2 upcoming Sydney events of interest to anthropologists:

• Traditional Healing at the 4th Sydney Latin America Film Festival

Monday 7 September 6:00pm @ Dendy Opera Quays

The film “La Curacion / Healing” (Ecuador, Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles, 56 minutes) by Yoni Goldstein will screen at 6pm.  After the film, Kalpana Ram, Head of the Macquarie Department of Anthropology, will facilitate a panel of speakers, including practising shamanic healers.  Speakers will include Chris Kavelin of Macquarie University, Byron Serrano from the Tribal Warrior Association, Beata Alfoldi-Askew from Inner Vision Quest, and Violeta Arraya from the Alazan Horse Centre. Entry is first come first served, no bookings.

• Mining and Sovereignty microcinema

Tuesday 8 September, 6pm @ Dendy Opera Quay

Forum discussion after screening of film When Clouds Clear on resistance to copper mining in northern Ecuador.  The forum has speakers who will connect the struggle to Australian Indigenous politics.

For full program details see www.sydneylatinofilmfestival.org.

On June 20, marking two years of the Northern Territory Intervention, demonstrations will be held across the country in defense of Aboriginal Rights .

See the Youtube promo at

http://www.youtube.com/user/solidtv7#uploads/7/9rHbpKEZVco

Darwin: 11am Raintree Park contact Dave 0407209520

Sydney: 10:30 Belmore Park contact Monique on 0415410558

Brisbane: 11.00am Queen’s park contact Rob 0424265730 or Sam 0401227443

Melbourne: 12pm outside the State Library Cnr Swanston/La Trobe sts.

Perth: 12 noon Wesley Church.

This rally will have a focus on Aboriginal death’s in custody, demanding justice for Mr Ward.

www.rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com

www.stoptheintervention.org

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new. I wrote an application for funding from a Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Fellowship and got money to support a one-year project with funding for some teaching relief and money to pay a research assistant and web programmers (thanks, Macquarie!). And I recruited two co-authors: Paul Mason, a PhD student here at Macquarie, and Kristina Everett, an anthropologist in Macquarie’s Department of Indigenous Studies / Warawara who helped develop the material on research in Indigenous Australian communities. Then the Macquarie Learning and Teaching Centre got involved and created the website and programmed it to offer an optional online quiz afterwards to assess comprehension of content, in case people wanted to use it in a class.

I won’t describe the entire module. It’s freely accessible so if you’re curious you can go have a look at it yourself (http://www.mq.edu.au/ethics_training). It is licensed under Creative Commons, meaning that anyone can use it or adapt it for their own purposes, as long as these are non-profit and attributed. So people can use it in their own classes, or use some of it as lecture slides, or they can take it and re-jig the entire thing according to their own perspective on research ethics.

Here I’ll just list some of the ethics issues that we decided to cover, some of the unique ethical dilemmas that can arise in ethnographic research but that rarely come up in clinical research.

Sex in the field

For the section on the ethics of sex in the field, Paul Mason produced a video interview with Julienne Corboz, an anthropologist who has researched BDSM communities

Here’s a classic dilemma that many fieldworkers face but which is unthinkable in clinical research. Paul drafted most of this section. Before going into the field, one of his research supervisors had given him this advice: “Don’t sleep with the locals.” At the same time, he was hearing from other staff in our department (ahem – I mean from me) that “everyone has sex in the field and half of anthropologists end up marrying ‘natives’.” (Of my cohort of 6 PhD students at Princeton, two married “natives” – and are still happily married, one came back with a long-term girlfriend, and another married no one but happily confesses to shagging through fieldwork!) So Paul was curious to explore this issue from the perspective of research ethics.

Oral vs written consent

A screenshot from the section of the module on oral vs. written consent

During participant observation, when should informed consent be written and when should it be oral? Anthropologists have often complained about ethics committees insisting on signed informed consent, even when it is entirely inappropriate, so I was delighted to find both disciplinary and national ethics codes that say clearly that written consent is not always possible or appropriate, even when your informants are literate.

Maintaining informed consent over years of fieldwork

A screenshot from the section on maintaining informed consent over time

How do you maintain informed consent over a long period of time? I illustrated this with an example from my own research: gossip, a small community, and I was pretty certain that when people told me about X’s affair with Y’s husband, they weren’t talking to me as an anthropologist but rather as a friend, and my own decision to not publish on this because it wasn’t clear to me that I was told such information under conditions of truly informed consent.  (Plus I couldn’t adequately disguise people’s identities in such a small community.)

Protecting informant identities in small communities

How do you protect informant identities without changing their identifying details so much that you have created fictional characters? This is a dilemma that many anthropologists have grappled with, and indeed, some have dealt with this problem by writing ethnographic fiction (like Laura Bohannan who published an “anthropological novel” under the nom de plume Elenore Smith Bowen, to protect her informants’ identities).

Researching people who commit crimes

Illustrations from the case studies

What are the ethical choices that you have to make when your research informants are engaged in felonies? I used examples from ethnographic sociologists: Sudhir Venkatesh, who wrote Gang Leader for a Day, and Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade study.

The ethics of applied research / Human Terrain System

Applied anthropology: readers of Culture Matters will be familiar with my interest in controversy over the Human Terrain System, which has prompted the AAA to debate revising its code of ethics, particularly around the issue of applied anthropological research and the extent to which the results of commissioned research data are proprietary or should be in the public domain. It’s a perfect case study, in part because it’s so controversial – so much so that it’s prompting an entire national disciplinary association to redo its whole ethics code – and in part because it’s so recent, which serves as a reminder that ethics controversies aren’t just things that happened in the past (which is the impression you might get from reading some surveys of the history of ethics regulation).

Teaching ethics as debate, not consensus

When I first started this project, I had the idea that, since I was writing for an undergraduate audience, I needed to provide concrete advice and unambiguous solutions. The more I wrote and researched ethics, the more I realized that not only was this impossible, but it was an intellectually barren goal to set. Instead what I ended up doing was showing how much research ethics are contested, both within and across disciplines. That researchers come to completely different conclusions about whether it’s OK to be deceptive in your research, about what research collaboration should look like, and about whether anthropologists should deploy with an occupying army. That researchers had made grave ethics mistakes and yet had gone on to major academic careers because the insights gained through ethically dubious research were so important. In sum, that there was no triumphant, linear narrative of ethical enlightenment – that despite the international “creep” of ethics regulatory regimes and surveillance, research ethics scandals and controversies are unfolding as we speak.

Yet even as I described controversies and lack of consensus, each issue and case study raised is far more complicated than I could ever convey. Virtually every case study I provide gets simplified for the sake of narrative coherence. And even if I could, in a short training module, satisfy myself that I’d covered these issues thoroughly and with enough attention to the ethical complexities raised, I could never satisfy others. Just about everyone who has reviewed this site has pointed out key issues that are missing and should have been covered. In many areas, I see no consensus in how the issues should be covered. Here are some examples from when I asked people to review the section on research in Indigenous communities.

An illustration from the section of the module on research with Indigenous communities

Their critiques:

(1) Not enough Indigenous voices are represented.

(2) But if a non-Indigenous person adds Indigenous voices, it would only be coopting them to authorize colonial methodologies.

(3) We should show examples of research that is truly “decolonising” and collaborative, so that students have a positive model to work towards, rather than only negative models to work against.

(4) But if we present examples of research that is supposedly decolonising and collaborative, then we are reinscribing the enlightenment narrative that conveys the message that we are all marching triumphantly on the path towards egalitarian, ethical research; yet hierarchies and inequalities between researcher and researched – particularly when the researched are Aboriginal – are not going away anytime soon.

(5) We should include a discussion of the recent Howard government Intervention as a crisis that’s fundamentally generated by the ways that politicians uses and twists social science research to advance its own agendas. In so doing, we could avoid giving the impression that unethical interpretations and applications of research only happened in the past and show that this is in fact an ongoing dynamic that links contemporary research agendas with those that led to the Stolen Generation in the last century.

(6) We shouldn’t, as three white academics, think that we can criticize the Howard government Intervention to advance our own academic agendas – a lot of Aboriginal people are happy with the initial outcomes of the Intervention and we need to be patient before assessing its overall impact.

The simple (not to mention simplistic) point is that research ethics are and will always be contested. Of course, that’s not the impression given by ethics codes, which make the issues appear to be settled, even though the codes get revised every few years. To quote Tess Lea (whose 2008 ethnography Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is fabulous – I’m going to review it here when I get the chance), “policy artefacts” are

fetish objects or magical relics that travel through time and space, often referring to each other and just as often ghost-written, that are attributed great expressive power and controlling capacities; a power acquired through ritualistic production efforts, including the careful addition of special words and consecration by anointed reviewers…. Well-worded strategies and well-formulated plans become talismans against an ever-present threat of intervention failure (2008:20).

Lea pushes the magic metaphor, but maybe a better analogy is between ethics codes and scripture. That’s mixing metaphors, but perhaps we’re being too cruel to magic – which is, after all, mysteriously efficacious – and we might do well to implicate religious faith and catechism as well. After all, religions are bureaucracies. Thinking of policy artefacts as scripture or formal documentation of sect doctrine, rather than just magical talismans, gives fuller meaning to another point that Lea makes, namely that ethics codes as policy artefacts are also scoreboards of relations of influence (Lea 2008:37, citing David Mosse). Perhaps that’s why we see both ethics codes and the NIH ethics training module organized primarily around clinical research contexts rather than ethnographic methods: we anthropologists are not powerful enough to shift their clinical orientation.

There is a handful of anthropologists and historians, including Rena Lederman, Jack Katz, Daniel Bradburd, Richard Shweder, and Zachary Schrag, who have recently started the important work of closely examining research ethics protocols and bureaucracies from ethnographic and historical perspectives, which is showing just how much variation there is in what is considered ethical and how differently it is applied and policed across countries, institutions, and disciplines.

It is Professor Schrag, in fact, who has scooped me with a critique of our ethics training module. He reviewed it at length on his Institutional Review Blog. He has some really nice things to say about it, and some potent critiques, too. Have a look and see what you think, and if you have your own feedback on the site, post a comment here or on the IRBlog or send it to lisa.wynn(/@/)mq.edu.au.

Next up, I’m going to post on my new idea for a research project on ethics…

–L.L. Wynn

Nuclear Territory Forum poster

A reminder that the Intervention, strictly speaking, is not the only controversial Federal Government policy affecting Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory.

From the website:

Radioactive Rollout

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is continuing to roll out the Howard Government’s radioactive agenda for the Northern Territory.

After more than a year in office there has been no indication that the draconian NT waste dump laws, the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act, will be repealed. This is despite a clear election promise from the ALP to repeal and a Senate Inquiry that called for repeal in the first parliamentary sittings of 2009.

ALP Platform pledges to ‘establish a process for identifying suitable sites that is scientific, transparent, accountable, fair and allows access to appeal mechanisms.’ (ALP Platform 2007, Chapter 5). This is clearly in contrast to current ways of operating around the NT dump proposal.

Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson continues to ignore affected communities and national environment and health groups who have called for information and action from the government.

Australia is maintaining involvement in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) agreement, which asserts that countries exporting uranium accept ‘stewardship’ over the metal. This will inevitably increase pressure for high-level radioactive waste to be returned from overseas after being ‘leased’ for use in reactors.

There is a plethora of uranium exploration applications across the Territory and support from both Federal and Territory governments for increased exploitation in return for short- term profit.

Cuts to Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) and the increasing economic disadvantage in remote areas means many Aboriginal communities are feeling pressure to accept uranium projects on their country as a source of jobs and income- sometimes in exchange for essential infrastructure like roads and housing.

Community resistance

Despite pressure from both industry and government, communities in the NT continue to be at the forefront of a major struggle against expansion of the nuclear industry in Australia.

Successful community campaigns fought the uranium mine proposed for Jabiluka in Kakadu National Park.

Central Australian residents are currently mobilising against the uranium exploration project at Angela Pamela, 25 km south of Alice Springs in the town’s water catchment area.

There is continued and strong opposition to the planned federal radioactive waste dump, already over a year behind schedule.

It is important for national awareness and mobilisation to support communities directly targeted by the industry.

The Rudd Government must be held accountable for its radioactive rollout.

Come along and hear from inspiring Arrernte/Luritja author, poet and artist Mitch, who is fighting the federal radioactive waste dump proposed for her country.

Here in Sydney as well as in Egypt, people have often commented to me on the strangeness of the American logic of race. “Why do you call Barack Obama black? His mother was white. Why don’t you call him white?” I explain the cultural logic of the “one-drop rule” of attributing race in the United States, but often people just shake their head at the absurdity of it. I tell them that yes, it’s absurd, but it’s how our culture popularly imagines race. Everyone knows that Obama’s mother was white, and yet everyone “knows” that Obama is black.

I’ve read enough of the work of my colleagues who do work in Brazil, and I’ve lived in Venezuela (where the racial imaginary is closer to that of Brazil than to that of the U.S.), to have some familiarity with different cultural logics of “race.” When it comes to Australia, though, I arrived here pretty ignorant. So for the past year and a half, I’ve been watching and listening carefully, trying to work out how the Australians imagine race. In certain ways the Australian logic seems to parallel the American formula. But in other ways the logic is quite different. Here, being Aboriginal seems to be not about the mixing of genetic or biological material but rather about heritage, about identifying with a community of people who claim you as one of their own. I’ve met several Aboriginal scholars who are as fair as Welsh-background me with straight blond hair, so it’s definitely not one’s appearance that is considered to make one Aboriginal.

Yet perhaps that’s also true in the U.S. It is self identification that matters most in “racial” categorizing, and this is reflected in the U.S. Census, where a person is categorized as black or white or Hispanic etc based purely on how they describe themselves. In contrast, Indigenousness in the U.S. can be is more straightforwardly about imagining the mixing of blood; to be officially Native American for purposes of obtaining some college scholarships or special admissions considerations, for example, you have to show that you are at least 1/16 or 1/32 Native American by descent (see this interesting online discussion); in contrast, the right to hold a Tribal I.D. card from most Native American tribes has to do with how you were raised and what community recognizes you, not with fractions and bloodlines.

But I started out talking about how Australians imagine Indigenous identity, i.e. Torres Strait Islanders or Aboriginal Australians, not about what Australians think it means to be black. I still don’t know that much about how Australians imagine blackness. (Maybe that’s because Australia is more about imagining whiteness than blackness?) This recent SMH article describes a group of Aboriginal artists as “black,” though the skin color of the artist they use to illustrate the article is quite fair. Yet to my American eye, this article is so wonderful — and strange — because of the way it describes a fair-skinned musician as black without at all indicating that there’s any strangeness about that. It makes it look like Australians are a lot less hung up on racial appearances than Americans are.

Can any of my Australian colleagues tell me more about how these labels get applied in Australia? Is “black” applied to all Indigenous Australians, independent of skin color? Is it equally applied to Sudanese immigrants?

Several articles have appeared in today’s The Australian regarding the Northern Territory intervention, and on indigenous health and welfare more generally.  Of most interest to me was a report on calls to soften some aspects of the new government regime.  The article notes that while there have been some reported positive outcomes of the new paternalism in the NT, such as an increase in the amount of fresh food being eaten.  I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from an anthro working in Arnhem Land that the quarantining of welfare payments and the introduction of stamps for certain products has certainly had an effect on consumption patterns.  For example, kids are claiming “not to like” lollies anymore but to prefer fruit-based snacks like Roll-ups because the latter can be bought with stamps.  This allows them to continue to spend their free cash on cigarettes and other products not covered by the stamps.  It would seem that the new system has introduced new hierarchies of need where people have to make choices about which pleasures to keep and which to modify.  This is all interesting stuff and it would be great to see more reporting by anthropologists about what they’re seeing in the communities that they work with. All contributions are welcome and we are happy to reproduce them on this blog.

One area on which the Intervention doesn’t seem to be having an impact, and might even be making matters worse in some ways, is child welfare and the prevention of abuse.  This was of course the issue that prompted the Intervention in the first place.  According to a report by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care,

“A major unintended consequence of the NT intervention has been to stall and delay the necessary reform of the child protection systems (and) care needed to support children at risk of abuse and neglect,” the secretariat says in its submission.

“It has not uncovered the abuse of children or resulted in any significant change in child abuse notifications.

“Ironically, the intervention seems to have swept to one side the very issues that precipitated it in the first place.”

Other related articles in today’s Oz are as follows:

Call to lock in indigenous health gains
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422991-5013172,00.html

Action, not words, needed to close gap on indigenous health
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422990-5013172,00.html

I am happy to present this guest post by ANU PhD Student Bree Blakeman and environmental economist, Dr Nanni Concu.  This article deals with a number of themes that we have focused on at CM: the concept of culture and how it is applied in real life contexts, engaged anthropological commentary on current events, and the specific issue of the government Intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.  The article provides some considered observations grounded in ethnographic research which, I think, serve to challenge the usual terms of the debate about the Intervention.  Hopefully this will provoke new discussion on what remains an important, and unresolved, issue.

Jovan

There is a sense of the uncanny following contemporary Indigenous policy debates while living in a remote Indigenous Homeland. For the last twelve months we’ve done just this, discussing the varying issues with our adoptive family. At first instance we thought this feeling of discomfort arose from the glaring power differential: listening to people thousands of kilometres away make decisions about the lives of our family in a language largely unintelligible to them, in a forum out of their reach. However, in the course of our life on the Homeland, it struck us that it is something more pervasive and, arguably, a lot more sinister. It is as if the life of our family – their everyday lives, responsibilities, values and goals – are being effaced. Through a pervasive rhetorical device – an implied cultura nullius – these debates effectively negate the life of those they then claim they must act to save.

Debates about remote Indigenous communities, with very few exceptions, are crafted with a discourse of negation: people on the ‘margins’ of society, on the ‘margins’ of the economy with ‘little or no education’ who are nothing more than exiled economic citizens. The implication is clear as Helen Hughes said recently – Indigenous people can’t read, they can’t write, they don’t have skills, [and seasonal fruit picking] is about the only thing they can do! Their communities are rendered as socio-economic vacuums in our thriving settler State. When the debate is cast in these terms, one can understand the sense of urgency to educate Indigenous people, ‘skill’ them up and make them ‘job ready’ so we can break down, in Marcia Langton’s words, ‘the apartheid system of employment’. They are waiting for us to fill them out and colour them in with education and skills, to bring them into the real world and the real economy.

However, one feels entirely unconvinced living in a vibrant remote Yolngu* community – one of around a thousand on the 1.5 million sq km of Indigenous owned land – listening to these debates and the assumed negation, or cultura nullius. Considered time in these communities will reveal very little ‘missing’ or ‘lacking’ in the social fabric. If anything, it is the visiting Balanda, or white person, who feels on the margins, lacking in language, education and practical skills. There are often more than five languages spoken in any one Homeland, a great source of amusement as kin show off their skilled and often uproarious word play. Days are spent in the breast of kin and country, hunting and gathering food to compliment shop bought products, collecting bark and pandanus for painting and weaving (which later adorn the walls and shelves in local and international art centres), and plugging in a few hours of CDEP work – mowing lawns, fencing, gardening etc. – to ensure their fortnightly pay. The evenings are spent catching up with the latest gossip and sharing in music, dance and food.

Longer yearly cycles show a rhythm of movement between one’s primary Homeland, trips to town for reinforcements, and movement between other communities and centres ‘following ceremonies’, and maintaining socio-ceremonial networks that hold the wider Yolngu community together. Underlying these everyday activities is the ever present satisfaction in the knowledge they are fulfilling their most fundamental and rewarding responsibilities: looking after kin and country, and in doing so ‘following in the footsteps of the ancestors’ and ‘holding’ Yolngu law, two sayings that one hears all the time in the Homelands.

These communities are not socio-cultural vacuums and are not on the margins of anything. They are the centre of Yolngu lives and are filled with knowledge, skill and value that, though very different, are not exclusive to those of the encompassing settler State. From a Yolngu point of view these communities are ‘promised lands’ of unquestionable value as part of wider socio-ceremonial networks that make up the Yolngu cosmological and social world. Traditional owners or custodians of each community proudly refer to themselves as ‘lukumankamirri Yolngu’, which roughly translates as the people who have their feet ‘stamped’ in the white clay of the land.

It is true that many people on the Homelands speak little English and do not meet National education benchmarks, but these are not primary indicators of social skill, status or value in Yolngu communities. Yolngu, by in large, have a very different education and a very different skill set that is much more diversified than ours in many cases. These knowledge or skill sets are perfectly suited to the tasks most Yolngu dedicate their time and lives to, which make them successful, happy and valued members in their wide social networks.

The argument that is often used to dismiss the portrait above, as Langton recently countered, is that Yolngu are an ‘exception’ and a geographically confined exception at that, and should therefore be subordinated to the national debate about CDEP (where most Indigenous people are exiled economic citizens waiting for us to bring them in?). Well, it is true that Yolngu are somewhat unique. They had a very late contact history, and many were never moved off their land. They still speak their languages, hold and practice their ceremony and live on land they own. But should this alleged ‘exception’ be dismissed and these communities be mainstreamed? Should the knowledge, skill and value in these communities be subordinated and effaced by a singular market value? What does it mean to talk and act as if this culture and life doesn’t exist?

As the legal escamotage of terra nullius denied the existence of Indigenous land tenure, opening up land and resources to European settlers, so cultura nullius is being used to justify government and market policy efforts to overlay our own, often foreign values and visions, on those that are rhetorically effaced and trade-off one cultural body of knowledge, skills, practices and values for another. We are not filling up or colouring in exiled citizens with no education or skills who are waiting on the margins of society for us to ‘bring them in.’ The pretence of a socio-cultural vacuum is functional to avoid the moral nuisances that arise when we address cultural diversity with mainstreaming and resocialisation. Policy pundits can no longer act in bad faith upon a false premise of ‘cultura nullius’. We have to ask ourselves how morally sound such policies are.

The merit of CDEP in the full colour version of life on the Homelands in North East Arnhem Land is that it accommodates and even compliments Yolngu cultural responsibilities, priorities and values while delivering basic services to remote communities at low cost to the Government. CDEP gives Yolngu the opportunity to balance often conflicting systems of value and allows them to choose how far they wish to move between the two. It offers a flexible system that allows communities to fulfil basic responsibilities to both kin and government on their own country, and largely on their own terms. A more coercive policy will inevitably bring the two systems of value into direct competition.

Yolngu are acutely aware of this pressure, as my adoptive sister (who is an enthusiastic CDEP worker) stated when discussing the recent CDEP debate and the pressure for Yolngu to move into labour market centres “if they stop CDEP we will not leave. We will still stay here on our country. We were not born with money, we were born with culture. It is indeed this way. The money is not sacred for us. That is Balanda madayin [white people’s sacred endowment]. This is how I feel. Money is not our madayin. We will stay here.” As history has proven, Yolngu are more than resilient. They will not disregard values at the heart of their culture and identity and it will be a sad day when Government policy measures suggest they do, without even acknowledging the trade off they are asking these people to make.

Acknowledging the richness and diversity in Indigenous Australia will make policy debates a lot more complex, but to act otherwise is both morally and politically dishonest.

Bree Blakeman is a PhD student of anthropology at the Australian National University, and long term resident of Yolngu Homelands.

Dr. Nanni Concu is an environmental economist at Charles Darwin University and Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation.

*The above discussion is confined to Yolngu country (stretching from Maningrida in the West to Blue Mud Bay in the South East) because this is the area with which the authors are most familiar.

I don’t have time for a full commentary on this but I wanted to share with you all the latest voice chiming into the intervention debate.  In her book On Rage Greer has come up with a theory which  places the culpability of violence of ‘Aboriginal men’ (which is assumed to exist) on the Australian colonial past and present which has inflicted such injustices as taking women, children, land and a way of life.  While no one, save perhaps Keith Windschuttle, would deny the harsh realities of colonialism and its effects on Aboriginal people, Greer’s essay seems in large part to rest on stereotypes and generalizations of Aboriginal men which are not substantiated.  Thus far her theories don’t seem to have been taken positively by either side in this debate. 

A few reports in the media for those of you that are interested —

Elders pan Germaine Greer black rage theory –

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24183665-16947,00.html

Rosemary Neill and Padraic Murphy | August 15, 2008

CONTRARIAN feminist Germaine Greer argues that Aboriginal men suffer a rage they “can’t get over”, one that is responsible for violence in their communities.

She also argues that indigenous women who supported the federal intervention in the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities will be seen as colluding “with the enemy”.

But her arguments have angered indigenous leaders, who claim her comments discourage personal accountability and are a step backwards in tackling violence.

Greer, writing in an essay, On Rage, suggests that loss of land, women, language and culture over the past 200 years has led to a rage among Aboriginal men that helps explain the high levels of violence, suicide and self-destructive behaviour often found in indigenous communities. “They can’t get over it (the rage) and it’s inhuman to ask them to get over it,” she said on the ABC’s Lateline this week.

Welcome Germaine – http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24182369-16741,00.html

But would you kindly tell us when you’re going home?

IF Germaine Greer’s extraordinary appearance on the ABC’s Lateline on Wednesday served any purpose, it was to remind us of the romantic, woolly thinking that has heaped misery on indigenous communities for decades. In a new essay, Greer looks at indigenous Australia entirely through the prism of Aboriginal male rage, which she justifies as a response to the “appalling outrages and abuses” of white settlers.

“They’ve been jerked about from pillar to post,” Greer told an incredulous Leigh Sales. “They’ve ended up in one concentration camp after another.”

By blaming white men for black men’s anger, Greer displayed her sexism, racism and ignorance. It was the kind of verbal molotov cocktail we’ve come to expect from the former anarchist, and proved yet again that if Greer did not exist The Guardian would have had to invent her. It is no surprise that after more than 40 years abroad, she is locked in to the progressive consensus of the 1960s and 70s. What might come as news to Greer, however, is that the debate has moved on since she left in 1964. The views she espouses are no longer progressive but regressive.

For a more sensitive if not supportive piece see

Greer’s latest rage more glib than lib – Tracee Hutchison

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/greers-latest-rage-more-glib-than-lib-20080815-3wab.html

Anthropologist Diane Bell (Daughters of the Dreaming) is hitting the political scene in Australia running for the recently vacated seat of former foreign minister Alexander Downer.  After the Rudd ‘apology’/ and on going ‘intervention’ it will be interesting to follow the campaign of an anthropologist who has worked closely both in legal and social contexts with Aboriginal people for several decades. 

Anthropologist and author Diane Bell throws hat in Mayo ring

John Wiseman | August 12, 2008

There was an article about Stolen Generations on the Sydney Morning Herald the other day. According to the article Stolen Generation Kids ‘Used for Tests’ (SMH, 15 April 2005), the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee’s inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008 was told that some Aboriginal children removed from their families and placed into institutions were used to test medical treatments. Below is from the article:

On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.

And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.

“These are the things that have not been spoken about,” Ms Mills told the inquiry.

“As well as being taken away, they were used … there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about.”

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.

She said he told her that children were used as “guinea pigs” for leprosy treatments.

“He said it made our people very, very ill … the treatment almost killed them,” she said.

“It was a common experience and a common practice …

“People are very inhibited to speak about their experience and it is not a nice subject … I don’t want them to be shamed.”

Senator Brown said it was important to get to the bottom of the claims, which he called “very, very serious”.

“It may be right, it may not,” he said.

“It needs investigation. If within the indigenous community there is a feeling that children may have been experimented upon for a treatment for leprosy or anything else, the air needs to be cleared.”

Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the government to assist “opening Pandora’s box”.

She also said it was important to work with indigenous groups to ascertain who is eligible for compensation.

“It has to happen … but there’s this reluctance to do it,” she said.

“We don’t have the necessary information … it’s probably tucked away in some archive but we don’t have the resources to research, we don’t have the people who are qualified.”

Senator Brown said there was a national responsibility to help Aboriginal people to get to all the records, including those being held by church institutions.

“This is about their identity, this about their sense of being, their history,” he said.

The compensation bill aims to pay money to victims of the stolen generations, including living descendants, out of a Stolen Generations Fund.

Ex gratia payments would be set at $20,000 as a common experience payment with an additional $3,000 for each year of institutionalisation.

Rodney Dillon, from the National Sorry Day Committee, said that while the government debated action more Aboriginal elders entitled to some form of compensation were dying.

“We are going to lose a lot of people between now and the next time this bill is put on the table,” he said.

“Although it does not have all the things in it we would like, I think we should push ahead.”

Zita Wallace, chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance, said it was time to act “with urgency”.

“Because I know we are dying and all of us elders from the first generation we will be all gone … maybe the government would wish that would happen, then they would not have to pay compensation.”