The Settler Colonial Present by L. Veracini

Author:L. Veracini [Veracini, L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Published: 2015-03-11T18:30:00+00:00

The new indigenisations

Beyond narratives and metaphors, settler colonial forms also persist in more politically recognisable settler reflexes in the settler polities. A random reflexological list would include naming a super-secret military operation (speaking of ‘Indians in unexpected places’!), Australia’s 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response and the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act that accompanied the ‘intervention’ (let’s face it, as a government, you do not suspend the Racial Discrimination Act unless you want to enact racially discriminating measures), and Brazil’s ‘effective use law’, which enables poor and politically threatening landless peoples to claim ‘underused’ land.74 More generally, settler colonialism also arguably persists in the demand that indigenous peoples ‘adapt’ to the normative frameworks of international forums, and conform to the expectation that they should be poor.75

Settler colonialism also persists in the expectation that indigenous people comply with state-sanctioned forms of ‘regulation of Indigenous identity’. These regulations, Sarah Maddison recently noted, perpetuate the violence of settler colonialism. She highlighted a paradox: it is precisely because the accepted definition of who is an Aboriginal person in Australia allows a degree of self-determination that the question of authenticity becomes a crucial tool in the perpetuation of identity violence.

Since the 1970s, the three-part, government-endorsed definition of Indigeneity has accepted that an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is any person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person and is accepted as such by the community in which they live.76

In this context, ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ enable the establishment of a hierarchy of Aboriginal identity, a crucial element in denying the indigeneity of urban Aboriginal people. Maddison then concludes: while the new definition constituted

a ‘refreshing’ break from the earlier periods of imposed classification of Indigenous people, the contemporary reality is that this unified identity has become ‘frayed and often burdensome’, creating ‘chronic disputes about who is and who is not a true blackfella’.

As a result, one ‘of the most visible forms of contemporary structural violence relating to Indigenous authenticity concerns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in Australian cities’.77 Because, of course, from a settler colonial point of view, the important thing is not how these debilitating disputes are resolved; what matters is that these disputes occur. Thus, Maddison concludes,

for the majority of Aboriginal people living in Australian cities and large towns, urban living produces a harmful, racialised paradox. On the one hand, urban-dwelling Aboriginal people are widely thought to have ‘jettisoned their culture and identity’, no longer the ‘real Aborigines’ who continue to live in the outback. On the other hand, the very fact of their Aboriginality produces a level of surveillance that is not experienced by the non-indigenous population.78

Avril Bell also noted that ‘settler propensities to define and delimit indigenous identities’ are ‘crucial signs of the ongoing existence of colonial relationships’.79 But while enhanced surveillance these days does not only affect Australian Aborigines or indigenous peoples, settler colonial forms also persist in the global movement towards the building of big and smaller separation walls dividing distinct socioeconomic and geopolitical realities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.