Upcoming NT Intervention Protests

We haven’t posted anything on the NT Intervention for some time but the issue is still very much alive.  A report on SBS news last night included some interviews with Aboriginal women from Bagot,  an urban community in Darwin, on their views of the intervention.  Two key points stuck out for me based on those interviews:

1. The prohibitions of alcohol use appear to be leading to new population movements as people attempt to escape regulatory mechanisms.  This means that the effects of the Intervention are uneven, with problems being exacerbated rather than reduced in some areas.
2. The paternalistic nature of the Intervention, with its enforced quarantining and management of all welfare income, means that “model” members of communities — those who are best able to manage their funds independently — are resentful about being treated as though they were not capable of looking after themselves.   If the Government’s goals are pedagogical, i.e. aimed at producing new kinds of subjects closer to the bourgeois ideal of the self-managing individual, it’s problematic that those people most closely resembling that kind of subject are punished and feel disempowered.  The predictable result of such a policy would be the increasing institutionalisation of welfare dependence.

Meanwhile, anti-Intervention protests have been organised for this weekend.  Here are the details:

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

Making ethics training ethnography-friendly

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.

A screen capture from the NIH training module covering the concept of “equipoise.” I gotta say, I never heard of this word before.

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.

Nuclear Territory Forum

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.

Gomorra and Frozen River

It happens that a small “arthouse” (?) cinema in central Amsterdam is simultaneously screening two award-winning feature films that are in one way or another about illegal Chinese migration: Frozen River, a quite lyrical film about two women smuggling people from Canada to the US through an Indian reservation to make ends meet, and Gomorra, based on Roberto Saviano’s bestseller, in which the Camorra works with Chinese crime syndicates to bring in “slave labour”. Although both films reflect the general obsession with this trope, the way in which it is presented is very different.  

In Frozen River, everybody — perhaps even the migrants themselves, two of whom curse at the women because they don’t trust women drivers — have individual motives; there don’t seem to be either dupes or villains in the story (though the idea that somebody would pay $40 thousand to be smuggled into what they perceive is a struggling country strikes the women as crazy). Gomorra, by contrast, is full of victims, villains and heroes, and seems to be very much in sync with Italy’s current political trends that are more anti-immigrant, anti-South (I mean Italy’s South) and pro-strongman than probably at any time since World War II.

A new anthropology ethics scandal (?)

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), an Indigenous umbrella group, has issued a press release condemning the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition, “México Indígena.”  (Below I’ve pasted this press release, and following that, the text of the AGS description of the Bowman Expedition’s “México Indígena” project, which refutes many of the UNOSJO charges.)

The first charge is that one of the AGS researchers, University of Kansas’s  Peter Herlihy,  failed to disclose the fact that his research was partially funded by the U.S. military, specifically the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army. It also claims that Herlihy failed to disclose the participation of Radiance Technologies, “a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.”

Another ethics charge is a novel variation on accusations that international researchers exploit Indigenous cultural and intellectual property: they accuse the project of “geopiracy.”

They also claim that the mapping data collected by the project is fed into “a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.”

AGS refutes  the association with HTS, but one thing that seems clear from this project is that one of the 5 main concerns expressed by the American Anthropological Association about the HTS, namely its prediction that HTS would taint anthropologists and their informants worldwide, seems to be coming true.

–L.L. Wynn (pasted press releases below)

On being “black” in Australia and the U.S.

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?

Some articles on the NT Intervention

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

Closing prosperity gap a $10bn gain
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24423119-7583,00.html

Guest post: Current Indigenous Debates, CDEP and the culture of Cultura Nullius

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.

Crikey! Germaine Greer Again Angers Australia

Anthropologist in Aussie Politics

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

– The prominent anthropologist and author Diane Bell will seek to wrest the South Australian electorate of Mayo from the Liberal Party at next month’s by-election forced by the resignation of former foreign minister Alexander Downer.

Dr Bell, who as an expert witness backed local indigenous women in the “secret women’s business” case at the mouth of the Murray River in the 1990s, lives in the electorate that encompasses the crisis-racked lower lakes region.

She said yesterday she had been drafted by an anxious and angry local community to run as an independent to fight for the Murray. She will be one of two independents in the race for Mayo: local Adelaide Hills councillor Bill Spragg will also nominate after running for the seat in 2001.

Labor will not contest what it considers to be a safe Liberal electorate, leaving former Howard government staffer Jamie Briggs to defend Mayo against the Greens, Democrats, Family First and the two independents.

Dr Bell told The Australian yesterday that the lack of a Labor candidate, the departure of a long-serving MP and his unknown Liberal replacement left room for an independent to snare the seat.

“This is not a safe Liberal seat,” she said. “The demography is changing, (and there is) a lot of anger and anxiety in the community. People are not happy that there was an election only last November and we are back to the polls.”

Mr Downer won the seat at the last election with a 7.1 per cent margin after a 6.5 per cent swing against him.

The former Deakin University professor and professor emeritus of anthropology at George Washington University in the US retired several years ago to live by the Finniss River, which drains into South Australia’s lower lakes.

It was at nearby Hindmarsh Island in the mid to late 1990s that she supported local Ngarrindjeri women who fought against the construction of a bridge to the island in what became known as the “secret women’s business” case.

A Royal Commission found the “secrets” had been fabricated, but a subsequent Federal Court decision found the Ngarrindjeri women were telling the truth.

Dr Bell wrote an acclaimed, award-winning book on the Ngarrindjeri people and their history.

When a weir was first mooted as a last-ditch means to cut the Murray River off from the declining water quality of its lower lakes, Dr Bell joined the fight against it. She said the looming by-election was an opportunity for voters to show their concern. “I could not let this go and watch the major river system of Australia die,” she said yesterday.

“Mayo has a chance to say to Canberra we will not allow this river to die on our watch. We will not be the electorate that had the chance to say something and wasn’t heard.”

Mr Spragg said an independent could win Mayo. “My sense is that there are a lot of Liberals that are unhappy with the choice of Briggs as a candidate,” he said.

“They see him as a staffer that has come out of Canberra, being opportunist and trying to get a safe seat. I think disenchanted Liberals might look to an independent.”