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The gap between settler lives and those it colonised is the system working as it was designed to, writesYuki Lindley.
As news of the NTs refusal to let the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention see the conditions within their prisons makes the headlines and Kumanjayi Whites family continue to demand an investigation into why their disabled son was killed by police in a Coles supermarket, it is important to understand the context within which Indigenous lives are so frequently disregarded, incarcerated and ultimately eliminated in the settler colonial state we call Australia.
As Australian scholar and historian, Patrick Wolfe famously concluded, “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event”. Yet, colonisers always insist that colonisation is over now, that its in the past, much like the way they insist the only real Indigenous people are those staring out of historical black and white photos. Colonisers love to believe that the colonial violence is all over and done with, that it was an unfortunately bad way of starting off the colony, but that we can and should move on now, because well, its not like there are any real Indigenous people left anyway.
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But if we take the time to study settler colonialism, we learn that it progresses from the initial bloody phases of frontier violence, to a more settled, structural process of eliminating the native, by embedding the genocidal intent of colonisation into the various power structures of the emerging state. During this phase, we see laws emerge that continue the process of elimination by targeting Indigenous peoples through policies such as the Aboriginal Protections Acts of the 1960s, which removed children from their families and dominated every aspect of Indigenous people’s lives, from their employment, marriage, to where they could live.
Today, the state no longer directly targets Indigenous people according to race and skin tone, but through a system of laws that target poor, traumatised, homeless people with disabilities; the result is that Indigenous people are the ones incarcerated because of the systematic trauma and poverty that the state inflicted upon their families.
Mandatory sentencing laws, which exist in WA and NT, fill up the prisons with poor, traumatised Indigenous people, the majority of whom are locked up for small non-violent crimes of poverty, such as shoplifting or unpaid fines. All the evidence shows that incarceration only leads to increasing crime rates because of the re-traumatising effect of prison.
This system of laws doesnt make sense if you assume the state wants to decrease crime rates; however, within the context of settler colonialism, it works perfectly to remove the natives from disturbing the peace of settler society. It is about removing Indigenous poverty from our view, whether by enclosing them within reservations or prisons, the intent remains the same.
The police, as an institution, is the big stick that the state uses to control its people, and as such, it was the police force that was tasked with removing Indigenous bodies from society and keeping them tightly controlled. Today, the police have largely moved on from lynching Indigenous people who strayed into settler society, to a system of neglect, disregard and excessive force designed to ensure that once Indigenous people are detained, their chances of leaving alive significantly reduce. By insisting that the police are continue to investigate themselves, the state ensures that the colonial intent of elimination continues to function as it has been designed.
Then there is the fact that Indigenous women are far more likely to be incorrectly identified as the perpetrator when they call for help during domestic violence incidents, which is why Indigenous women often dont call for police help.
As Indigenous scholar and journalist, Amy McQuire highlights, this leaves Indigenous women extremely vulnerable; indeed, the record on missing Indigenous women in this country reveals the shocking lack of due diligence performed by the police when investigating missing Indigenous women. This is why perpetrators knowingly target Indigenous women, because the police are unlikely to collect evidence and investigate their disappearance.
Colonisation continues to break up Indigenous families, while the state no longer removes Indigenous children in order to breed out the natives, families continue to be broken apart by laws which criminalise poverty, though laws that lock up parents for unpaid fines for minor offences such as driving without a licence or drinking in public. The consequence of these laws are that Indigenous parents are taken away from their homes leaving their children trapped in a cycle of neglect and poverty, which the state itself began.
It was the state that ensured that Indigenous people were unable to accumulate wealth and property through policies that controlled and often stole their wages (which were low to begin with), and through policies that excluded them from purchasing property. Even once these legal frameworks were dismantled, the racism within the banking and real estate sector ensured they remained excluded in practice, only allowed to purchase property in the worst neighbourhoods if they were able to secure a mortgage at all. This state-inflicted intergenerational poverty is the reason Indigenous people are targeted by laws that criminalise poverty and homelessness, with those laws most prevalent in states such as WA and the NT, due to their larger Indigenous population.
Colonisers have long weaponised access to food, having stolen the best lands, they force Indigenous people into reservations and missions, often ensuring that the paucity of food and overcrowding create the conditions where the natives simply die off; in these crowded, unhealthy spaces, outbreaks of diseases do the work of the colonial state in reducing the Indigenous population. The destruction of Indigenous food systems ensured they became dependent on the state for food, and without regulation to ensure adequate, healthy food availability and affordable prices, Indigenous communities continue to experience high levels of chronic disease, malnutrition, and child development issues; these issues are often compounded by a lack of working stoves, running water and working fridges in their homes. Thus, the colonial state continues its intent of smoothing the pillow of a dying race, as it removes the conditions required for Indigenous health and life.
Then there is the colonial assertion of power over what constitutes knowledge, history and how we understand the world. Colonisers have long believed they know Indigenous people and their experiences better than Indigenous people themselves. White expert accounts of their time spent in Indigenous communities fly off the shelves, explaining the Indigenous subject to a largely white audience. Of course, these outsider opinions formed under the logic of white supremacy rarely capture the reality of Indigenous experiences, communities and worldviews. Colonial institutions of knowledge production often silence Indigenous perspectives, in order to maintain the power dynamics which allow Indigenous lives to remain tightly controlled by the very systems intent on their elimination.
Outside of the ivory towers of academia, the media continues to push their colonial narrative, which portrays Indigenous people as unable to direct and manage their own communities. The media floods the public with images of dysfunction, criminality and violence. While these are the impacts of colonisation, the media subtly suggests through its choice of language and stories to cover that there must be something innately criminal and dysfunctional about Indigenous people themselves, and the settler public unquestioningly accepts this soothing narrative.
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In every aspect of Australian life, the colonising power of the state negatively impacts Indigenous lives. While wealth, education, and social status can provide a pathway out for certain individuals, the fact that we live in a settler colonial state means that the underlying intent of the state remains the elimination of Indigenous sovereignty in order to gain access to their lands. As Patrick Wolfe has identified, the state requires the elimination of the native as a native, as part of a sovereign people. This leaves Indigenous people the impossible choice to cut off parts of who they are, their ancestry, their history and become assimilated into the settler state, albeit as second-class citizens, orto hold onto their sense of self within a structure intent on their elimination.
As a sociologist and historian, Orlando Patterson has shown, colonisation breaks kinship groups, languages, culture and connection to Country, through a process of stripping away the very things that give people a sense of self and belonging; in this way, a proud sovereign people can be turned into an object, a tool, a slave. This is the process that Indigenous people resist daily, in their insistence and assertion of their rights as sovereign people, and it is this assertion of their humanity as a sovereign people that is incommensurable with the settler colonial state we call Australia.
It is the incommensurability of Indigenous lives within the settler colonial state that lies at the heart of the gap between the lives of settlers and those they colonised. The gap is not a failure of the system, but rather the colonial system working as it was designed to. How can Indigenous lives be valued and allowed to thrive under a structure intent upon their elimination? This is the incommensurability that lies at the heart of all settler colonial states, and the reason why justice comes too slowly for Indigenous peoples if it comes at all.
Yuki Lindleyis a student of philosophy of race, colonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.
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