Understanding Settler Colonial Pasts

Left: The Native American Christ

It would be useful to discuss the general background and some historical aspects of the theme of land and belonging in settler colonies such as North America and Australia at this point. Differing attitudes to land were at the heart of the early conflicts between Aboriginal peoples and European settlers/invaders, and these differences also shaped the policies that were subsequently framed by settler states. Settlers from Europe brought with them their own ideas about the ownership of land and property that were closely linked to both the Protestant work ethic and capitalist desire.

By the time of the European Renaissance, the mythological associations of the land had become completely divorced from the understanding of it as space framed by political and scientific discourse. Both feudalism and the system of capitalism that gradually replaced it held that apart from certain specific sites (controlled by institutionalized religious structures) the only ‘power’ associated with place was the power of possession by its rightful owner. When the period of exploration and colonization began in Europe, the notion of the ownership of space, both private and corporate ownership, was firmly in place. It was common to ‘claim’ new territories in the name of one’s monarch and country on expeditions funded by emerging corporate bodies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, the East India Company, and so on. In the period of ‘settlement’, the ownership of land and property in claimed areas, and the right to allocate parcels of land to newly-arrived; settlers was arbitrarily assumed by European states.

Apart from the private ownership of property, an idea that was influential in the shaping the attitudes of many early settlers moving out of Europe into the ‘New World’ was the idea of the ‘wilderness’. As the literature of early settlers in both Australia and Canada indicates, there was unease about the discrepancy between the highly urbanized cultural forms of Europe and the ‘alien’ of the ‘new land.’ However, the Biblical notion of the wilderness to which Adam and Eve were exiled and wherein they were to toil for their bread, strongly affected the way in which the land was viewed, and the non-Christian inhabitants the settlers encountered were seen as part of this wilderness that had to be tamed in accordance with the Protestant ethic. Thus the ‘garrison mentality’ of early Euro-Canadians meant a refusal to ‘learn from the land.’ Instead, settlers sought to impose their Eurocentric weltanschauung upon the land and its original inhabitants. The ‘terror’ of the wilderness, the binary of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ and the need to protect ‘private property’ led to the demonisation of Aboriginal peoples, so that even the slightest perception of threat led to over-reaction from the ‘garrison’. The idea of place as something to be owned and industriously ‘farmed’ for profit thus clashed with the Aboriginal idea of being of the land, being owned by place, and performing ceremonies for the land and the beings that inhabit it. Strongly rooted in their own types of emplacement, the early explorers and settlers did not know how to recognize or understand the economies or cultures of the peoples they came into contact with.

It is necessary to understand the historical context of settler attitudes to the land and the way in which these shaped the policy of governing Aboriginal peoples. In the different phases of Aboriginal policy in Australia and Canada mentioned earlier, the government of Aboriginal lands changed radically. In the period prior to 1860, the period of ‘early institutionalized contact,’ there was no recognition whatsoever of Aboriginal land use: the notion of terra nullius prevailed in Australia as lands were parceled out for settlers. During this phase in Canada, treaties were used to set the boundary between settler society and Aboriginal societies, pushing Aboriginal communities onto smaller and smaller portions of their own land. In the period between 1860 and 1920, marked by the apartheid-style ‘protection’ of the early phase of paternalism, limited land holdings were set aside in Australia for use by missions as ‘safe’ or ‘refuge’ areas where Aboriginals could be sent. In Canada, by this time, the federal government held the titles to reserve land, and the Department of Indian Affairs assumed the powers of a land owner in order to control the use of the land.

As the policy of paternalism gradually clarified itself as assimilationism from 1920 till roughly about 1960, state control over land consolidated itself. Thus, in Australia, land in Aboriginal communities was retained under state control, and the boundaries of these lands could be and were changed by regulation. However, some major areas were reserved by the state for use by Aboriginal communities. In Canada, land was allotted for use by the institutions meant for or run by Aboriginal peoples. At this stage, a record of the use of the land for agriculture was kept as an indicator of the ‘progress’ of Aboriginal communities. When integration became the policy of the state from the 1960s onwards, Australia extended general state services to Aboriginal peoples, but continued to make arbitrary changes in the boundaries of Aboriginal lands. While major reservation areas were created in the Northern Territory, the claims of other more dispersed peoples across Australia, many far more severely affected by colonization than the peoples of the Northern Territories were ignored.

In Canada, the move to ‘integrate’ Aboriginal people into the mainstream involved a suggestion to abolish all reserves, something that was rejected outright by all Aboriginal people across Canada. Provincial authority was now extended to reserves, and the three-tier system of governance was consolidated with the strengthening of band administration. In the phase of so-called ‘pluralism,’ continuing from about 1975, Land Councils were established in the Northern Territory of Australia. The increased judicial activism and legal awareness among Aboriginal peoples and subsequent pressure on the government has led to at least in some measure the recognition of Aboriginal communities and land leases. In Canada, the phase of pluralism saw the according of the status of a Canadian province to Nunavut, the traditional homelands of the Inuit peoples, as well as the recognition of some Aboriginal rights of self-government of Aboriginal land and resources.

It has been a continuous struggle for Aboriginal peoples to maintain the continuity of their relationship to the land in the face of harsh and unsympathetic state policies. It hard for us to truly understand how complex this relationship is. Not only are land-based knowledges specific to communities, they can be specific to a single site, or a single family network, and persist even after migration to cities.

The notion of 'land as history' has also evolved to incorporate post-contact ways of Aboriginal belonging to the land. Australian historian Heather Goodall suggests that while non-Aboriginal readers and researchers need not fully comprehend the ‘mythic significance’ of the country, they need to understand and acknowledge, in the wake of cultural genocide, the new emotional relationships to the land that Aboriginal people formed after invasion, welfare and settlement. According to Goodall, old and new relationships unite in an Indigenous culture no longer purely traditional, though equally valid. She cites the role of land as actor in contemporary situations as well. In an anecdote about the Aboriginal community with whom she was working, she recalls that after the death of an Aboriginal friend, the mourners went to the riverside to fish, as a way of coping with the event. Though the quiet barbecue and conversation that followed had nothing ‘ceremonial’ or ‘traditional’ about them, Goodall recognizes that ‘it was about getting something, … drawing something from the land, from the places which people knew, … a way of relating to each other which used the land in a really productive way… a sense of the land being an active participant in what you’re doing.’ Many Aboriginal texts deal with the contemporary and historical connections to the land that may (or may not) be related to older ways of ‘belonging’ to the land.