- Parallels between Indigeneity, and Indigenous issues / histories in colonial Australia / Canada
- Both being developed “Western” nations, colonised (at least in part) by the British empire and both currently facing backlash for their respective governments’ tokenistic attempts at ‘reconciliation’ (as they call it), I think it would be interesting to delve deeper into their Indigenous communities’ common struggles and examples of global solidarity between the two groups.
- Considering the violent imperialist history of both nations, these frivolous attempts at establishing some sort of truce (e.g. former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the “stolen generation” in 2007) and how they contradict with ongoing celebration of this past violence (e.g. “Australia Day” continues to be a celebrated national holiday in Australia, which is essentially the day the genocide started), seem to have finally encouraged the support of an increasing amount of non-Indigenous people as they realise the realities of continuing injustices.
- I’d also like to shed light to the fact that both countries are now being faced with terrorist threats yet there is little talk in mainstream media, public discourse or even academia about how the means by which they were settled by the British / French would be considered terrorism by today’s standards. History is thus re-written by Western institutions in order to absolve responsibility for such atrocities; that is, these countries weren’t invaded or terrorised, but “discovered.”
- Being an exchange student from Australia, I think such an enquiry would allow me to develop a more holistic understanding of Indigenous issues on a universal scale and how, being of British descent, I have a duty to educate myself with regards to these issues and how colonial behaviours and attitudes are inherited
- Question: How are the histories of colonisation in Australia / Canada similar and in which ways are their persecutors related?
2. Appropriation of Indigenous Canadian / American culture in Western art
- While this is an entirely different topic, one example of the aforementioned inherited colonial behaviour is the appropriation of traditional Indigenous dress for the sake of fashion by settlers / white people. If one simply looks through photo albums for American/Canadian/Australian music festivals, for example Coachella, one will see myriad examples of this.
- I will use examples such as this as the basis of broader arguments about how relatively nuanced manifestations of systemic oppression of Indigenous / other oppressed peoples, in art and culture, are perhaps more harmful than those that can be more easily identified / explained to white people, because:
- They cannot be punished by law
- Of the recent trend of brash ‘free speech’ rhetoric / politics
- I’m interested in this topic because I produce music and try to make art, myself, and so I’d like to better understand how I can continue to create without appropriating Indigenous cultures in any way and also, I attend a lot of music events where this sort of thing is very common
- Question: How can white people learn to understand the harm they are causing when they wear headdresses to music festivals (for example), especially in a neoliberal context where ‘free speech’ is the mantra of the young ‘left’?
3. The simplification / trivialisation of Indigenous cultures / peoples by white categorical thinking and the contribution of this to Indigenous erasure
- This is my least developed idea but during the last lecture, I began to think about how the categorisation of Indigenous peoples of Canada into three broad categories (First Nations, Métis and Inuit), mostly for the sake of simplifying legislation (on which the survival of these peoples depend) contributes directly to the erasure of sacred cultures / languages.
- This desire to categorise and compartmentalise knowledge / culture is a white, post-Enlightenment epistemic convention. Hence, it is insensitive to the rich cultural history of ancient Indigenous peoples. In Sydney, I was taught by a professor Clint Bracknell, whose family is from the Wirlomin Noongar clan of Western Australia, and he opened my eyes to the idea that hundreds of Aboriginal languages are being erased, as they are primarily oral and literature is the dominant means by which knowledge is retained and history is told, in today’s world (if you’re interested, the Guardian interviewed him about this: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/26/aboriginal-language-wikipedia-faces-cultural-hurdles-say-researchers)
- These are the kinds of ideas I want to explore but as you can probably tell, my vision for this particular idea is still quite vague.
- Question: How can ancient Aboriginal cultures survive or be revived in a world that is largely oblivious to their value?