Related pages
Australian Aboriginal Studies 2000 Abstracts
Globalisation, Decolonisation and Indigenous Australia
Claire Smith and
Graeme K. Ward
Introduction to the five papers in this issue that are based on presentations made at the Darwin Fulbright Symposium. Context of the Symposium is set and discussion made of the various themes and issues developed at the meeting and in the papers published here.
Playing the game: Is sport as good for race relations as we'd like to think?
Darren Godwell
With the increased engagement of Australia’s Indigenous peoples with Australian society, sport is heralded as a positive avenue of race relations. However, is this an accurate characterization of Australian race relations? The research reported here examined Aboriginal male involvement in the sport of rugby league. It is proposed that Indigenous involvement can be attributed more to a positive cycle of personal application and self-confidence than inherent physical ability or the supposed meritocracy of Australian sport. This positive spiral links belief in racial stereotypes of physicality, self-confidence in skill acquisition and practice, improved performance, belief reinforcement and, finally, reaffirming Aboriginal identity formation. This positive spiral was not infallible. Every subject interviewed recounted occasions when racism jolted this positive construction of self. The research also considered the need for these Indigenous football players to make frequent and regular transitions between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal situations within Australian society. An individual’s capacity to accommodate these shifts indicated their likelihood to persist in their careers. This research identifies a factor to be considered when seeking increased Indigenous retention in non-Indigenous dominated fields such as education, employment, professional careers or participation in political arenas.
Representing the Rainbow: Aboriginal culture in an interconnected world
Francesca Merlan
Stories known and told by Aboriginal peoples as recollections of their past experiences are increasingly being brought into the framework of recent, intensified efforts to recognize and validate Aboriginal culture by collection of narrative and other materials intended for a wider recipient public. This is illustrated by an example of a story about a place, part of a personal and shared store of such stories, which as told locally had retained a situatedness and openness to regular reformulation deriving from its embeddedness in everyday life. Gradually, however, such stories are becoming part of a repertoire of representations being produced as authoritative and illustrative for a wider recipient public, in this case in the broader context of the shift of land tenures and management schemes in remote areas and parklands. In this new context, formulated to communicate to an outside, non-participant observer, such stories are typically invested with a new character representative of Indigenous/non-Indigenous ‘difference’, and beyond the producers’ reach and capacity to adjust them. The process involved illustrates some of the tensions between forms of validation and the opening of spaces to new forms of inequality. In this picture, the desires of Indigenous Australians to have stories and histories recorded must be kept in mind.
The use of electronic media in remote Aboriginal communities
David Tafler
In a world where going away means growing away, remote outback communities can now plug into an evolving global fiber-optic satellite network without their members leaving the family or the land. These networks and linkages lie on different planes; they operate in different dimensions. On the ground, outback highways do not follow the traditional routes mapped out by the original inhabitants. Electronic tracks do not replicate the hub and spoke models of old roads.
Understanding the balance, articulating the borders, navigating the network, means vesting the law within a very different social framework. Several factors skew this social framework: the balance between inbound and outbound movement, between the inflow and outflow of information, ideas, and commodities. For Indigenous Australian communities wedged between the inflow of capital and goods and the outflow of culture, globalization disrupts rituals and cycles of learning that have endured for centuries. Other system/delivery designs, information priorities, and economic control models lie on the horizon. With nobody left untouched in even the most remote section of the bush, each individual within each community faces the challenge of discovering and reconstructing the boundaries of that new horizon.
Plugging in Indigenous knowledge: connections and innovations
David Nathan
Indigenous participation in the early growth of the World Wide Web was vigorous and successful. This was mainly due to the emergence of the Web as a new medium where conventional media forces were not able to control participation at the same time as Indigenous Australians were willing and able to get involved. In addition, properties of the new medium – hypertext, multimedia, and collaborativity – were ones that tended to encourage Indigenous participation. Non-Indigenous persons also created sites about Indigenous issues. The standard of Indigenous sites was generally good and the proportion of sites run by Indigenous bodies remained high. Some of Australia’s earliest Web sites were Indigenous, expressing a diverse range of styles and purposes. Since then, the number of Indigenous sites has increased, predictions of appropriation and misrepresentation have been unrealized, and Indigenous publishing has become an important part of the Web landscape.
The Web and today's colonialism
Cathryn McConaghy
The World Wide Web has the potential to reproduce and disrupt the social formations and legitimating conditions of Australian colonialism. Analytical frameworks need to be developed to evaluate the impact of the Web in Indigenous Australia. The development of Web-capitalism, colonial commodification, the formation of post-colonial nation-states and the technologies of contemporary colonial governance are examined in light of a long history of technological determinism in Indigenous education and social policy, are issues in. While celebrating the possibilities for the development of new social literacies, political alliances and new cultural productions, caution is needed about the potential of Indigenous voices on the Web to transform the material and symbolic structures of Australian colonial legitimation.
Human genetics: Control of research and sharing of benefits
Michael Dodson
The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) is a program of mass sampling of Indigenous peoples and other isolated populations, presently being conducted by teams of molecular biologists around the world and is due for completion early next century. It is a process for the collection, exchange and potential commercialization of the human gene. It operates within Australia. Arguably, the HGDP not only jeopardizes the rights and safety of the peoples targeted, but also could lead to the cultural, political and social complexity of Indigenous identity and rights of Indigenous Australians being reduced to an arbitrary genetic test. Recently, we have witnessed attempts by a United States institution to patent human genetic materials taken from Indigenous peoples without their free and informed consent. Such practices underline the lack of specific national and international law on human genetic material, which allows for the commercialization of human genome and the development of gene therapy at the expense of the human owners. Indigenous peoples and others need to be protected from such exploitation through adequate legal safeguards, including contractual arrangements and protocol statements, to guarantee privacy rights and entitlement to any medical or financial benefits arising from this research. Establishing Ethics Committees of Indigenous persons to monitor and approve medical research projects may be useful in protecting Indigenous communities from exploitation. Continued sampling of targeted populations without the free and informed and express consent of the peoples concerned will lead to the continuing disrepute of this project.
Genetic research: what does this mean for Indigenous Australian communities?
Sheila van Holst Pellekaan
People whose maternal ancestry stems mainly from the Paakintji and Ngiyambaa language groups of the Darling River region contributed blood samples for a study which identified distinctive types from the hypervariable mitochondrial D-loop segment 1. The study provided information of local social, as well as scientific interest. Analysis suggests a distinction between northern and southern Darling River groups, although further work is required to assess strict conformity to remembered language divisions. Diversity is likely to have been generated over the long period of occupancy during fluctuating environmental conditions but may also reflect ancient ancestry from populations which entered Australia at different times.
With the return of information to communities in the Darling River region of western New South Wales, the overwhelming interest expressed has been concerned with local family genetic history. The sharing of information between families is naturally limited by the need to maintain confidentiality. Local Elders have expressed a wish to use the information in education of young ones and are presently involved in discussions about the best way to provide and maintain a local repository of this and other research data.
The researcher is rewarded for the lengthy consultation process by friendship and expressions of interest from participant families and others in continuing the work.Co-operative research can provide information of value to both scientific investigators and local participants, and do much to overcome a feeling of distrust toward research arising from past experiences. Adequate and ongoing consultation, as well as the return of results to communities in an accurate and appropriate form, must be part of the research strategy. Information from mitochondrial studies may assist Aboriginal people who were removed from their families, to trace links, but researchers must ensure that participants have a realistic understanding of limitations of the research.