ (Watson, 2009, p. 45). In Australia, as Waanyi author Alexis Wright has suggested, it is evident that settler governance is ‘the wrong system of governance

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for people who have been working to their own governing system for thousands of years’ (Wright, 2016, p. 1). Despite ongoing Indigenous efforts at both resistance and reform, the structures of settler colonialism have proven stubborn and robust. Contributing to the maintenance of settler colonialism is the fact that underlying and supporting its structure is a set of processes that, as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Simpson (2017, p. 45) has argued, create a ‘scaffolding’ for the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state. These processes exist for the sole purpose of dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Simpson (2017, pp. 45–46) describes ‘a series of complex and overlapping processes’, evident in state practices of ‘consultations, negotiations, high-level meetings, inquiries, royal commissions, policy, and law’, which can be experienced by Indigenous peoples as slight, temporary, microscale shifts that ‘can appear to present an opportunity to do things differently, to change our relationship to the state.’ Simpson cautions Indigenous people against the seductive nature of this shape-shifting ‘structure made up of processes’, pointing out that, despite appearances to the contrary, the state always uses its power to ensure that it ‘controls the processes as a mechanism for managing Indigenous sorrow, anger, and resistance, and this ensures the outcome remains consistent with its goal of maintaining dispossession.’ Simpson contends that: ‘Colonialism as a structure is not changing. It is shifting to further consolidate its power, to neutralize our resistance, to ultimately fuel extractivism.’ What a critical Indigenous analysis such as this suggests is that while colonial structures may one day be dismantled, the shape-shifting nature of their underlying processes make them virtually impossible to be reformed. By operating through the familiarity of state bureaucracy, colonial authority over Indigenous lives has been naturalised, and the assumption that Indigenous peoples have already been incorporated within the settler regime remains unquestioned by the majority of settlers (Strakosch, 2015, pp. 9 and 51). While the structures of settler colonialism may appear fluid and permeable, Indigenous efforts at reform have inevitably led to disappointment and disillusionment. Hope that Indigenising settler systems (in the inclusionary sense) will reduce the harms experienced by Indigenous people affected by those systems is lost hope. Apparently transformative moments are swallowed by the shifting processes that underpin settler colonial structure. For the most part, this has meant that focusing on the state as a locus of change has produced little if any benefit for Indigenous people. Indeed, the state and its agents (government departments and services) are never neutral or benign, and cannot be the ‘heroic protagonists’ they are imagined to be (Macoun, 2016, p. 93). The settler state is profoundly harmful to Indigenous peoples. Despite its shape-shifting, the possible openings suggested by the complex structures and processes of settler colonialism work primarily to advance the dispossession, domination, and elimination of Indigenous peoples. It is in light of this grim reality that Indigenous peoples are instead seeking to live their sovereignty through more separatist modes of relations with the settler order. Chief Executive of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO), Arrernte woman Pat Turner, contends that,

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…what our people and our communities have to do is just take total control of their own affairs. Don’t wait for government, don’t wait for them to provide the solutions. Work it out ourselves and just move on (quoted in Pearson, 2017).

Assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, which have always been core to Indigenous politics, are embodying a politics of resurgent nationhood that seeks not to Indigenise settler colonial processes but instead to ‘dismantle the structure of colonialism in all forms’ (Simpson, 2017, p. 47). Pursuing what non-Indigenous philosopher Bignall (2014, p. 341) describes as ‘excolonialism’, contemporary Indigenous politics seeks modes of ‘decolonised sociability’ through separatist institutional forms that allow both the ‘exit’ from settler structures and processes while also enabling new modes of interface in the unavoidable coexistence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on this continent.

10.3 Sovereignty, Refusal, Resurgence, Nation Building: Turning Away from the Settler State From at least the late 1960s, Indigenous political struggles increasingly focused on calls for recognition of an abiding sovereignty over unceded territories. Eualeyai/Kamillaroi legal scholar Larissa Behrendt articulates these aspirations when she writes: In the heart of many Aboriginal people is the belief that we are a sovereign people. We believe that we never surrendered to the British. We never signed a treaty giving up our sovereignty or giving up our land … It always was Aboriginal land. It will always be Aboriginal land (Behrendt, 1995, pp. 97–98).

As a concept within the lexicon of Indigenous struggles, sovereignty has been (re)articulated to mean different things by different people at different times. Linked to concepts of self-determination and self-government, sovereignty ‘insists on the recognition of inherent rights’, foregrounds primary political affiliations that are historical and located in place and territory, and prioritises cultural identities that ‘find meaning in those histories and relations’ (Barker, 2005, p. 26). As a broad and flexible term, characterising Indigenous experiences and expressions of peoplehood as sovereignty demands an ongoing and dynamic relationship between peoples and the structures and processes of settler governance, without necessarily defining the specific nature of that relationship (Rifkin, 2017, p. 184). Increasingly, however, the apparent durability of settler colonial structures (as outlined above) is driving renewed assertions of sovereignty that are marked by a politics of refusal and resurgence rather than negotiation with the settler order. By refusing to ‘consent to the apparatuses of the state’, Indigenous peoples in settler colonial societies are resisting settler domination and articulating political projects that draw from pre-colonial political traditions (Simpson, 2016, p. 328). In practicing refusal, Indigenous people turn away from the settler state and its offers of ‘recognition’ that fail to disrupt the structural arrangements of settler colonialism. The

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refusal of state recognition instead holds open possibilities for ‘political maneuvering’ that distances Indigenous political action from government policy and decentres the need for Indigenous political life ‘to become intelligible to the settler state as a structure of governance’ (Rifkin, 2017, p. 182). Where participation in settler politics and institutions remains necessary—and at times even beneficial—a politics of refusal encourages an ongoing, watchful, and critical mode of conduct (Elliott 2016, p. 415). Munanjahli and South Sea Islander academic Bond (2016, p. 4) suggests that when Indigenous people ‘refuse to accept the “gifts” of the state… refuse to comply, perform or play on their terms’ it is because they recognise that: …there is something deeply wrong with the systems and structures that seek to demean and diminish us as Indigenous peoples. In denouncing these we are asserting both who we are as Indigenous people, but also rejecting the authority of these [settler] systems and structures.

Audra Simpson’s articulation of refusal (2016, pp. 327–328) draws on the practices she has observed in her own Kahnawa:ke Mohawk polities, describing ‘the very deliberate, wilful, intentional actions that people were making in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people.’ Simpson describes ‘refusal’ as: …a political and ethnic stance that stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognised. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so? (Simpson, 2014, p. 11).

And while there may be limits to refusal as a political strategy when, as nonIndigenous philosopher Mark Rifkin suggests, the repudiation of state recognition may produce conditions in which Indigenous peoples ‘play no substantive role in the ways they are narrated within settler institutions’ (Rifkin, 2017, p. 183), in fact the ethics of refusal suggests a fundamental disregard for how such narrative might be deployed. Accompanying refusal on this revitalised journey towards political autonomy and separatism, resurgence also signals a turn away from settler institutions, values, and ethics towards Indigenous institutions, values and ethics ‘in order to re-center and reinvigorate Indigenous nationhood’ (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, 2014, p. 18). Indigenous resurgence focuses on the active restoration and regeneration of Indigenous nationhood as a transformative alternative to settler colonial dispossession (Corntassel, 2012; Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 2). Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred and Cherokee scholar Corntassel (2005, p. 612) argue that resurgence—what they describe as ‘Indigenous pathways of authentic action and freedom struggle’—begins with ‘people transcending colonialism on an individual basis’, with ripple effects ‘from the self to family, clan, community and into all of the broader relationships that form an Indigenous existence.’ Alfred and Corntassel (2005, pp. 611–612) argue that:

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Current approaches to confronting the problem of contemporary colonialism … are, in a basic way, building not on a spiritual and cultural foundation provided to us as the heritage of our nations, but on the weakened and severely damaged cultural and spiritual and social results of colonialism. Purported decolonization and watered-down cultural restoration processes that accept the premises and realities of our colonised existences as their starting point are inherently flawed and doomed to fail.

Central to these transformative practices is a regeneration of pre-colonial place and nation-based Indigenous identities that are expressed and governed through culturally appropriate political formations (Battell, Lowman, & Barker 2015, p. 120). These practices do not rely on the settler state for validation or the provision of funding, but instead are evident in efforts towards the recuperation of Indigenous languages, philosophy, and laws to shape practices of jurisdiction and governance (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005, p. 614). As governance, Indigenous resurgence involves Indigenous people developing arrangements for self-government that are consistent with their own values, norms, and decision-making processes. Thus, resurgence should not be understood only as practices of cultural revival, although such practices are certainly important. What Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017, pp. 48–49) has described as ‘radical resurgence’ is deeply political, predicated on ‘an extensive, rigorous, and profound reorganisation of things.’ Simpson contends that ‘cultural resurgence’ can be dangerously compatible with settler colonialism because it does not contend with dispossession. While Simpson also acknowledges that, in Indigenous thought, culture and politics are inseparable, and that community-based language revival projects (as an example) are ‘inherently political and cultural’, she also observes that adding the modifier of ‘cultural’ depoliticises resurgence in ways that enable it to be co-opted by the modes of recognition offered by the settler state (Simpson, 2017, p. 50). ‘Political resurgence’, by contrast, ‘is seen as a direct threat to settler sovereignty.’ Radical resurgence also has specific, separatist political goals concerned with the decolonisation of political relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler states through the revival of Indigenous self-government. Indigenous peoples the world over seek recognition as distinct political entities with control over their lands, governance of their internal affairs, and the ability to define and pursue their own interests, even as Indigenous nations continue to exist within encompassing settler states. Resurgent self-government means Indigenous nations are increasingly turning away from a focus on changing settler government policy and towards Indigenous agendas and action, ‘giving political force to Indigenous nationhood’ through the intentional processes of ‘identifying as a nation, organising as a nation, and acting as a nation’ (Cornell, 2015, pp. 3–6). In practice, the political focus of refusal and resurgence might be understood as taking place under the banner of nationhood and nation building. Simpson (2017, p. 47) suggests that there is work to be done to connect these concepts more effectively, noting that few critical Indigenous scholars ‘have taken up what resurgence looks like within nation-based thought systems’ and, while others have ‘talked about nationhood, nation building, and a recentering of Indigenous political thought’, they have done so ‘without mentioning resurgence to any degree.’ Tanganekald,

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Meintangk-Bunganditj scholar Watson (2002), highlights the different pathway that resurgent nation building makes possible: We must reclaim our being as independent nations, in control of our territories where we live under our laws of respect for all things with our relationship to the natural world. If we were to have all of that returned to us what would be left to agree to? Peaceful coexistence perhaps.

In Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, Indigenous peoples are working to reclaim self-government as an Indigenous right, and as resurgence in practice. Non-Indigenous scholar Stephen Cornell describes this as the latest phase in the self-determination movement, in which Indigenous nations have shifted their focus from a demand for Indigenous recognition and rights from the settler state and towards the actual exercise of those rights, whether recognised or not. Cornell argues that the movement for self-government is ‘less likely to be national than local: It is about distinct groups, communities, tribes, or nations engaging the practical tasks of governing. It pays less attention to overall patterns of Indigenous rights than to localized assertions of Indigenous decision-making power.’ Still, despite this localism, there is a common theme: The assertion of genuine decision-making authority over lands and other natural resources held to be an Indigenous patrimony, over the internal affairs of Indigenous communities, over the nature and processes of economic development on their lands, over cultural properties and the management of cultural heritage, over the organization of self-government, and over other matters that directly affect Indigenous welfare (Cornell, 2015, pp. 1–2).

Where self-determination is an aspiration, Cornell contends, self-government is ‘doing it.’ Drawing on decades of research on the resurgence and success of Native Nations, Cornell (2004, p. 12) argues that three important things happen when Indigenous peoples take power over their own affairs: First, bureaucratic priorities are replaced by Indigenous priorities, thereby gaining Indigenous support for initiatives and programs. Second, decisions begin to reflect local knowledge and concerns. One of the great fantasies of colonialism, still alive in the Indigenous affairs bureaucracies of the world, is the idea that ‘we know what’s best for you.’ But we don’t…. And the third thing that happens is that decisions get linked to consequences…when Indigenous peoples themselves are in charge, they pay the price for bad decisions and reap the rewards of good ones…. Jurisdiction, in other words, creates accountability.

Separatism, it seems, is not just an aspiration, it is a contemporary political practice. What this means for the future of Indigenous-settler relations remains uncertain.

10.4 Towards Separatist Relations Between assimilation and secession there are an infinite number of possible configurations to the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the settler state (Bradfield, 2006, p. 81). There is a risk that highlighting the structural nature of settler colonialism will cast it as unchangeable (Strakosch & Macoun, 2017, p. 36),

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but this is far from the case. As the non-Indigenous theorist of settler colonialism Lorenzo Veracini (2015, p. 102) has argued, ‘structures can be torn down; hegemonies can be superseded.’ What seems increasingly clear, however, is that settler structures and processes cannot easily be reformed. Powerful settler logics constantly act to delimit ostensibly progressive reform processes and set them in service to the colonial agenda. Instead they must be dismantled in a profound reorganisation of Indigenoussettler relations. As the Unangax critical race scholar Eve Tuck, and non-Indigenous cultural theorist Wayne Yang (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 36) argue in their precisely titled essay ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, decolonisation requires ‘a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice’, an approach that necessitates ‘relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples.’ To advance a resurgent, more separatist mode of Indigenous-settler relations a different kind of analysis is needed. Non-Indigenous social movement scholar Verity Burgmann (2003, p. 49) has suggested that the Indigenous movement in Australia has been ‘the most beleaguered’ of any of the social movements she has researched, both because of its ‘extremely limited’ support base, and because decades of government policy have contributed to the fragmentation of Indigenous communities, which has, in turn, ‘rendered political mobilisation difficult.’ As a tiny percentage of the overall population, Burgmann (2003, p. 50) considers the movement ‘powerless within the parliamentary political system’. In the context of Indigenous resurgence, however, a different analysis is possible. The ‘fragmentation’ of Indigenous communities may be reimagined as the resurgence of Indigenous clan- and nationhood. The parliamentary political system becomes less relevant when Indigenous peoples are turning away from that system and towards their own institutions, values, and ethics. A decolonising approach to Indigenous politics, and specifically to the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Australian settler state requires the reorganisation of the institutional structures of settler domination and a rejection of the assumptions and certainties that underpin settler political analyses (Elliott, 2016, p. 423). The language of sovereignty articulates Indigenous peoples’ pursuit of selfdetermination in terms that are intelligible to the state while simultaneously marking the limits of settler-state authority (Rifkin, 2017, p. 180). If state recognition of Indigenous sovereignty is the goal (and refusal suggests it may not be) it must be acknowledged that such recognition may also constrict and misinterpret this recognition. For Mark Rifkin this risk raises a number of questions: If asserting sovereignty acts as a bulwark against depoliticizing attributions of cultural difference, how is the sovereignty acknowledged by the state distinct from the sovereignty regulated by the state (as a condition of recognition)? If sovereignty is the means of asserting and signifying an Indigenous people’s existence as a self-determining polity to non-natives and is the means by which the settler state defines and regulates the terms of Indigenous political authority, how can the forms of the one be distinguished from the impositions of the other? To what degrees can Indigenous political understandings that are not consonant with settler frames be realized as sovereignty within such institutions when Native nations remain “in the teeth of Empire?” (Rifkin, 2017, p. 182).

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There are no easy answers to any of these questions. What is clear is that the ability to live genuinely self-determining lives will depend on a careful disentangling of Indigenous and settler modes of governance, and extensive work to reconstitute Indigenous jurisdiction in places where colonialism has damaged systems of authority and decision-making in communities. This work is not unthinkable or undoable, but it will need resourcing and support. As Plangermairreenner man Jim Pura-lia Meenamatla Everett has argued (quoted in McConchie, 2003, p. 60), Indigenous people need ‘to be given back the resources to live a cultural life in a modern world without being told by government how to do it.’ How these lives look and are experienced must be determined by Indigenous peoples themselves, community by community, clan by clan, nation by nation. Any new political arrangements need not, indeed cannot, originate from the settler state but may instead exist peacefully alongside it (Strakosch, 2015, p. 186). Decisions by Indigenous people to pursue a separatist path must be met with respect. These decisions are not trivial, but emerge from experiences of deep political failure that have shattered any confidence in the possibility of more just relations that remain tangled with the settler state (Hendrix, 2010, p. 51). How a more radical, structural transformation of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Australian settler state might occur is uncertain, and yet in some important ways this work is already underway. Writing of North America, the non-Indigenous political theorist Burke Hendrix (2010, p. 51) contends that creating pockets of ‘full American Indian sovereignty’ should not frighten settlers or the settler state; it will not be ‘the dawn of a new age of political chaos or anything similarly threatening’ but rather ‘a measured, if belated, attempt to finally end colonialism on this continent.’ For non-Indigenous Australians, the challenge is to practise an ‘alternative relation’, one that is ‘informed by a decolonising attitude’ and ways of working that will support the creation of an ‘excolonial society’ (Bignall, 2014, p. 353). As treaty processes emerge around the continent, these alternative relations are beginning to take on more solid form. As Veracini (2015, p. 106) has argued ‘Contrary to what the settler common sense may assert, settler colonial ways of belonging are not inevitable or natural; they are merely one possibility among many.’ Multiple polities already reside on this territory, and the peoples that make up many of those polities are already engaged in practices of refusal, resurgence, and nation building. A decolonised politics that supports Indigenous autonomy and separatism is not beyond imagining.

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