Indigeneity behind the Scenes: Invasion and Kriolisation

Martin Préaud

doi:10.25120/etropic.14.2.2015.3377

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the relations between Indigenous and Creole modes of existence and political situations. It combines a theoretical and ethnographic approach to explore the Aboriginal concept of “law and culture” as it emerged in the Kimberley region of Australia. In retracing the historical conjuncture that gave rise to the emergence of this concept into an Aboriginal regional organisation, it highlights important similarities between the developing politics of indigeneity in Australia and the processes of creolisation. Different translations of “law and culture”, a concept expressed in Kriol, allow for a processual understanding of cultural and political change within Aboriginal societies and in their relation to the broader Australian society. Although Kriol is considered a linguistic phenomenon rather than a cultural or political one in the Australian context, it points to specific historical and social processes that are crucial to understanding the conditions in which Indigenous subjects are able to enunciate and articulate their position. By situating creolisation in the broader context of settler colonialism, I argue that it is a necessary counterpart of indigeneity, but one that needs be silenced and made invisible

Highlights

Kurinjpi was a Walmajarri man who had been brought up on Kimberley cattle stations in northern Western Australia. He was a public figure in the Aboriginal movement against the drilling of Kimberley ground at Noonkanbah and an important activist who played a key role in the establishment and operation of the three regional organisations created by Kimberley Aboriginal people: the Kimberley Land Council (KLC), the Kimberley Language Resource Centre (KLRC), and the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC)
By analysing the history and concept of law and culture in the Kimberley, I have shown that there clearly are kriolising processes at work in Aboriginal political history and that they offer an avenue to explore a Aboriginal political history that cannot be reduced to resistance to the colonial experience, but point to a longue durée of Aboriginal societies beyond the “colonial moment”
In turning the gaze towards social practice and the organisation that embodies the concept of law and culture, I have suggested that these kriolising processes that underpin the vitality of Aboriginal societies constantly run the risk of being interrupted by the very politics of recognition that the late settler-colonial state characteristically promotes through an aspiration for clarity and authenticity

Summary

Introduction

Settler colonialism establishes a political situation where indigenous peoples and settlers can never quite meet – which should raise the issue of their modes of coexistence – and where forms of state recognition are means to manage and neutralize indigenous difference, for instance by defining criteria of authenticity in order to obtain certain rights, especially in relation to land – what Wolfe (1999) discusses as forms of “repressive authenticity” In this particular juncture, it is impossible for Aboriginal people to present themselves as creolized because it would mean their disappearance as Indigenous peoples both in the international and national meanings attached to this term. Kriolisation operates as another layer of relations and networks but does not erase or supersede those in which it is rooted

Behind the Scenes

Conclusion

Findings

Works Cited