Indigenous Resurgence: Unsettling the Colony
One of our prevailing national myths is that colonisation and all its associated harms are a thing of the past, an unfortunate event long ago that has no bearing on life today. However, history never has an end, it lives on in our bodies, our intergenerational wealth or trauma, as well as the lens through which we view the world, and the institutions and systems that shape our lives. Scholars of colonisation recognise that colonisation is an ongoing process, one that has changed its shape, however, not its essential nature and intent. The driving intent of colonisation has always been the displacement of Indigenous peoples in order to gain access to their lands for extraction. Colonisation as a process is embedded in colonial structures—such as our legal, education, healthcare, welfare, and prison systems—as well as in the frameworks through which we discuss Indigenous rights. Thus, Indigenous resurgence scholars argue for a need to turn away from the assimilating and eliminating force of colonial systems, in order to rejuvenate and ensure the continuity of Indigenous identity (Coutlard, 2014).
Central to Indigenous resurgence is the understanding that:
‘1. that colonialism is an active structure of domination premised, at base, on Indigenous elimination;
2. the prevailing normative-discursive environment continues to reflect this imperative; and
3. that Indigenous peoples must therefore turn away from this hostile environment and pursue independent programmes of social and cultural rejuvenation’ (Elliott, 2018).
Let’s unpack this. The notion that colonialism is premised on the denial of and elimination of Indigenous sovereignty comes from understanding our shared history and by examining the logic of colonisation. Because the foundation of British sovereignty over the continent was premised on the lie of terra nullius, its establishment was illegal under international law of the time, and thus to this day the legitimacy of modern Australia rests upon questionable foundations. Thus, colonial sovereignty was based upon the logic that ‘might makes right’ combined with a scientific racism premised on the idea that ‘natives’ were stuck at a primitive stage of human evolution, and thus could not be considered fully human and equal to Europeans. This logic informed the brutal establishment of the colony which enforced its sovereignty through the unleashing of diseases, massacres, and slavery which sought to eliminate and then assimilate Indigenous people in order to absorb them into the social order as a servant underclass. This colonial logic then became enshrined through a legal framework of domination and racial segregation.
Colonial legal frameworks were permissive of settler violence against Indigenous people in order to cleanse the land of the natives. As slavery had been abolished already, a regime of
‘indentured servitude’ was established to provide the large stations with free labour, and Indigenous workers had their wages stolen. In order to turn proud sovereign peoples into a docile servant class, Indigenous people had their connection to ancestral lands severed and were separated from their kinship groups as well as prevented from speaking their languages and practicing their culture. This was designed to break their sense of self such that they could, through extreme violence and terror, be reconstructed into a slave. It was believed that over a few generations, the ‘Aboriginal’ would be bred out, and the inconvenient memory of their existence would fade away. This was the basis of assimilation policies which led to the stolen generation, and the segregation of Indigenous people into missions and reserves where conditions were extremely poor and death was always near.
Thus, we see one of the primary intents of colonisation is the erasure of their Indigenous peoples identity as a sovereign people, with their own laws, cultures and social and political systems in order to assert its legitimacy. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2020) describes Indigenous sovereignty as being ‘embodied, it is ontological (our being) and epistemological (our way of knowing), and it is grounded within complex relations derived from the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land.’ Indigenous sovereignty is thus embodied in Aboriginal peoples' connection to Country, through speaking their languages, and practicing their culture in order to keep Indigenous perspectives and worldviews alive.
Colonial sovereignty however, is premised on land ownership, individual rights and a nation's ability to protect one’s border by force. These represent two very different and perhaps incommensurable understandings of sovereignty that create a deep tension within Australia’s contemporary identity.
While some progress has been made towards including and recognising Indigenous people within Australian society, the foundational structures of the colonial state remain, which is why attempts at seeking justice and rights within colonial systems have proven difficult.
The Mabo decision in 1992 that led to the enactment of the Native Title Act (1993), while largely heralded as a landmark step towards reconciliation, enshrined a legal exception which precluded Indigenous people from their full rights as land owners, and gave them only a beneficiary title, which the state is able to extinguish whenever it deems necessary, as is often the case when mining or other corporate interests are brought to bear. Under Indigenous law, land ownership is enshrined in caring for Country, thus being unable to protect their lands from pollution and destruction, is an assault on their sovereignty. Colonial legal frameworks work to protect the interests of the coloniser, because they are part of a system that defines the land as a resource for extraction, and as such are incompatible with Indigenous worldviews and sovereignty.
While this is just one example of the colonial system proving hostile towards Indigenous people and their human rights, there are examples within many of our colonial institutions such as the police force, the welfare state, education and healthcare that reveal a hostility towards Indigenous people, and their rights as sovereign people. From deaths in custody, child removals and the lack of adequate housing, infrastructure and support in Indigenous communities, to paternalistic interventions such as the NT emergency response, Indigenous lives are devalued by colonial systems intent on their erasure.
The ‘politics of recognition’, a term coined by Taylor (1992), has been taken up by many western liberal states as the framework through which we recognise, in order to include a wide variety of cultural identities within increasingly multicultural societies. While it attempts to grapple with the reality that certain groups are marginalised because of their identity, it has a tendency to sideline issues of wealth redistribution and sovereignty, and frames justice through the lens of identity and individual rights. In Australia there is growing recognition of Indigenous people, from ‘Welcome to Country’ at major sporting events, to ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ echoing across boardrooms around the nation. However, any talk about Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination is largely dismissed by those in power, and weaponised by the media to spark fear in the hearts of white Australia.
Framing Indigenous rights as a matter of recognition ignores the ongoing process of colonisation, and gives the appearance of progress whilst enabling the ongoing elimination of Indigenous people. Recognition works to erode Indigenous resistance by co-opting individuals and communities into the colonial system, and by entrenching the power dynamics of who it is that is doing the ‘recognising’ (Elliott, 2018). It invites Indigenous people to come to the table for scraps, while reinforcing not just who gets to sit at the head of the table, but does nothing to challenge the legitimacy of the table itself.
As Wolfe (2006) identifies, one of the ways colonialism sought to erase Indigenous people was to change them from being a member of a ‘tribe’, to becoming an individual. In doing so one is able to assimilate the individual into the greater white society by destroying their identity as part of a larger whole. Thus, while Indigenous scholars and activists have long argued for the state to recognise Indigenous sovereignty as a starting point to redress the harms of colonisation, colonial powers continue to deny them this possibility, and insist upon paradigms of recognition which serve to further entrench their power over Indigenous lives.
The Voice to Parliament referendum is a recent example of Indigenous people seeking recognition within colonial frameworks, only to be thwarted. This is why some Indigenous scholars have concluded that seeking their human rights within colonial systems is self-defeating. The Blak Sovereign Movement, of which Lidia Thorpe is perhaps most prominent, refused to back the campaign for a Voice to Parliament for many of the reasons we have just been discussing. In recognising this foundational incompatibility, Indigenous resurgence advocates take refuge in and reassert their power by refusing to engage with the colonial state on the terms it has defined. They seek safe spaces on the margins where Indigenous ways of being can be nourished and empowered, free from the hostility of colonial systems. While there is no universal template for Indigenous resurgence, at its root is the understanding that being Indigenous, speaking language, caring for Country, practicing culture and keeping Indigenous worldviews and laws alive, helps build the resilience and continuity of Indigenous sovereignty.
Indigenous resurgence is emergent and generative. It is not about going back to the past, indeed framing Indigenous culture as something forever stuck in the past is a colonial framing: cultures are always changing, emerging and being created anew. It is not so much about trying to replicate the past, but about thinking through how Indigenous people may reconnect with their ancestors' strength and culture in their everyday lives at both an individual level and within their communities.
Indigenous-led alternatives to the punitive, colonial justice system provide an example of Indigenous resurgence in practice. Things like justice reinvestment, where money spent on policing is redirected into the community, so that they can create safe spaces for the community often reduces crime rates. This represents an ideological shift from seeing criminality as an individual’s responsibility, to seeing it as a community's responsibility, requiring a community led response. Indigenous cultures did not believe that a crime should become a life sentence for someone, whereas colonial systems often trap impoverished people into a cycle of lifelong incarceration. Indigenous people thought that once one makes amends for any wrongdoing, they should be able to rejoin the community free from any stigma of having committed a crime. Because criminality is seen as a communal responsibility, the focus is on supporting people in order to ensure their social, emotional and physical needs are met, rather than focusing on additional punishment and incarceration to control anti-social behaviours. Indigenous societies were also egalitarian, and had women's only spaces where Grandmother's law was respected, thus centering women's law and creating safe spaces for women fleeing violence, acting as another example of Indigenous resurgence in practice.
Central to Indigenous sovereignty is caring for Country. Protecting Country from extractive industries and pollution by any means possible is strongly linked to acts of sovereignty and thus Indigenous resurgence. Colonial laws may be disregarded when in conflict with Indigenous laws—ceremonies that seek guidance from the land may be performed on Country to draw strength from the ancestors. These acts of sovereignty strengthen and reinvigorate Indigenous ways of being, and thus are embodied acts of Indigenous resurgence. While Indigenous resurgence does not preclude utilising colonial tools (such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) where helpful, it does recognise the inherent limitations of these colonial systems, and seeks alternative pathways more in-line with Indigenous thinking where possible.
While refusal allows Indigenous people to take back their power, it does not necessarily seek a permanent separation between Indigenous Australians and settlers. What Indigenous resurgence seeks to achieve is a recalibration of power between the colonisers and the colonised, it seeks to renegotiate the terms of engagement. It wants to unsettle the colony and its foundations of racial hierarchy, capitalist expansion and exploitation of the land and its people, in order to create another world. One that sees the land and all its creatures as more than a commodity or resource to be extracted and profited from, that sees the way we treat the land as the framework for how we treat one another, and sees the essential nature of human society as being rooted in connectedness and interdependence, rather than individualism and competition.
By rejuvenating and nurturing Indigenous sovereignty, advocates hope to ensure the continuity of alternative ways of being, knowing and relating to the world and one another. Rather than seeking recognition from those seated at the table, Indigenous resurgence hopes to dismantle the table and build a new one together, one grounded in a more equal partnership and premised on a different understanding of our relationship to the land and each other.
Sources:
Coulthard, G.S. (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.
Elliott, M. (2018). Indigenous resurgence: The drive for renewed engagement and reciprocity in the turn away from the state. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 51(1), 61-81. doi:10.1017/S0008423917001032
Moreton-Robinson, A. (Ed.). (2020). Sovereign subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters. Routledge.
Taylor, C. (1992). The Politics of Recognition. In Gutmann, A (Ed.), Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition. (pp. 25-74) Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240
Writer: Yuki Lindley
Editor: Natalie Charlesworth
Photography: Image by Valentin from pexels