Abstract
Subjectivity coded in Indigenous and non-Indigenous minds maintains a fictional spectre of Aboriginal deficiency and dependency. This essay argues that attempts to resist this narrative by economic means may serve in some ways to materially improve the lives of Indigenous peoples today, but are ultimately embedded in the western hegemony that continues to repress and inferiorise Aboriginal culture. Keywordssettler colonialism; subjectification; self-determination; economism
Highlights
First Nations peoples of Australia, whose traditional lands are incumbently covered by the Australian settler-state, were and continue to be subject to violent, state-mandated dispossession
NEW: Emerging scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies 2018 critical to rivaling the extremely destructive ensemble of social and political mechanisms leveraged by settler-colonists to domesticate, subordinate and eliminate Aboriginal people
Terra nullius produced an Indigenous subject with political demands centred on legal recognition of land rights and kinship structures: a relationship with the Australian settler-state in which Indigenous people are subjectified to reproduce “certain gestures, certain discourses, [and] certain desires” (Foucault 1982, p. 98)
Summary
First Nations peoples of Australia, whose traditional lands are incumbently covered by the Australian settler-state, were and continue to be subject to violent, state-mandated dispossession. Indigenous peoples function within a schema of liberal democratic governmentality, in which social and economic policies are culturally pluralistic, but politically and economically hegemonic.
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