Miranda Johnson

Reconciliation, indigeneity, and postcolonial nationhood in settler states

In the Commonwealth settler states of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the last two decades, ‘reconciliation’ has become a key term for expressing a new relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous (primarily white settler) peoples. The term is usually associated with post-conflict societies and its use in the settler states is meant to acknowledge the historical injustices that indigenous people suffered in the colonial past. In this article, I examine how reconciliation evokes a kind of postcolonial nationhood in settler states in a post-imperial era. This is a peculiar form of postcoloniality since it does not mean the realization of political independence for indigenous people. It does, however, mean the reframing of settler states in more local terms. In fact, I suggest that the ways in which justice has been provided to indigenous people have invested their indigeneity with a high cultural value that non-indigenous people in these countries also want, in order to localize their expressions of postcolonial nationhood.

Honest acts and dangerous supplements:1 Indigenous oral history and historical practice in settler societies

As the historical profession has diversified and democratised in the last 40 years, and there has been an explosion of interest in recovering voices ‘from below’, new ways of telling history and accessing those voices have been experimented with. Perhaps the most common experiment has been with oral history. However, this historical form and practice occupies an ambivalent position at the edges of the documentary-based sphere of academic history work that is usually expressed in methodological terms: are oral histories an archival source that historians can use alongside documents to fill out their explanations of the past? Or are they different kinds of historical practices that must be treated differently? If they are treated as a source, oral histories pose a problem of reliability to historians more used to working with, and assuming the fixity of, archival documents. If they are evaluated as history in their own right, however, their complementary function is even less certain. Do oral histories, as embodied and sometimes collective representations of the past, tell the same truth and offer the same proof as documentary-based historical work? In settler societies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where Indigenous oral histories have been accorded some evidentiary weight in native land and resource claims, the question is more than academic. In these places, methodological uncertainties about Indigenous oral histories have legal and political motivations and consequences. In the wake of domestic articulations and international definitions of Indigenous rights since World War II governments in all three societies have initiated (more and less enthusiastically) processes and practices of reconciliation between settler populations and Indigenous communities. As a political narrative reconciliation sutures the gap between older historical tropes (of racial harmony, benign civilising missions, dying savages or noble primitives) that have been recently unsettled and new stories particularly those emerging out of and in relation to activist movements of the 1970s and claims to Indigenous ‘renaissance’. The narrative also provides a new political imaginary of a postcolonial state in which the healing of historical wounds is not necessarily predicated upon decolonisation (that is, the departure of the colonisers). The courts and tribunals, such as the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand and the Indian Claims Commission in Canada, are crucial sites in which different historical practices have been acknowledged and the methodological problems in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 261–276, 2005

Sacred claims and the politics of indigeneity in Australia

Abstract The claims of Indigenous peoples to sacred sites have generated far-reaching debates about identity, authenticity, and history in Australia in recent decades. This is surprising in such an avowedly secular country, where there is no constitutional or statutory recognition of principles of religious freedom. This article charts the emergence of sacred claims and their imbrication with a broader politics of indigeneity in the 1970s. These claims shaped and were reshaped by state law, sometimes holding out the possibility of the restitution not only of land but also of culture and identity for Indigenous peoples. As these claims and the broader politics of indigeneity to which they were attached came to challenge the settler state, its history and moral foundations, as well as economic development, both the content of claims and the characters of the claimants became subject to sharp critique.

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

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

Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights/Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946–1972/Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia

These three books add to a growing scholarly literature on white peoples’ involvement in and support for Aboriginal rights and welfare in Australia. Indeed, scholarship on humanitarian whiteness in Australia is perhaps the most developed of all the settler contexts in which minority Indigenous peoples’ welfare, rights, and sovereignty are at issue. Why this might be the case is not directly addressed by any of these authors but would be worth thinking about comparatively in future studies. Further, in Australia, scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives have engaged the study of whiteness and white peoples’ involvement in Aboriginal issues. The first two books discussed in this review are histories of the mid-twentieth century, based in archival research and existing historical scholarship. The third is an ethnography drawing on the anthropologist’s own experience as a medical doctor in northern Australia in the early 2000s, and engaging with scholarship in postcolonial and critical whiteness studies. Read together, the three books suggest intriguing changes in the meaning, framing, and performance of humanitarian (or, later, anti-racist) whiteness over the course of the twentieth century in Australia. Alison Holland’s expansive work on Mary Bennett spans the interwar years, in which frontier conflicts andmassacres were a present reality for some Aboriginal communities in the west, to the post-World War II context of international human rights. Born in 1881, Bennett mostly grew up in England though her father owned a ‘pastoral empire’, as Holland puts it, on Queensland’s northern frontier, which Bennett often visited, before marrying and settling in Hertfordshire. Renouncing her family and, paradoxically, re-engaging with her problematic ancestral inheritance, the recently widowed Bennett became deeply involved in Aboriginal issues in the late 1920s, first in London and then in Western Australia. Eventually based on the Mt Margaret mission, she launched a ‘crusade’ for Aborigines’ ‘human rights’, one which led her into direct and fierce conflict with leading policy-makers and bureaucrats of the day. Holland’s book is not a biography per se. She recuperates Bennett’s work and thought as a contribution to the history of ideas about justice, race, and rights. As the subtitle to the book suggests, Holland is more interested in what Bennett did – particularly her zealous and copious writing to politicians, government bureaucrats, sympathisers, and the press, the amount of which sometimes leads Holland herself to repeat Bennett’s arguments unnecessarily – rather than who she was. The majority of the chapters are concerned with Bennett’s efforts in the 1930s opposing child removal policies and the exploitation of Aboriginal workers; and then the 1950s, following a decade living back in England, when she pursued the argument that Australia was violating Aborigines’ human rights. Holland contextualises Bennett’s intellectual formation and political commitments within a wider framework of ‘imperial humanitarianism’. This seems entirely appropriate, given her formation in Britain, her interest in ideas of indirect rule as discussed in the context

Writing Indigenous Histories Now

I SHARE SOME OF THE CONCERNS raised by Tim Rowse in his article for this forum, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’. Namely, that one of the main arguments in the burgeoning historiography on settler colonialism obliges us to demonstrate a singular logic: that of the elimination of the native. Rowse challenges the usefulness of this idea at two levels. First, he questions the accuracy of the logic proposed, arguing against the claim that this kind of colonialism is, unlike other kinds, driven solely by the logic of elimination. Such a singular logic, he argues, cannot account for the ‘contending structures’ at work in the settler colonial state. Furthermore, he asks, if this is the only and defining ‘logic’ of settler colonialism, then how do we deal with Indigenous agency? Notably, the proponents of a settler colonialism paradigm of which he is critical (he names Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, and Edward Cavanagh) do not necessarily intend to nuance an account of Indigenous agency; rather they are attempting to theorise a particular kind of colonial predicament. Nonetheless, as Rowse points out, Indigenous peoples who have survived the incursions of settler colonialism now debate what survival means and what is necessary for the flourishing of Indigenous communities in the present and future; their diversity (or, as he terms it, their heterogeneity) is a fact of life in contemporary Australia and elsewhere. Working at a second—though certainly related—level of critique, Rowse claims that the ‘logic of elimination’ poses real problems for historians in carrying out their scholarship. He argues that the ‘settler colonial paradigm’ closes down plural and more complex accounts of life under settler colonialism and he advocates instead for accounts that are ‘less predictable, messier, more surprising and occasionally more hopeful’. Moreover, he worries that the paradigm he identifies has a moral effect on historical scholars, one that ‘encourages hesitation about characterising Indigenous difference’. ‘Indigenous heterogeneity’, I would like to suggest, is in fact being grappled with by historians and anthropologists writing in the context of settler colonialism in North America and Australasia. Historical scholars are considering the diversity of Indigenous pasts: I examine five new historiographical directions in explication of this point. Beginning with the writing of Indigenous histories in ‘unexpected places’, as Philip Deloria puts it, notably but not exclusively