To Be, or Not to Be, Aboriginal - That is the Question
Commentaries on Aboriginality
The Social Researchers
“In the past half century, the Indigenous Australian population has grown at a far faster rate than can be explained by births alone, and has come to include more western-educated people living in the south-east of the country…[these]…”New Identifiers”…were more likely to believe their ancestors – known and unknown – played an active role in defining their identity…[and] were particularly drawn to Indigenous ancestors, it would appear, because they seemed to offer them a sense of deep belonging to the Australian continent, a holistic spiritualism, and a meaningful family history.”
- Elizabeth Watt and Emma Kowal, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2019, VOL. 42, NO. 16, 63–82.
An ‘On-the-Ground Informant
Pastor Paul Albrecht, AM was ordained in the Lutheran Church and Field Superintendent of the Finke River Mission in Central Australia. He was fluent in the Western Arrarnta Aboriginal language. A highly abridged version of his address to the 9th Conference of The Samuel Griffith Society in 1997 is below.
‘Who is an Aborigine? It seems to me that this is the first question which needs to be answered when attempting to define the nature of the Aboriginal identity.
Soon after receiving the invitation to address you tonight, I remember picking up The Advertiser, the Adelaide daily of 19 July, 1997. Splashed across its front page was a picture of a middle-aged white woman, with the following story line:
"For 44 years Kathy Burgemeister thought she was white. Now she has declared herself Aboriginal. And she is proud of it."
Inside, it gave a truncated family tree which seemed to suggest, and I advisedly say seemed to suggest as the detail was very sparse, that her parents were Australians; that of her grandparents, her grandfather was Swedish and her grandmother Australian; and that, of her great grandparents, her great grandfather was Aboriginal (his name would suggest, of dual Aboriginal/White descent) and her great grandmother was Irish.
The Advertiser went on to say:
"[Since learning of her Aboriginality'], Mrs Burgemeister said she had met many Aboriginal people who had begun to fill in her family history. She had visited special sites of significance, including several on the Coorong, where she felt spiritual attachment."
The current federal Government definition makes it possible for Mrs. Burgemeister to claim to be an Aborigine, since that definition is, a person descended from the original inhabitants of this land who chooses to identify as an Aborigine, and who is accepted as such by his/her own group. This definition makes Aboriginality purely and simply a matter of race. So any person whose genealogy includes an Aborigine, or a person of dual Aboriginal/White descent, can claim to be an Aborigine. This creates the confusing situation where people who still live largely according to their Aboriginal traditions are equated with people who for all intents and purposes live as White Australians, and look like White Australians.
…[F]or someone to call him or herself an Aborigine, is really of no great consequence. It's no different from other Australians who draw attention to their ethnic origins by calling themselves Irish, Scottish, German, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, or whatever. While this may cause some pique among those who believe that all of us should simply call ourselves Australians, I believe this only becomes divisive when people of different ethnic backgrounds demand special treatment from their fellow Australians, because of their ethnic origins.
Aboriginal identity in the past, i.e., pre-settlement, was not predicated on the basis of race. Nor was it predicated on the basis of an Aboriginal nation, since Australia never was an Aboriginal nation…
[T]he direction in which we must look to discover the Aboriginal identity…[include] land, kinship…and tjurrunga. Tjurrunga is a generic Arrarnta word which, depending on its context, refers to the objects representing the ancestral spirit beings; the rituals these beings instituted to maintain the orderly functioning of the world and the increase of its flora and fauna; the rituals commemorating the pre-history travels and activities of these spirit beings, and so on.
[T]he land, the tjurrunga, and kinship, are the foundation blocks of the individual and corporate Aboriginal identity. These three are indivisible, and in a sense form a larger entity…The more traditional Aborigines' definition of who is an Aborigine reflects this. They define as an Aborigine a person who knows his "law" and lives according to it. ("Law" is the generic English term Aborigines use now to denote the totality of their culture, comprising land, tjurrunga, kin, actual and classificatory).
Whether a person is Aborigine or White, or of dual Aboriginal/White descent, is considered irrelevant. Crucial is whether the person knows the "law" or not. Traditional Aborigines cannot conceive of a person who no longer knows his "law", his language or his country, as being an Aborigine, in the sense that they apply it to themselves. If one or another of their relatives has lost his language and his culture, this in no way invalidates their relationship.
But for them, it does raise serious questions concerning their relatives' claim to Aboriginality, because for them Aboriginality is not a matter of race (they never saw themselves as a race), but of knowing the traditions and observing them…
So if we are seeking to establish the Aboriginal identity, it is in their culture that we must seek this corporate identity. This is not to suggest that the Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal identity are identical. Rather, it is the recognition that the Aboriginal culture is the only means by which we can access their corporate identity…
Much is made of the Aborigines' attachment to their land, and of their need to be on their land for their well-being…However, much of what is said, or reported on this subject in the media, gives the impression that the Aborigines' attachment to their land is genetic, something they were born with; something they have even when they are brought up in a white urban setting, without any knowledge of their own language, and without any in-depth knowledge of the mythology relating to their land.
The Aborigines' attachment to their land has nothing to do with genetics, but everything to do with learning, and the subsequent internalisation of the knowledge that has been passed on.
Aborigines were/are animists, believing that the ancestral spirit beings (also known as totemic ancestors) who were active at the dawn of time, are still to be found in the land they shaped and fashioned. They also reside in its flora and fauna, in the natural phenomena like thunder and lightning, in the sun, moon and stars, and in the humans to whom they gave birth. It is these same spirit beings residing in the land, and in the people of that land, that give the Aborigines their unique attachment to their land, and their sense of oneness with the land.’ - (our emphasis -Ed.)
An Aboriginal Elder
“You can only be a proud Aboriginal person if you carry your own learning and cultural lifestyle with you”.
— Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Chairman Yothu Yindi Foundation
Galarrwuy Yunupingu confirms Pastor Paul Albrecht’s sentiments that being Aboriginal is all about knowing, and living by ,one’s ‘Learning and Law’
An Aboriginal Academic & Bureaucrat
Professor Shane Houston has worked in Aboriginal Affairs for more than 35 years holding many roles at local, state, national levels including as a CEO of an Aboriginal Medical Service and National Coordinator of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Organisation and took up his current position at the University of Sydney as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services). He is the first Aboriginal person to be appointed to such a senior role at any Australian university.
Speaking in an episode of SBS’s Insight program (1), Professor Houston states :
“There are three issues [with regard to aboriginality]:
The first is about identity. The second one is about heritage. And the third one is about needs.
Let's go to the first one about identity. I've been working in Aboriginal affairs for almost 40 years. I have seen Aboriginal people of all sorts of colours but who are incredibly proud of their identity - that is a construct of self not of anybody else, it’s yourself. Your identity is a spirit, a set of values, a force which informs your decisions which is a product of story and of journey immersed in our identity. That is something the Government can never give you. No organisation can give you that. Your family, your community, yourself gives you that identity.
The second question is about heritage. Now I have had people have conversations with me and say, 'Shane, I am not Aboriginal but I grew up in West Wylong and I think if I go back far enough, I'm sure I'd be able to find. Why aren't I Aboriginal?" and my response to them was, "That might be part of your heritage and you should be very proud of it just as I am very proud of my mother’s English heritage." They can be very proud of their Aboriginal heritage. But it is not their identity. It is not that story and journey which informs their decisions.
The third thing that's collided in to this conversation is the question of need. We've criticised in some ways, the definitions that we use in Australia but at least ours is consistent, it has survived nearly 40 years and it's a lot better than definitions that exist in other parts of the world. If you're Apache in the US for example, one group you have to be half cast. Another group you have to be quarter cast. The next group of Apache, you have to be 1/8th of blood and they have a DNA test, so it is incredibly complex.
So the question of services which all the people have raised here, access to services is something that should be based on need. I earn a good wage my kids shouldn't have to access those services. I look after my kids. There are Aboriginal people at the university I work at who without scholarships would never get an opportunity. Absolutely the case and let's not say just because we went to and they have Aboriginal kids in Scott's or Andrew's or any of the big schools around Sydney that they don't have needs. They all come from families and I have met most of these kids. They're single parent families or out bush and they've decided to give their kids something better. Let's not judge them on the fact that they go to those schools. Let's judge them on what their needs are, we have to reconcile those three issues.”
(1) - Prof Houston speaking from 47:49 on the SBS Insight program here.
The English Boy Who ‘Became’ Indigenous
A Canadian ‘Aboriginal’, Grey Owl - alias Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, born in Sussex England
Clive Webb, professor of modern American history at the University of Sussex, said it was "very easy" to dismiss Grey Owl as a fraud. "I think you do have to separate some of his personal shortcomings from his great work as a conservationist," he said.
"It is precisely because he has assumed that identity that he has an apparent authenticity that he would not have possessed if he was just any other white European settler who'd moved to Canada in the 19th or early 20th Century.
"This is a young man who, really from the outset of his life, wanted to be a Native American. There's a real singular sense of vision and purpose about him which really stands out. He's not simply setting the context for the environmental movement that will emerge later in the 20th Century, but he's really the one of the first and foremost voices. He is the first celebrity conservationist."
‘One hundred and twenty five years ago, a great conservationist - and imposter - was born in East Sussex. Known as Grey Owl, he was one of Canada's first conservationists and is said to have saved the Canadian beaver from extinction. But his beginnings in south-east England were a world apart from his public image as a celebrated writer and speaker on both sides of the Atlantic. Born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney on 18 September 1888 in Hastings, he grew up enthralled by stories of Native Americans and moved to Canada aged 17 in search of a new life.
He married a girl from the Ojibwa tribe and learned the language, trapping and canoeing. He kept his true identity a secret, however, telling inquisitive traders and trappers he was the son of a Scotsman who had married an Apache…[H]e married a[nother] woman but he abandoned her soon after for reasons unknown - a recurring theme in his personal life, much of which remains unclear. [O]n his travels, Archie Belaney was rescued from snow blindness by an Ojibwa chief called Ne-Ganikabo, or The One Who Stands First. He studied under Ne-Ganikabo for four years, becoming skilled in wilderness survival techniques, and adopted the name Grey Owl. His message was 'you belong to nature, it does not belong to you.'
… He stopped trapping animals and begin his writing and conservation work, warning of the dangers of the logging and fur industries and how they threatened Canada's native beavers with extinction. His first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, attracted rave reviews and his journey to fame began. Published in 1931, it is partly memoir and partly about the vanishing Canadian wilderness. However, all trace of his past life in Hastings was erased. The book's foreword states: "It should be explained that the author is a half-breed Indian, whose name has recently become known throughout the English-speaking world. "His father was a Scot, his mother an Apache Indian of New Mexico, and he was born somewhere near the Rio Grande forty odd years ago."
The fame of his books led to Grey Owl being invited to carry out lecture tours of Canada, England and the United States in the 1930s and he became arguably the first celebrity conservationist.
Don Smith, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Calgary, said he thought Grey Owl had adopted his Native American persona as a cover, because of his lack of family. He said he had "cast a tremendous shadow" over subsequent conservationists and was decades ahead of his time. "This is 1930’s Canada, it seemed to have inexhaustible forest," he said. "His personal life was a mess but he had insight, he had vision. This man had a message. Everybody's green now. He was green when there was nothing to it. His message was 'you belong to nature, it does not belong to you'."
Prof Webb said many people felt deceived and in some cases Grey Owl's books were withdrawn or his alias replaced with his real name. A spokeswoman from Prince Albert National Park said Grey Owl's charade pretending to be aboriginal was still a contentious issue for some local First Nations people. "He was an eccentric person and some of his personal choices in life have been criticised, but his efforts to promote conservation and the protection of habitat and wildlife are still resonant today," she said.
From : Grey Owl: Canada's great conservationist and imposter
‘Dark Emu’, who is ‘more Cornish than Koorie’, who wants us to Learn to Love our Country
Bruce Pascoe is a writer of Tasmanian, Bunurong and Yuin descent.
From a 2019 Magazine article we learn that,
‘The arc of his own life, from working-class whitefella to Aboriginal eminence, tells its own story of hidden history and racial reconciliation… It’s the evangelising of someone who experienced late awakening to indigenous history, both the country’s and his own.
Growing up in 1950s working-class Melbourne, Pascoe knew poverty but not much family lore…In his [writing] there’s a deep identification with society’s toilers and an equally deep distrust of bosses and the political class. Bricklaying was Pascoe’s first employment but his “infatuation with words” led him to Melbourne University and a job as a high school teacher in Mallacoota…
By his late 20s he was married with a daughter and…determined to avoid the poverty he’d grown up in…His mother’s brother sometimes alluded to their Aboriginal ancestry but Pascoe didn’t begin investigating it in earnest until he was in his early 30s, by which time his marriage was crumbling and he was attempting the financially perilous switch from teacher to writer. He had fallen for the woman he would spend most of his life with…and moved with her to a caravan at remote Cape Otway…
By the time he was 40, he had fully identified as Koori and was immersing himself in indigenous language… Pascoe says he found indigenous ancestors on both sides of his family, tracing them to Tasmania, to the Bunurong people of Victoria and the Yuin of southern NSW…
[He wrote] Convincing Ground, a 302-page polemic about Aboriginal dispossession and its legacies. In one passage he embraced the animist spirituality of traditional Aborigines, claiming to have witnessed quails gathering at the side of the road when [an Aboriginal Elder] passed by. In the book and in interviews he admitted that his indigenous ancestry was distant, and he was “more Cornish than Koori”…[but]…Pascoe admits — he once stated that his great-grandmother had an Aboriginal name, but declines to elaborate today because the claim has put him in dispute with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, which polices claims of Aboriginality in that state.
It’s an example of how contested this territory can be, and Pascoe acknowledges the “schizophrenic” nature of having both Anglo and indigenous ancestry yet choosing one over the other. He has been to Britain and walked around the Cornish landscape of his forebears, he says, but felt nothing.
Bruce Pascoe honouring his ancestors with his Yuin people, South Coast of NSW, 2020.
“When people ask me whether I’m ‘really’ Aboriginal, because I’m so pale, I say ‘Yeah’. And when they ask me whether I can explain it, I say: ‘Have you got three hours?’” In the broader indigenous community, Pascoe’s acceptance is now so established that he is routinely bestowed the honorific “uncle”, and he was anointed Person of the Year at the 2018 Dreamtime Awards — a ceremony he attended in his first suit jacket, bought from a charity shop.
Seven years ago he was summoned to a meeting with Uncle Max Dulumunmum Harrison, a Yuin elder, arriving to find himself at a cultural ceremony that lasted a number of days…It was the beginning of his complete acculturation into indigenous lore, although Pascoe again declines to elaborate. “This is an honour but not something we talk about, nor do we point to the marks,” he says, adding that he prefers not to use the term “initiated” because of its capacity to be overdramatised. “I don’t call myself an elder,” he says, “just older.”… Pascoe connects with general readers because, “he knows what it feels like to be a whitefella — in a sense, Bruce is translating it for whitefellas”.
A ‘Self-De-Registered’, Aboriginal Woman
Kerryn Pholi has worked in Indigenous research and policy in various government agencies and NGOs and written for the Spectator
Why I burned my 'Proof of Aboriginality'
- By Kerryn Pholi 27 September 2012
After a career spent in jobs reserved for Indigenous Australians, Kerryn Pholi has had enough of being a "professional Aborigine". Far from closing the gap, she now believes these strategies are racist.
- Abridged version below - Full version at The Drum, ABC
Kerryn writes,
“I am a person of Aboriginal descent. This is nothing special; all it means is that I could trace my ancestry back to a stone-age way of life more easily, with far fewer steps, than most readers. When I think about my Aboriginal ancestry, I feel gratitude. I feel gratitude because modernity has given me a life of ease, pleasure and privilege beyond anything an Aboriginal woman in pre-invasion Australia could possibly imagine. As a person of Aboriginal descent, and a female at that, I am grateful that I had the good fortune to be born here in Australia in 1975, and not here in say, 1775.
Perhaps life for my Aboriginal ancestors (the Bundjalung people of what is now northern NSW) had its good points prior to invasion, just as European life around 5,000 BC couldn't have been all bad ... though nobody seems to miss that particular lifestyle much or yearn to have it back. Perhaps some readers are disgusted that a person with Aboriginal ancestry would be grateful to the 'white invaders', given the historical horrors they brought upon 'my people'. Nonsense; I can feel gratitude for my personal good fortune without needing to be grateful to anyone in particular. I don't feel particularly proud to be Aboriginal. No-one likes to see a skinhead thumping his chest and saying he is proud to be white; how is pride in an Aboriginal racial identity any different?
And yet in a way I am proud of my Aboriginal ancestors. I used to identify as Aboriginal, and I have worked in 'identified' government positions only open to Aboriginal people. As a professional Aborigine, I could harangue a room full of people with real qualifications and decades of experience with whatever self-serving, uninformed drivel that happened to pop into my head. For this nonsense I would be rapturously applauded, never questioned, and paid well above my qualifications and experience. I worked in excellent organisations that devoted resources to recruiting, elevating and generally indulging people like me, simply because other people like me told these organisations that's what they needed to do to 'overcome Indigenous disadvantage'.
In these organisations I worked alongside dedicated, talented and highly skilled people - and there may have been room for one more dedicated, talented and highly skilled person if I hadn't been there occupying a position designated for someone of my 'race'.
In my years of working as a professional Aborigine, I don't think I did anything that really helped anybody much at all, and I know that I was a party to unfairness, abuses of power, wastefulness and plain silliness in the name of 'reconciliation' and 'cultural sensitivity'.
Aside from a nagging sense of feeling like a complete fraud, things were reasonably OK until I made the mistake of reading works by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen's, Identity and Violence and Thomas Sowell's, Affirmative action around the world: an empirical study. After that, I could no longer ignore the fact that my career was built on racism. Not 'reverse racism' or 'positive discrimination' - just plain racism, of benefit to nobody except a select gang of privileged people with the right genes and a piece of paper to prove it.
In other words, of benefit only to people like me. About 18 months ago I burned my 'proof of Aboriginality' documentation (a letter from the NSW Department of Education acknowledging that I was Aboriginal, on the basis that my local Aboriginal Lands Council at that time, circa 1990, had said so).
I walked away from the Aboriginal industry for good. It hasn't been easy, and I am still working out what to do with myself from here, but it has been rewarding. It feels great to simply identify as a human being, and to work alongside colleagues that only know me as another ordinary wage-slave, and not as a pampered mascot with the power to ruin a career with an accusation of 'insensitivity'.
It also feels good to do proper work; sitting around a government office essentially being paid to be Aboriginal is both undignified and boring. I miss the money of course, but I don't miss the racism.
If you are an Aboriginal person with the literacy and media access to be reading this, you are not 'disadvantaged'; you are one of the most fortunate people on the planet. You don't need special assistance because you are Aboriginal, you are not owed recompense because you are Aboriginal, nor do you possess special powers to perform tasks that others could not.
To accept preferential treatment on the basis of one's race - in employment, academe, the arts, the media - is to participate in racism. It does not 'close the gap', promote role-models or let you 'challenge the system from within'. To genuinely challenge racism we need to stop rationalising our individual self-interest, reject preferential treatment, compete in the open market for jobs, grants and audiences, and accept the financial and career consequences of refusing to be bought.
For A Typical ‘Progress Left’ Analysis of Aboriginality
- see “Aboriginal Identity: Who is 'Aboriginal'? - Creative Spirits Website here.
This website site details all the usual “Identity” reasons for claiming Aboriginality, but even these Progressive Left contributors acknowledge that there are problems (which should be addressed?) in defining Aboriginality particularly :
‘Problem: No standard for recognising Aboriginality where several problems impede recognition of Aboriginality, namely:
Organisations do not recognise each other's paperwork. There appears to be a lack of consistency between agencies (some have accepted statutory declarations).
There is no governing body regarding Aboriginality. It is left up to the individual organisations to interpret government rules.
No national register or directory of Aboriginal people exists.
Services insist on confirming Aboriginality to avoid abuse. Like any system of services that aims to provide a benefit to a minority of society, Aboriginal services are subject to abuse by a small number of dishonest people.’
Some have therefore called for a national database of Aboriginal people to resolve ‘once and for all’ the controversial issue of proving Aboriginality. This issue is not going away and as the ‘Indigenous’ population increases rapidly, and as a scramble for government benefits and funds intensifies, it is sure to continue to spill over it acrimony each year - see 2012, 2015 , 2016, 2016, 2016, 2020,
“If we can't work out who our own people are, how can we expect non-Aboriginal people to understand?“— Ray Gates, Mentoring Program Coordinator, National Association of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Physiotherapists [Ref 16]
