Australian and Canadian Policies towards Aboriginal Peoples

The social policies regarding the Aboriginal populations of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are similar in their objectives and the major policy periods.

Before the 1830s, relations with Aboriginal peoples were based on military and commercial interactions, and influenced by competition between European countries for colonial territory, with no regard to the actual socio-economic conditions of the peoples. By that time, military and civilian settlements, missions and trade had been established. In many ways, the 1837 British House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines was foundational in shaping subsequent policy in Australia and Canada. This was influenced by the patterns of institutionalized contact and domination, and in turn had a formative influence on paternalism and integration policies in these colonies. Such was the influence of the Committee that only in the present movement towards pluralism are the committee’s views finally being displaced. While the specific forms of this initial contact differed in Australia and Canada, the acquisitive, exploitative and proselytizing nature of the European invasion was visible in all the colonies.

In the early period, missionaries with their own ‘civilizing’ agenda traveled widely and translated between European and Aboriginal languages, and while many were ‘shocked’ at the ‘heathen’ ways of the peoples, they were often also shocked by the murder, rape and plunder carried out by their own countrymen. In the case of Australia, the European settlers had a genocidal intent towards Aboriginal peoples, and there were a number of ineffectual prescriptions made by British authorities for the protection of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. In the case of Canada, there was an early history of commercial and military relationships between settlers and First Nations. Since, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the need for alliances with First Nations had passed, and early commercial relations (for example, the fur trade) had given way to large-scale European settlements, the focus shifted to social policy.

In each of the countries, there had been Aboriginal resistance to the waves of settlers inundating Aboriginal lands. In Australia, the ‘frontier’ contact between Aboriginal peoples and settlers was brutal, based on notions of the racial inferiority of the Aborigines. They were dispossessed of their lands, without recognition or compensation, and the individual settler was aided by the police in enforcing his ‘rights’ to the land. Land was granted by the Crown to settlers without recognizing prior ownership by Aboriginal peoples. Those Aboriginal people who were not killed or starved became refugees in their own land. In Canada, First Nations people were believed to require ‘careful management’, after the transition from earlier interactions that at least partly recognized the First Nations as trading partners or allies, to a dominance forcing First Nations to yield established rights for a European future. There was a silent partnership between Canada and the United States in this matter. Genocide was more frequent on the American side, and this served as a constant reminder to Canadian First Nations regarding the nature of European domination. Treaties were used to confine First Nations people to reserves, and to establish the infrastructure to dominate them. The Select Committee had not recommended the treaties, but in Eastern Canada they were already in place. Thus, through domination, single societies based on gross inequalities between Aboriginal and European populations were established. The effectiveness of the Select Committee’s recommendations was dependent on the British government’s will to impose rule on the settler societies, and this diminished with the establishments of relatively independent settler governments with their own forms of dominance over Aboriginal peoples.

However, while the Crown’s influence diminished, the dominance of settler governments enabled the continuation of paternalistic policies. In Australia, these policies were enshrined in the ‘Protection of Aborigines’ statutes that were passed in the period between 1869 and 1909; in Canada, they were introduced within the framework of the Indian Act, 1876 and its many successors. Settlers, entrenched in their notion of racial superiority introduced these policies in the ‘best interests’ of Aboriginal peoples.

The paternalistic period lasted for over a century, and can be said to have occurred in two phases. In the first phase, the ‘protection’ of Aboriginal peoples was the purported aim, and in the second phase, assimilation was the main objective. The social policy in the colonies that reflected this thought assumed that the Aboriginal peoples were a ‘dying race’. All Aboriginal communities experienced a sharp population decline after the European invasion, and settler governments assumed that these declines would continue. Racial and eugenic theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was influenced by the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest. However, by the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was clear that the Aboriginal minorities were neither ‘dying out’ nor being absorbed, and in Australia and Canada, attention subsequently shifted from the idea of ‘protection’ and ‘smoothening the dying pillow’ to the idea of assimilation. It seemed to missionaries and administrators that a more rigorous application of the policy of assimilation was needed.

Assimilationist policies remained in effect until long after the Second World War. In Canada and Australia, there was a major policy shift from paternalism to the idea of integration in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a hundred years since the inauguration of the assimilationist policy and nearly three decades after the start of a rigorous effort to achieve assimilation through social engineering. By the 1960s, general social services were full-fledged public services. These services provided each country with the opportunity to integrate Aboriginal social policy with mainstream social policy. Although the phrase that now had currency was ‘integration’ the main agenda remained the assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the mainstream. In Australia the change was evident in the repeal of the various state Aboriginal protection statutes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Aboriginal peoples were given citizenship rights in 1967 and incorporated into the census of Australia. In Canada, the Indian Act of 1951 provided the legal base for the extension of provincial social services to First Nations, and the services were expanded as funding agreements were reached between federal and provincial governments. First Nations peoples were also given the federal vote in 1967 without having to lose their status and rights as Indians through the process of enfranchisement.

The services that were extended to Aboriginal peoples did not recognize either their distinct cultures or the fact that Aboriginal peoples had endured over a century of paternalistic rule. The assumption of settler superiority was as much present in the policy of integration and the extension of common services to Aboriginal communities as it had been in the assimilationist period of separate services. In the 1960s, mainstream politicians and administrators assumed that Aboriginal peoples would welcome being ‘liberated’ from separate status. It was thought that Aboriginal peoples would soon become indistinguishable from settlers with regard to their use of public services, and that they would soon become one more piece in the general multicultural mosaic that comprised the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority and many ethnic/immigrant groups. Thus, assimilation would be achieved, and Aboriginal cultures would become invisible as far as public policy was concerned. These ideas of assimilation were never fulfilled.

The Aboriginal peoples resisted the policy of assimilation because it offered no solution to the issue of land rights and territory. Common services were designed to remove all recognition of special status within the state, including territorial recognition. There would be no need for special land tenure, social policy or institutions – racial origin and cultural difference would be ‘private’ matter. Thus, the Canadian First Nations rejected outright the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. In Canada, Aboriginal peoples began to reverse the historical process of the loss of land to settlers as new claims were made based on either Aboriginal title or treaties negotiated during the first stages of the process of European encroachment and settlement. In Australia, opposition to the loss of Aboriginal land manifested itself in the Commonwealth government preventing Queensland from varying Aboriginal land boundaries in order to facilitate mining and in establishing Aboriginal Land Councils in the Northern Territory.

At the same time as actions were underway to maintain land under Aboriginal control, movements were also growing to establish separate social rights for Aboriginal peoples based on a separate legal status. The establishment of new rights for Aboriginal peoples marked the decline of assimilation and integration policies – whereas for over a century the objective of social policy had been to end Aboriginal status, it is now being directed at strengthening that status. Whereas for a century or more ‘progress’ was measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who abandoned their traditions, progress is now measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who are strengthening those traditions and governments acknowledging rights and obligations that had been set aside in earlier periods. Although a movement towards the acceptance of difference by the state has begun (pluralism as distinct from multiculturalism that places Aboriginal peoples on the same platform as other ethnic groups), the longstanding presence within government infrastructures of the policies of assimilation and integration constantly conflict with the move towards pluralism and relative autonomy.

While we look at the literature of two Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Canada as a continuity within which the colonial disruption is a phase, rather than a defining moment, the post-contact literature/orature often reflects the effects on the communities of these policies and their adaptations to these changes. The emphasis on cultural continuity and change both before and after contact is also important as it enables me to look at the cultural specificity of Nyoongar and Ojibwe cultural production, rather than only looking, in a very narrow focus, at how the pattern of colonization is mirrored in the two cultures - a trend of ‘fixing’ the Aboriginal communities in perpetual victimhood, with colonization as their distinctive trait, that I find repeated in most readings of Fourth World writing at most Indian seminars on Australian and Canadian writing. At the same time, it is necessary to engage with the strongly political nature of much of post-contact writing because it helps us to see the agency of the Nyoongar and Ojibwe communities in defining the nature of their own modernity.

Since we deliberately do not begin with any particular theoretical premise within which we try and ‘fit’ Ojibwe or Nyoongar literature, it is through focusing text-by-text on particular and local contexts that we can critique established theoretical frameworks for reading ‘new literatures,’ and move towards an understanding of the tensions between separatist and universalist, insider and outsider boundaries in the reading of Aboriginal narratives.

As long as an egalitarian situation in the academy is not realized, and until the imposition of dominant theoretical frameworks by mainstream academia does not give way to more people- or culture-specific readings, thematic readings of Aboriginal texts, informed by a clear socio-political understanding, remain my personal choice. My readings follow this pattern, and revolve around the theme of land and the relationships of the peoples to the land. There is a tendency to analyze work published by minority writers from the perspective of authenticity. Thus, readers see only the exotic nature of ‘otherness’ and the writer is reduced to the role of the informant providing a necessary degree of ethnographic accuracy. In this context, perhaps, thematic readings may be a less appropriative way of reading culturally ‘different’ texts.