Recognise what? The limitations of settler colonial constitutional reform

In settler colonial societies such as Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have turned to constitutional reform as a means of addressing historical exclusions and colonial injustice. In practice, however, the promise of constitutionalism has revealed clear limits. This article explores these limits in the context of the current Australian campaign for the constitutional ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where the loudest dissenting voices have come from Indigenous people themselves. In light of this, this article proposes a more agonistic engagement of diverse and dissenting opinions, with a view to opening up a more radical, decolonising space for constitutional politics.     

Constitutional recognition and reform: developing an inclusive Australian citizenship through treaty

Eight years after the Expert Panel on Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Australian Constitution was established, institutional reform to empower Indigenous peoples in this country has not been realised. This article argues that the persistent failure to progress constitutional reform stems, in part, from dominant conceptions of Australian citizenship that deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoplehood. It follows that meaningful institutional reform is possible only if Australian citizenship is reconceptualised in a manner that makes room for the distinctive status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Treaties offer a path forward to develop this new understanding of Australian identity and ground institutional reform.     

Official Statistics and the Contemporary Politics of Indigeneity

Critical scholarship on colonisation tells us that official statistics have reflected the perspectives of the colonisers. However, the colonised, in asserting ‘Indigenous rights,’ have begun to use official statistics to advocate policies that will relieve the continuing structural injustice that is colonisation's legacy. This paper examines Aboriginal and Maori intellectuals' efforts to quantify, using official statistics, the ‘unfinished business’ of settler colonial liberalism. Examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners' annual Reports, the paper argues that their quantitative comparisons of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations highlighted the contested implications of ‘equality.’ Turning to New Zealand, the paper reviews two issues: the appropriate boundary of the ‘Māori population,’ and whether it is possible to measure Māori well-being according to Māori norms. The paper draws on the work of Andrew Sharp to make sense of the difficulties and opportunities that face Indigenous intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand when they operationalise ‘social justice’ in the terms of a comparative statistical archive. The paper argues that there are now two distinct idioms in which to represent the collective Indigenous presence within settler colonial nation-state—one signified by the concept ‘population,’ the other by the concept ‘people.’ The tensions between ‘population’ and ‘people,’ resonating with undecided issues about the claims of Indigenous citizenship upon a liberal policy, are a feature of contemporary Indigenous political discourse.     

New collaborations in old institutional spaces: setting a new research agenda to transform Indigenous-settler relations

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.     

Organisational Capacity for Engaging with Indigenous Australians

Community capacity building is a common goal for programmes and policies involving Indigenous peoples, but it relies heavily on organisational capacity to work effectively in intercultural settings. This paper reviews the organisational capacity of the senior leaders of Australian Red Cross and institutional efforts to build a culturally appropriate and respectful organisation. It reports results from a survey of the organisation's leadership team and follow‐up interviews undertaken in 2010, reviews the challenges facing the organisation in working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, and considers institutional progress in building internal capacity to lead change in working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The paper concludes with discussion of wider implications of this research.     

Settler colonialism and cultural policy: the colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy

This article aims to reintegrate the colonial history of Canada as part of the grids of analysis for understanding the evolution of its Federal cultural policy. Building on the notion of settler colonialism and its implication for Indigenous population (For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ is used in place of, perhaps, more popular or familiar terms – such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Native’ – in order to remain consistent with current Indigenous politics. In particular, some Indigenous scholars are reluctant to accept the label Aboriginal because they feel it is consistent with the colonial order imposed by the Canadian government [Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599]). The term Indigenous also alludes to a global political awareness and to forms of alterity between different populations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. in Canada, this paper documents different transformations in cultural policy and illustrates some of its paradoxes and challenges. Building on principles developed by Indigenous scholars, this article highlights some of the components for decolonizing cultural policy in Canada. It is argued that a post-colonial cultural policy must build on the grounds of ethics (and ethos).     

Making tuba in the Torres Strait Islands: the cultural diffusion and geographic mobility of an alcoholic drink

There is relatively scant evidence of the Indigenous production and consumption of intoxicating drinks on the Australian mainland prior to the arrival of outsiders. Although Australian Aboriginal peoples had mastered fermentation in some regions, the Indigenous manufacture of much stronger drinks by distillation was unknown on the Australian mainland. However, following contact with Pacific Island and Southeast Asian peoples in the 19th century, Islanders in the Torres Strait adopted techniques for fermenting and distilling what became a quasi-indigenous alcoholic drink known as tuba. This paper discusses the historical process of the diffusion of this substance as a result of labour migration and internationalisation in the Strait, and provides present-day accounts of tuba production from Torres Strait Islanders.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

Making Tuba in the Torres Strait Islands:

There is relatively scant evidence of the Indigenous production and consumption of intoxicating drinks on the Australian mainland prior to the arrival of outsiders. Although Australian Aboriginal peoples had mastered fermentation in some regions, the Indigenous manufacture of much stronger drinks by distillation was unknown on the Australian mainland. However, following contact with Pacific Island and Southeast Asian peoples in the 19th century, Islanders in the Torres Strait adopted techniques for fermenting and distilling what became a quasi-indigenous alcoholic drink known as tuba. This paper discusses the historical process of the diffusion of this substance as a result of labour migration and internationalisation in the Strait, and provides present-day accounts of tuba production from Torres Strait Islanders.     

The economics of reconciliation: tracing investment in Indigenous–settler relations

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation' (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.     

Reshaping governance in Torres Strait: The Torres Strait regional authority and beyond

Getano Lui (Jnr) suggested in his 1993 Boyer Lecture that it was time to ‘build a new framework’ for the Torres Strait and that this might be negotiated in time for the centenary of the Australian Constitution in 2001. This paper examines possibilities for reshaping governance in Torres Strait, particularly the idea of Torres Strait regional government. It does so in the light of the history of settlement and contemporary population characteristics in the Strait and also the history and development of local and regional structures of political representation. It pays particular attention to events leading up to the establishment in July 1994 of the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TRSA) within the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ASTIC). Under the labels of other authorities, the marine environment, constituency and confederal representation, it also examines some key issues which are likely to arise in attempts to move beyond the present structures towards fuller regional government. Some consequences of one possible and likely approach to the constituency issue are explored and a brief concluding comment is made about the relationship between these developments in Torres Strait and interpretations of Australian federalism.     

White Parliament,Black Politics: The Dilemmas of Indigenous Parliamentary Representation

Australia's parliaments remain fundamentally white institutions. Since Federation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been poorly represented – or not represented at all – in the nation's State, Territory and Commonwealth legislatures. Today there remains an ambivalent assessment of the capacity for parliamentary representation to actually deliver meaningful change for Indigenous peoples. This article examines the complexities involved in Indigenous parliamentary representation, drawing on original interviews with current and past parliamentarians to examine tensions between party identification and indigeneity; between electoral and group-based representation; and between notions of a politics of presence versus the effective representation of a diversity of Indigenous interests. The paper concludes that while parliamentary representation is important in a symbolic sense, without structural transformation it will never be an adequate vehicle for representing Indigenous needs and concerns in the postcolonial state.     

Localising the Australian National Action Plan on Women,Peace and Security: a matter of justice

In the bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the Australian government emphasised international peace and security and Indigenous peoples as two of the eight key elements supporting its nomination. Australia's positive track record in support of the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, including the delivery of an Australian National Action Plan (NAP) along with recognition of historical injustices to Indigenous Australians, was highlighted as a valid and important argument in favour of its nomination. The Australian NAP, however, has all but ignored the local context in its development and application, focusing instead on its commitments abroad. This framing of the Australian NAP is informed, firstly, by the WPS agenda policy framework applying to conflict and post-conflict situations, and, secondly, by its location within the UN mandate, requiring those situations to be internationally recognised. This article applies Nancy Fraser's tripartite justice framework to reveal that the Australian NAP gives rise to the political injustice of ‘misrepresentation’ in relation to intra-state (violent), domestically situated Indigenous–settler relations, which are denied the status of ongoing internationally recognised conflict. The author suggests that the remedy to this injustice is to reframe and recognise the conflict status of Indigenous–settler relations in the localisation of the Australian NAP. This localisation creates openings for Indigenous Australian women to engage with the WPS agenda in meaningful ways.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

This paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.     

Recent Change in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Population and Housing Geographies

The intercensal period (2006–2011) was a time of significant policy and population change in Indigenous affairs. The aim of this paper is to document the changing distribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population and housing geographies over that period. We use the Indigenous Region structure developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that Indigenous Australians grew at a rate that significantly outstrips the non‐Indigenous population with an increasing concentration of the Indigenous population on the urban eastern seaboard and particularly among older people. We present results that show that for certain measures, the housing situation of the Indigenous population in 2011 had improved relative to the Indigenous population in 2006. A smaller proportion of Indigenous households were estimated to live in an overcrowded dwelling compared with Indigenous households in 2006. There were also significant increases in the per cent of Indigenous households that owned or were purchasing their own home. Other results might be seen as less positive with community housing (a tenure type identified as having benefits in both qualitative and quantitative analysis) declining in importance. In net terms though, Indigenous households continue to experience a high degree of housing need. Compared with other households, they were 3.7 times as likely to live in an overcrowded dwelling.     

Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town

This paper explores rural Australian settler historical narratives through an examination of the landscape of public history in the northwestern Queensland city of Mount Isa. In various sites of public history, including the city's 75th anniversary festivities, tourism sites, and popular historical literature, certain narrative themes are predominant. Themes of ‘discoverers’, ‘firsts’, and ‘pioneers’ coalesce into a ‘timeline’ approach to history, in which the past is ordered sequentially in a linear pattern of development and progress. Aboriginal people are incorporated into linear histories in various ways, notably through the concept of ‘the last of the tribe’, which separates an aboriginal past from a European, colonial present and presumes colonial authority to be effectively established. Aboriginal people, particularly the Kalkadoon, are also incorporated within a second narrative tradition, the Anzac legend, for their heroic, desperate and failed battle in 1884 against European invaders. Aboriginal leaders in Mount Isa use these settler narrative traditions to advance native title claims and to create a respected public space for Aboriginal people in the city. In short, settler historical narratives, while being conservative in language, are continually being reshaped and metaphorically extended to new contexts, and are mobilized for both conservative and critical political agendas..     

Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia's colonial geographies

Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.