Aboriginal Presence Research Articles

Employment Equity and Canada's Aboriginal Peoples

Aboriginal Canadians – First Nations peoples, Inuit and Metis – are the most disadvantaged social group in Canada, with significant gaps in their health, education and living standards compared to other Canadians. A 2010 social development index created by the federal government reported that, of the bottom 100 Canadian communities on the index, 96 were First Nations and one was Inuit; only one First Nation community ranked among the top 100 Canadian communities. These social disadvantages are reflected in the Canadian labour market: while the Aboriginal presence in the workplace has steadily improved during the past thirty years, there remain substantial differences in employment rates, job training, advancement to higher-responsibility positions and wage earnings that will not be closed any time soon. A meaningful legislative tool in the federal government’s hands is the Employment Equity Act, enacted in 1986 following the 1984 recommendations of the Commission on Equity in Employment (the “Abella Report”), and revised a decade later. There have been some remarkable employment equity gains for Aboriginal peoples over the past 25 years, but these gains have been too modest and incremental to qualitatively transform their labour force standing, let alone significantly close the social gaps separating them from the rest of the Canadian population. This essay attempts to measure the efficacy of employment equity over the past quarter-century on the working lives of Aboriginals in Canada, set against the landscape of their social well-being.

Maryborough and Its History

Let me begin by acknowledging the Aboriginal presence in the district around Maryborough. The earliest European officials named this then-unknown area the Wide Bay, after the curving mainland between Fraser Island and Double Island Point that had been named ‘Wide Bay’ by Captain James Cook as the Endeavour sailed north along the coast in 1770.

Urban Myths: Exploring the Unsettling Nature of Aboriginal Presence in and through a Regional Australian Town

According to census data, Aboriginal Australians live predominantly in urban localities. Yet ‘urban Aboriginality’ has received limited attention in the Australian literature and continues to be generalised largely in terms of deficit and illegitimacy. Drawing on findings from recent research in Broome, Western Australia, this article explores how Aboriginal presence in and through a particular urban space disrupts overlain colonial boundaries regarding who and what constitutes ‘urban Aboriginality’. It argues that not only have ‘authenticity discourses’ had a marginalising and disciplining effect on Aboriginal spatial geographies, they also paint a distorted picture of the realities of Aboriginal lived experiences in and through urban spaces.

The changing politics of miscegenation

In Tasmania’s Mercury newspaper Henry Reynolds raised the contentious issue of identity in respect to Tasmanian Aboriginal people of mixed heritage. Such people, Reynolds stated, might better be described as Creole. This paper firstly canvasses why it is that notions of hybridity are anathema to many Aborigines, then proceeds to discuss how the elision of white heritage and identity invoke some of the same contested ideologies underpinning the assimilation policy. The paper continues by examining the issue of identity in the context of the language used to describe the British usurpation of Australia and subsequent black-white relations. Finally, the paper examines the impact that the Aboriginal presence has had and is having on the psyche of settler-Australians, and suggests a reason why it is that many settler-Australians in mixed Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal partnerships appear comfortable with, or at least do not resist, having their offspring elide one heritage and identity (white) for the sake of another (Aboriginal).

Aboriginal Enterprises: negotiating an urban Aboriginality

In 1952 long time political activist Bill Onus used compensation from a road accident to establish Aboriginal Enterprises, a tourist outlet in Belgrave, on the outskirts of Melbourne. Employing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers Aboriginal Enterprises manufactured artefacts and furnishings, imported bark paintings and didjeridus from Arnhem Land and sold a range of other small objects. At a time when assimilation policies expected Aborigines to adopt the ideals and values of white Australians, Aboriginal Enterprises offered a model for cultural maintenance that began to rebuild pride in Aboriginality, contributing toward a new urban Aboriginal presence in Melbourne. Yet despite its success, Aboriginal Enterprises is almost completely overlooked in the history of Aboriginal art in south-eastern Australia. With colonisation Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia were incorporated within the uneven power relations of a settler society. From the outset they engaged in barter and trade, drawing from their own cosmologies, stories and histories and selectively incorporating from colonial genres. For Aboriginal people, participation in tourism through the production of artefacts and cultural performances was an expression of continuing attachment to their own culture often carried out in opposition to government policies of assimilation. However the narrowly ethnographic concerns of museums viewed the stylistic hybridity and commodification of these objects as evidence of acculturation and cultural decline. This scholarly response imposed an enforced silence on the history of Aboriginal art in the south-east such that, even today, a lacunae exists from the drawings of William Barak and Tommy McRae in the late nineteenth century to the emergence of a contemporary 'urban' Aboriginal artistic expression in the 1970s and 1980s - a period of silence that coincides precisely with the implementation of assimilation policies aimed at rendering Aborigines invisible. By considering the cultural production of Aboriginal Enterprises in the light of recent debates in cross cultural discourse and the wider socio-political context of colonisation, this paper intervenes in this apparent historical absence to argue for a dynamic and resilient presence in south-eastern Australia. My research shows that for ethnic minorities entangled in colonial power relationships, the visibility politics of tourism provides a critical insight into the representation and recognition of Aboriginal identities within the wider framework of the nation state. The ambiguities and tensions that arise around issues of authenticity and tradition as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike engage in processes of collaboration, adaptation and appropriation suggest the saliency of this study to postcolonial debates on tourist art.

International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (review)

Reviewed by: International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker Sophie Bush Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman, eds. International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker. Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances, No. 23. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008. Pp. 292. $66.95 (Pb). Given the extent of Timberlake Wertenbaker's oeuvre, Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman's International Dramaturgy, the first full-length volume on [End Page 280] the playwright, is overdue and very welcome. Rather than address the gap in the market with a more conventional overview of the playwright's work, Roth and Freeman frame their collection around the "bold proposition . . . that all of Wertenbaker's plays can be understood as translations in some fashion" (13). As the editors point out, such a focus is well timed with the current academic interest in translation studies. The editors' manifest commitment to interdisciplinarity and cultural diversity deserves much praise. As the book's cover notes, contributions have been gathered from "varied countries, language traditions, and disciplines," authored by literary and theatre scholars, theatre practitioners, writers and directors, classicists, and historians. The sixteen chapters form an even spread across Wertenbaker's major published plays (those appearing in her two volumes of collected plays) and her Greek and French translations, but they do not address more recent works, such as Jenufa and Galileo's Daughter, or her earlier, unpublished pieces, many of which could fit well into the frame of study, as the editors acknowledge. Notable essays include Freeman's own "Group Tragedy and Diaspora: New and Old Histories of Exile and Family in Wertenbaker's Hecuba and Credible Witness," which explores Benedict Anderson's idea of "imagined communities" in relation to the displaced people of Wertenbaker's asylum play, Credible Witness. Freeman recognizes the hopeful quality of Wertenbaker's writing, which "reaches back to ancient Greek models [such as Hecuba and Trojan Women] but transforms the purgatory of exile into the potential of diaspora" (63). Equally impressive is Kate Bligh's "Oppositional Symmetries: An Anthropological Voyage through Our Country's Good and The Poetics." Bligh's examination of her hypothesis that "virtually every structural mechanism in Our Country's Good symmetrically opposes one of [Aristotle's] strictures" (177) proves there is still much academic mileage to be had from Wertenbaker's best-known and much-discussed play. In fact, Bligh's arguments provide some refreshing reassessments that counter the accusations of cultural imperialism sometimes laid against this text. Particularly astute is her reading of Wertenbaker's "reduction" of the Aboriginal presence within the play to one solitary figure as a reversal of an Aristotelian chorus: anonymous, observational, and representative of the (native) people. Bligh argues persuasively that this strategic diminution can be considered the counter-side to Wertenbaker's parallel expansion of Aristotle's recommended single protagonist to a community of subjects. Towards the end of the volume are two interviews with theatre practitioners: the American director Carey Perloff, who has collaborated with Wertenbaker on translations of Hecuba and Phaedra (interviewed by Roth); and the Egyptian-born Dalia Basiouny, a writer, director, performer, [End Page 281] and scholar who has translated The Love of the Nightingale into Egyptian. Basiouny's interview (conducted skilfully by Freeman) in particular adds a great deal to the volume. Basiouny seems to embody the volume's preoccupations most convincingly of all: her multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary perspective is lived practice rather than matter for theoretical speculation. The editorial decision to arrange chapters neither chronologically nor "in 'formal' divisions" - there are no subsections through which to navigate the book's sixteen chapters - but in "dialogic clusters that jump from translations to new works" (26) creates some problems for the volume's overall clarity. Whilst the intention not to pigeon-hole the chapters or the plays they discuss is admirable, and one that Wertenbaker's own distaste for labels would no doubt support, the consequent loss of structure makes the book seem a little daunting. In her introduction, Roth voices the hope that this structure will "surface conversation across chapters" and "take a cue from Wertenbaker's own dramaturgy, where gaps and connections . . . foster critical engagement" (26). At times, the chapters...

Colonial Wars and Indigenous Geopolitics: Aboriginal Agency, the Cuba-Florida-Mexico Nexus, and the Other Diaspora

Cuba served as a frontier outpost and key to the defence of the Spanish American empire and became one of the first centres for slavery in the colonial Americas. At the same time, Cuba also served the interests of various North American Amerindian groups and individuals who conducted trade, diplomatic, and other missions to the island colony, and also undertook migration and settlement there. Aboriginal peoples were not merely the object of the earliest forced migrations; they too generated and directed (and/or adapted) their own missions and diasporas. Florida and New Spain/Mexico represented two substantial sources for Amerindian migration to and settlement in Cuba. This article raises questions about both the aboriginal presence in Cuba and its diasporic dimension, and examines the movement and migration of Amerindian peoples from the North American continent to the largest island in the Caribbean.

Football barriers – Aboriginal under‐representation and disconnection from the ‘world game’

Indigenous Australians have had some great successes in Australian football and rugby. However, this success has not been mirrored in the ‘world game’, soccer. This study examines the reasons for such under‐representation in Australia. The barriers to access to soccer were a combination of racist government policy which restricted the movement of Aboriginal people, and thus their opportunities to engage with a game that was not located near the isolated reserves in which they were held. The most successful Aboriginal players were fortunate that their circumstances placed them in close proximity to locales that were soccer strongholds. Moreover, the multicultural environment of post‐Second World War Australian soccer provided these players a haven from the prejudice and racism of wider Australian society. The fact that soccer itself faced obstacles of acceptance in mainstream Australian sporting culture also impeded an Aboriginal presence. However, in recent years, several players have broken through to play in the national league and gain national representative honours.

How can the health community foster and promote the health of Aboriginal children and youth?

Aboriginal people have poor health status, but there is also evidence that they access the health care system less effectively and find it more intimidating than other Canadians. The present paper reviews the evidence for this, details some of the history that has led to the continued disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people and makes some modest suggestions for ways that the health system can work toward better health and health care for Aboriginal people. Efforts should focus on making the entire system more patient-centred, improving cultural competence, increasing Aboriginal presence in the health workforce, and improving access through cultural and language interpreter services and outreach.

When the imaginary Australian is not uncanny: Nation, psyche and belonging in recent Australian cultural criticism and history

Postcolonialism does not exists outside the shadow of colonialism and even as Australia remains under the shadow of colonialism, it is postcolonial because it does things that could not have been done if Australia were still just colonial. Postcolonialism in Australia means more Aboriginal presence, but for non-Aboriginal Australians, less Aboriginal contact and so the emphasis on one to one relationships is important, especially in a postcolonial context that conceptualises and officialises contact primarily in pedagogical terms.

Reconnecting Communities Through Community-based Action Research

Background: Aboriginal life in Australia Indigenous peoples have deep roots in Australia. Estimates of continuous occupation of the land range from 40,000 years to over 750,000 years [1,2]. The anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown estimated that at the time of arrival of the British in the 1780s, there were 300,000 Aboriginal people on the continent [3]. Subsequent estimates based on historical research suggest that prior to European contact, the population of indigenous peoples in the southeast portion of the continent alone may have exceeded a quarter of a million people [4]. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies supports archeological investigations indicating that Aboriginal presence is at least 750,000 years old [5]. Aboriginal people were organized into about six hundred identifiable cultural groups [6] holding features in common, yet each group had unique linguistic and cultural characteristics. People were linked to clans

Renovating the Landscape and Packaging the Penguin: Culture and Nature on Summerland Peninsula, Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia

Changes in settler impacts on Summerland Peninsula, Phillip Island are examined, with an emphasis on the recent program of environmental restoration associated with the Penguin Parade, one of Victoria's largest tourist attractions. Management strategies construct nature around an ideal of human absence, expressed in, for example, removal of residents and residential buildings; representations of the Aboriginal presence as both prehistoric and part of nature; and formalised rather than experiential environmental education. Paradoxically this encourages intensified tourism and its associated impacts, such that the economics of environmental preservation are dependent on its commodification. This paper draws on two traditions of cultural geography, with components undertaken more than 20 years apart. I argue that a combination of Sauerian and deconstructive approaches can be productively applied to many current environmental issues. © Institute of Australian Geographers 2000.

Wilderness, Modernity and Aboriginality in the Paintings of Emily Carr

There is an inherent duality in Emily Cair’s artistic project of recording and commemorating Northwest Coast Native villages and totem poles. Her images fell within a racist paradigm that grounded a modern Canadian national art in the assimilation of the style and motifs of aboriginal art. They were seen as a complement to the Group of Seven’s “wilderness” images, which erased the living aboriginal presence from the landscape. On the other hand, Carr’s writings and paintings show her strong and persistent sympathy and admiration for Native peoples and their culture, and her attempts to counteract the negative racial stereotypes and to criticize the injustices of her day. The article focusses on Carr’s confrontations of Native cultural change, for example in her images of Skidegate and Haida Gwaii, and argues that her work has continuing relevance as a statement of respect for First Nations’ traditions and endurance.

Refiguring Wilderness: A Personal Odyssey

This autobiographical essay traces the refiguration of the author’s notion of wilderness, from one comprising little or no human presence to a conception that includes a vital and permanent aboriginal presence. The essay depicts the author’s personal journey, inspired and fuelled by the themes of landscape, nordicity, environmental stewardship and the relationship between Native and non-Native peoples. The author’s evolving definition of wilderness has been informed by personal life experiences, intellectual and academic pursuits, and social and political encounters, such as his involvement with the Ontario camping movement and his active participation in the Teme-Augama Anishnabai’s efforts to regain their traditional homeland.

The Aboriginal Presence in Australian Painting in the 1950s

The Aboriginal Presence in Australian Painting in the 1950s

The Aboriginal Presence in Canadian Theatre and the Evolution of Being Canadian

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.

Jack Pine — Wilderness sublime or the erasure of the aboriginal presence from the landscape

Inaugurated by the Group of Seven, modern art in Canada is intimately and inseparably linked, unlike other modernist visual art traditions, with landscape painting and a particular, if not special, view of landscape as wilderness. The visual image might be best and simply characterized in terms of a landscape empty of human and animal presence and its apparent replacement by an organizing non-human figure, paradigmatically a single, foregrounded Northern tree, typically a Jack Pine, iconized as canonic in such celebrated paintings as Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine and West Wind and Frederick Varley’s Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay. This study attempts to establish a theoretical problematics of the Laurentian wilderness ethos through an interpretation of the significance of that denial of human presence and its replacement by the shifting anthropomorphic form of the solitary tree. The essay demonstrates how Jack Pine came to invent the “wilderness park” as a monumental site that represented a kind of human occupancy as if it were utterly vacant of human beings. This required the erasure of aboriginal presence from wilderness as a system of representation.

Péron, Porteus, and the Pacific Islands regiment: the beginnings of cross-cultural psychology in Australia.

The circumstance of the Aboriginal presence in Australia prior to white settlement resulted during the nineteenth century in spasmodic studies, often theory-driven, directed at a comparison of the moral and intellectual competence of the blacks with that of the British and other races. The development early the next century of the Porteus Maze Test, cast as a particularly appropriate ability measure for nonliterates, contributed to a steady continuation of empirical research along similar lines until well after World War II. Some of this was driven by government and other administrative exigencies; overall it was characterized by decreasing attention to the nature/nurture issue.

Aboriginal and Islander Aides in Secondary Schools

There are at present sixteen Aboriginal and Islander teacher aides employed in secondary schools in Queensland. They are employed under the same conditions as all teacher aides in Queensland, but six are funded by grants from the Commonwealth. They perform the usual aide duties within the school, but have a further very important role: they provide an adult Aboriginal or Islander presence within the school having contact with both students and staff. This allows for students to relate with them so that situations and activities can be discussed in maybe a freer way than with the teaching staff. It also provides teachers with the opportunity to discuss any matter relating to their students with the aides. The school administration team can use the aides to assist with advice on situations which arise involving students, and as advisors in deliberations on school matters.