Abstract
This essay examines gambling as one thread of a broader fabric of economic relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. How do these relationships shape the ways gambling is promoted, experienced, regulated and talked about in Australia?; what are the implications of this for the governmentality of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians?; and how are political and cultural processes of racism and white possession involved in and reproduced through these relationships? What follows is a comparative analysis of discourses on Indigenous gambling in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. The aim of this comparison is to imagine alternative figures, which might inhabit the intersection of Indigeneity and gambling, to that which currently prevails in the national imagination: the Indigenous problem gambler and target of practical reconciliation policies.
Highlights
Practical reconciliation, neo-liberalism and Indigenous rightsBy the end of the Liberal party’s first term in office, led by conservative former Prime Minister John Howard, unfounded public concerns following the Australian High Court’s native title decisions in the 1990s, about Indigenous people ‘stealing our backyards’, were increasingly giving way to concerns about appalling conditions in remote Indigenous communities
Structural problems in Indigenous communities and failures in Indigenous organisations, many of which were due to inadequate resourcing, were cited as proof that Indigenous Australians were incapable of self-management
By 2004 public faith in the capacity of Indigenous people to control their own domestic affairs had been so seriously undermined through political and media campaigns targeting the character of its leaders that the elected representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) established in 1990, was disbanded by the Australian government
Summary
By the end of the Liberal party’s first term in office, led by conservative former Prime Minister John Howard, unfounded public concerns following the Australian High Court’s native title decisions in the 1990s, about Indigenous people ‘stealing our backyards’, were increasingly giving way to concerns about appalling conditions in remote Indigenous communities. In the context of practical reconciliation, these sets of binary oppositions have had at least two significant effects On one hand they have been used by political and media agents to attribute ‘cultural’ meanings to problems such as alcoholism, violence and child abuse in Indigenous communities by disaggregating figures from wider national trends.i On the other hand they have been deployed by some Indigenous leaders to speak the only language which the Howard government seemed able to understand and be prepared to listen to. In other words: Indigenous welfare policy is inextricably bound to histories of colonization which have enabled whiteness to signify and circulate as a valuable and exclusive form of property in Australia (see Harris 1993), with ongoing consequences in spheres of law, politics and culture
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