Indigenous Representation Research Articles

Flourishing in Country: An Examination of Well-Being in Australian YA Fiction

This article is the result of a collaboration between two academics—one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous—to investigate the representation of Indigeneity in two contemporary YA novels. Melissa Lucashenko's killing Darcy is narrated by multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters, whereas Clare Atkins's Nona and Me is told from the perspective of a white character and explores her relationship with an Indigenous community. Cultural identity forms a significant part of well-being, and this article investigates versions of sufficient well-being. It explores how the novels represent flourishing subjects—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—in the context of Australia as it struggles to come to terms with its colonial past and demonstrates how cognitive mapping replaces damaging colonial assumptions about Indigenous Peoples with a model of overcoming.

Festivalizing Down Under: Unsettling the Contact Zone

Festivalizing Down Under:Unsettling the Contact Zone Ric Knowles (bio) Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand are key contact zones between the Global North and South. Geographically located in the Southern Hemisphere, their dominant, settler populations are culturally of the North, and their major theatre festivals have been struggling with this fact in Australia since the repeal of the terra nullius policy in 1992, and in Aotearoa since the Treaty of Waitingi Act in 1975.1 Sarah Thomasson has argued that the Australian festival circuit has functioned as the country's de facto national theatre;2 Aotearoa's major festival is titled "The New Zealand Festival of the Arts," and together with the Auckland Festival plays a similar role there. Festivals in both countries, then, can be understood to play a constitutive role in the ongoing redefinition of their national subjectivities in ways that both reflect and shape cultural negotiations between their First and subsequent peoples. I visited festivals in both countries in 2020 as a white settler Canadian interested in how these negotiations are playing themselves out in the twenty-first century. I focused on the festivals as meta-performances and on the shows that constituted the circuit as a circuit. What follows is a consideration of how, and how well, Australasia's destination festival circuit is managing to reconcile the conflicting narratives of reconciliation [End Page 487] (a social good) and festivalization (an economic one) in 2020.3 The former calls for collaboration, restoration, and cultural sensitivity; the latter calls primarily for spectacle and display before a consumerist or touristic festival gaze. Click for larger view View full resolution The women of the MAU Wāhine opened the festival pouring buckets of blood onto the rock-strewn stage in Lemi Ponifasio's Chosen and Beloved. (Photo: Courtesy of Sophie Spear, New Zealand Festival.) The Indigenous populations of Australian and New Zealand have been represented at festivals through most of their histories, and it may be valuable to provide some context about the trajectory in which the 2020 festivals' grappling with issues of Indigenous representation, participation, and collaboration participated. Much of the early history of Indigenous representation consisted of exoticist spectacle, but Australia's 1997 Festival of the Dreaming, part of a series of festivals leading up to the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, has been seen as a turning point in the relationship between Aboriginal and settler Australians. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo have noted that "Indigenous involvement in the Olympics was susceptible to being incorporated into a narrative of reconciliation that would redeem the nation's vexed self-image and enact a 'national catharsis' of sorts."4 Nevertheless, the organizers of the Festival of the Dreaming did collaborate. In fact, the festival was curated by Koori director Rhoda Roberts (Bundjalung), who agreed to serve as festival director on condition that the event would remain under Indigenous control. And "there is much evidence," according [End Page 488] to Gilbert and Lo, "to suggest that the Festival of the Dreaming managed to fulfil its brief as an Olympic event while also serving the interests of Indigenous peoples."5 Roberts consciously used the festival to address ignorance about Aboriginal cultures, redress stereotypes, promote Indigenous languages, and create opportunities for Aboriginal people in the arts. The festival featured Indigenous performances ranging from Shakespeare and opera to street theatre, addressed social issues directly, and focused on diversity among Indigenous cultures. Elsewhere in Australia, festivals since 1997 have indeed struggled even to include acknowledgments that they take place on Indigenous lands and displace Indigenous peoples, and when they have functioned productively as contact zones, it has been as a result of some degree of ceding leadership to Indigenous artists. The now annual Adelaide Festival in South Australia, "the nation's premiere arts event,"6 might serve as an example. The first sustained effort to engage fully with the festival's location on the land of the Kaurna peoples was undertaken by American director Peter Sellars when he was appointed artistic director in 2002. Sellars's curation was contentious, but in attempting to address three key festival themes—the "Right to Cultural Diversity," "Truth and Reconciliation," and "Ecological Sustainability"—he introduced a new programming model...

Call for Articles: Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames

157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word abstract in English or Portuguese by 15 March 2020, accompanied by a brief bio-note. Letters of acceptance will be sent no later than the end of March. Send inquiries and abstracts to Teresa Botelho at and to Isabel Oliveira Martins at . .—Teresa Botelho and Isabel Oliveira Martins, National Library of Portugal, Lisbon Call for Articles: Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames. Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium, but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? While there is an extensive body of scholarship on how videogames create worlds, construct characters, and explore themes, there has been almost no scholarship on the representation of videogames in literary texts. Yet the study of the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, and around videogames can shed new light on how conceptions of character, space, time, the body, and identity are being reshaped by new forms of play, playable media, algorithmic systems, surveillance culture, and social media. We seek essays by scholars interested in establishing the foundations for the study of this fascinating but underappreciated body of literature. The essays will appear in an anthology that we are calling “Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames.” We are primarily interested in scholarly work on written literatures: short stories, novels, poetry, autobiography, creative nonfiction, rap lyrics, fan fiction, and graphic fiction. While we are less interested in essays on cinematic and televisual representations, we welcome exceptional proposals in this vein. Possible topics include analyses of individual texts whose focus is videogames, videogame players, or videogame culture; the representation of videogames, videogame players, or videogame culture in texts that are not “about” videogames per se but feature them in some significant fashion; and comparative analyses of texts 158 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) that focus on a specific genre of videogame, such as MMORPGs, virtual worlds, fighting games, etc. Send abstracts of 300-700 words to Dr. Megan Amber Condis and Dr. Mike Sell at by 31 March 2020. .—Megan Amber Condis, Texas Tech, and Mike Sell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania SFRA Awards Renamed. After the votes were cast and tallied, the SFRA formally changed the names of two of its awards. The award formerly known as the Pilgrim Award will hereafter be known as the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship; the award formerly known as the Pioneer Award will hereafter be known as the SFRA Innovative Research Award. The former names remain on the website so that any past recipients can still be found using either the old or the new monikers. Full information on the awards, their description, recipients, and award committees can be found on our website in the pages under the Awards tab. I want to thank SFRA members for beginning this debate, for suggesting alternate names, and for voting. The forum, now closed for further discussion, remains posted on the site, so that members (current, past, and future), can retrace the considerations that led to the change.—Keren Omry, President, Science Fiction Research Association Call for Essays: Hélice. An online...

Gathering Knowledges to Inform Best Practices in Indigenous Publishing

Indigenous community members—including Elders, storytellers, writers, poets, artists, scholars, activists, editors, and publishers—have worked for decades to increase Indigenous representation in publishing. They know that storytelling is at the core of Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of life. Many feel a responsibility to share their stories, knowing that publishing in a good way—committed to Indigenous values and protocols—can promote healing and strength among Indigenous cultures and address a lack of understanding among settler Canadians about Indigenous people's lives and experiences. By conducting interviews, reading widely, and reflecting on my own experience, I gathered knowledge about some themes, subjects, and concerns that are repeatedly raised in discussions around publishing for and by Indigenous people; this is one model for learning about sharing stories in a good way in the publishing industry.

(Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. 157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word...

Born the Year after the Flood

This essay reveals the true history of my people. It demonstrates our highly developed social, spiritual, and political governance structures. Our use of the water systems underscores the ecological integrity of sustainable development that we fostered for thousands of years. Yet, due to colonization and oppressive policies designed to destroy Indigenous identity, culture, and history, Indigenous knowledge and governing systems have been put in jeopardy. Colonial policies intended to dispossess and oppress First Nations by depriving us from Indigenous lands, controlling all aspects of our lives, which created dependence by limiting Indigenous peoples’ abilities to provide for themselves. Furthermore, these policies had no Indigenous input or representation and were designed to eradicate or eliminate Indigenous rights, titles, and the right to self-determination to easily gain access to Indigenous lands for development and industrialization, such as in the case of the massive hydroelectrical dams that continue to alienate my home community today.

Fear and Loathing in the Americas: White Fanatics and the Cinematic Colonial Mindset

White Saviors and Magical Negros are well-established cinematic archetypes that have been identified, analyzed, and subsequently labeled as unadvisable storytelling tropes due to their innate cultural arrogance and racially offensive undertones. The following paper classifies a related cinematic phenomenon the author calls the White Fanatic. By analyzing three recent films in which white lead characters suffer existential crises and demand relief from Magical Natives, the paper makes the case that the White Fanatic represents a colonial mindset shared by filmmakers who continue to emphasize the experience of European colonizers at the expense of Indigenous peoples.The three films included in this analysis are Zama (2017), directed by Lucrecia Martel; The Lost City of Z (2016), directed by James Gray; and Embrace of the Serpent (2015), directed by Ciro Guerra. The author concludes that such stories are more sensitive to Native cultures than previously accepted versions of the White Savior. However, the essay calls for greater Indigenous representation that is uncorrupted by fanatical white protagonists.

Bringing Her to the Front Page: An Analysis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Representation in Canadian Media

Abstract Despite the fact that over one hundred Indigenous women are missing in British Columbia, Indigenous women are rarely the subject of the front page of media outlets. This article discusses the discourses surrounding Indigenous women, specifically those living in Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, BC.

Tracing country commitment to Indigenous peoples in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Indigenous peoples (IP) and traditional knowledges have been marginalized in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since its inception, but recent efforts have attempted to better integrate Indigenous perspectives. This paper proposes an empirical method for tracking country representation of IP and traditional knowledges within the UNFCCC, using text analyses of national-determined contributions (NDCs) and official side events. Here we show that while some references to IP exist in NDCs, the language is often found in less substantive portions of the texts. Official side events on Indigenous topics are one-third as likely to have been sponsored by individual countries as events on other topics. Thus, centralized discourses around IP in the UNFCCC do not necessarily translate to individual country priorities and actions on climate change. While larger structural changes are necessary to include IP in the UNFCCC, understanding this insufficient country inclusion of Indigenous topics points to further avenues for increasing Indigenous representation in the UNFCCC.

Is Indigeneity like Ethnicity? Theorizing and Assessing Models of Indigenous Political Representation

AbstractWithin the broader literature on political representation, studies exploring Indigenous forms of representation are rather limited. Where they exist, they tend to explore how Western models of political representation include Indigenous peoples, conflating Indigenous groups with ethnic minorities. This article asks whether and how Indigenous political representation might be distinguished from the representation of ethnic minorities. Our argument is that Indigenous groups’ identities tend to be based on different claims and relationships to the state than ethnic groups, which leads to political mobilization seeking a means to respond to the colonial nation-state project. We develop a theoretical framework that identifies three principles that ought to inform an effective and legitimate model of Indigenous political representation: recognition, protection and decolonization. We then apply this theoretical framework to assess the extent to which existing models of Indigenous representation in Bolivia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway correspond with these three principles.

The Portrait of Noken As A Manifestation of The Existence of Papuans

The Portrait of Noken as a manifestation of the Existence of Papuans is seen from the perspective of the socio-cultural aspect, Noken, as a manifestation of the indigenous Papuan representation in its mandate, is only vague but its meaning is very deep. Its meanings can be both denotative and connotative. For example, the Noken called mesin, as a medium of transporting various types of goods, has a denotative meaning. In addition, it also has a connotative meaning, namely a person who is open and likes giving whatever he/she has in his/her Noken. The next connotative meaning is as a mother who carries the burden of life or as it is usually called ifaj uk aromat mowran (a women carrying a lot of burden), starting from the period of menstruation, conceiving, giving birth and breastfeeding, which is identical to a Noken called mesin. Unlike the case of Noken, which is called mecoi, this kind of Noken has two kinds of meanings, namely denotatively as a means of transporting goods and connotatively as a person who is closed or stingy. Both mesin and mecoi are used for reducing the amount of garbage that has been wrapped around the life of the nation and the state.

Advocating Dialogue or Monological Advocacy? Settler Colonial Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies and the Authentic “Pro-Indigenous” Position

ABSTRACTThis article problematises settler colonial theory and critical whiteness studies and their role in supporting advocacy scholarship, or scholarship purporting to uphold Indigenous political aspirations. It examines the conceptual reliance of these paradigms on binarised, orthodox representations of Indigeneity and the role of these representations in supporting particular “pro-Indigenous” political priorities, such as decolonisation. By way of example, a retrospective engagement with Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black–White Relations in Australia is offered. I argue that this text’s representation of all non-Indigenous people as “white” and “guilty” perpetrators constructs Indigenous people as “black” and (by implication) “innocent” victims. The circumscription of Indigeneity delimits the terms by which Indigenous people can articulate their interests in the dialogue proffered as evidence of decolonisation, thus rendering the dialogue a monologue. Underscoring the power of this monologue, a Métis critique of Indigenous cultural-nationalist anti-colonial movements is called upon to argue that those who employ orthodox representations of Indigeneity put their commitment to an ideological position above a negotiation of alternatives. Consequently, the task of theorising decolonisation is diminished, and those we seek to support in our scholarship remain marginalised in our representations of them.

Highlighting the potential of peer-led workshops in training early-career researchers for conducting research with Indigenous communities

For decades, Indigenous voices have called for more collaborative and inclusive research practices. Interest in community-collaborative research is consequently growing among university-based researchers in Canada. However, many researchers receive little formal training on how to collaboratively conduct research with Indigenous communities. This is particularly problematic for early-career researchers (ECRs) whose fieldwork often involves interacting with communities. To address this lack of training, two peer-led workshops for Canadian ECRs were organized in 2016 and 2017 with the following objectives: ( i) to cultivate awareness about Indigenous cultures, histories, and languages; ( ii) to promote sharing of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing; and ( iii) to foster approaches and explore tools for conducting community-collaborative research. Here we present these peer-led Intercultural Indigenous Workshops and discuss workshop outcomes according to five themes: scope and interdisciplinarity, Indigenous representation, workshop environment, skillful moderation, and workshop outcomes. Although workshops cannot replace the invaluable experience gained through working directly with Indigenous communities, we show that peer-led workshops can be an effective way for ECRs to develop key skills for conducting meaningful collaborative research. Peer-led workshops are therefore an important but insufficient step toward more inclusive research paradigms in Canada.

Imaging crisis in Indigenous Australia and Canada: towards an analysis of neoliberal primitivism

The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in the terms through which Indigenous people are rendered visible in public debate in Australia and Canada. In observing the long and recursive history of colonial visual regimes, this paper argues that contemporary politics of Indigenous representation are nevertheless distinctively marked by a regime of neoliberal primitivism. Tracing the features and operations of this regime across a selection of images and discursive imaging practices in Australia and Canada, the paper identifies three tropes that are centrally involved in imaging contemporary Indigenous crises: the suffering child, the silenced woman and the dysfunctional landscape. The visual regime of neoliberal primitivism operationalises these tropes in relation to each other and plays a vital role in the neoliberal turn in Indigenous governance. While bringing attention to the very real forms of damage and distress with which Aboriginal individuals and communities must contend in the present, paradoxically, the paper argues, this regime works to occlude from view the constellation of forces at work in those very circumstances.

Beyond the pipeline: a critique of the discourse surrounding the development of an Indigenous primary healthcare workforce in Australia.

A central strategy in addressing health disparities experienced by Indigenous people has been based on a concern with workforce improvement. In this paper, the Indigenous Australian healthcare workforce literature since 1977 is reviewed and its scope of concern, as being often limited to questions of 'supply', is critiqued. The pipeline metaphor, whether used explicitly or implied, regularly focuses attention on closing the gap on Indigenous representation within the health workforce. The exception though is the discourse concerning Indigenous Health Workers (IHWs), where questions concerning the legitimacy of the role continue to abound within a workforce hierarchy where community knowledge, though shown to be crucial to culturally safe health service provision, is trumped by the other health professions whose knowledges and legitimacy are not in question. This contrast exemplifies the need to examine the working of power not just 'supply'. The pipeline metaphor is disrupted with concerns about a range of other 'gaps' - gaps in the recognition of Indigenous knowledges, in organisational structures, in governance and in self-awareness by the health professions of their whiteness. As the health system continues to measure workforce development in terms of pipeline capacity, our study questions what happens beyond the pipeline.

Perspectives from Students in the Native American Summer Research Internship Program

Objective: The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) undergraduate students by examining Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) experiences and identifying potential challenges or barriers to visualizing careers in science and health. This study is important because it provides narratives from AI/AN people, who have been historically marginalized in research. Methods: Focus group discussions about health disparities in AI/AN communities and access to biomedical science education and employment were run with AI/AN undergraduates from the United States of America who were participating in an internship program at the University of Utah during Summer 2018. Results: The main themes touched on were lack of education and resources, limited academic mentorship, and misconceptions about health disparities in AI/AN communities. Students identified forces that work to limit indigenous representation in the biomedical workforce, which included limited exposure to quality education, lack of support and encouragement from academic advisors, lack of mentorship, navigating the cultural significance of the human body in settings where the body is used for medical instruction, and being disconnected geographically from their land and community. Students expressed that it was difficult to maintain both a scientific and tribal identity, highlighting the violent history that western-led research efforts have had with AI/AN people and the misconceptions about indigenous individuals and their health. Conclusions: It is vital that AI/AN people have a more proportionate rate of biomedical professionals and physicians because these healthcare professionals will provide more culturally competent care for AI/AN people than the general population.

Pig Girl: An Indigenous Woman’s Perspective Through “Scriptive Things”

Indigenous representation in various genres has always been questionable in regards to who has a voice, and content that is culturally sensitive and appropriate. This paper critically examines the controversial theatrical play Pig Girl (Murphy, 2013) through the lens of Robin Bernstein’s (2011) “scriptive things” theory. Although Pig Girl sought to give voice to Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, it instead was sharply criticized by Indigenous community members. This paper explores historical ideologies corresponding to the dehumanization of and violence perpetrated against Indigenous women based on the imagery provided by those who created and promoted the Pig Girl stage play. The paper discusses how such imagery can re-inscribe prior beliefs and be interpreted with “things” depicted within the playʼs narrative. The paper also addresses the function of interpellation and imagery, aesthetic intervention, and resulting associations

Struggling toward Indigenous representation and service improvement within the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development

AbstractThis article explores organizational conditions for change to promote active Indigenous representation and service outcome improvements in a provincial child welfare program responsible for the ongoing oppression of Indigenous Peoples. Specific structural and environmental variables that support or impede Indigenous professionals’ efforts toward critically needed improvements to Indigenous child welfare services are explored. Amidst the ongoing humanitarian crisis level of Indigenous children in care, the results indicate that developing highly specialized and equitably resourced Indigenous services, rather than ongoing ineffective and vague organizational approaches toward “indigenizing” provincial child welfare programs, are strongly indicated.

Arguing about Indigenous administrative participation in the Whitlam era: A representation theory analysis

AbstractIn 1974 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam established the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (‘the Commission’), appointing HC Coombs as chair. The Commission's brief was ‘to inquire into and report on the administrative organization and services of the Australian Government’ giving particular attention to, among other issues, public servants’ ‘participation in forming policy and making decisions’. From the outset the Commission aligned itself with the view that Aboriginal people were ‘less than proportionately represented in the administration’. The Commission asked CD Rowley to prepare a report on Aboriginal issues. Barrie Dexter, Secretary of the newly established Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Charles Perkins, Assistant Secretary and Arrernte man from Central Australia, both gave evidence to the Commission. The competing ideas on Indigenous administrative participation expressed by Coombs, Rowley, Dexter and Perkins in the course of the Commission will be considered through the lens of representation theory. While all four doubted the capacity of the bureaucracy to provide a meaningful channel for Indigenous representation internally, each argued from a different view of representation. Understanding their positions on how Indigenous people should be represented in public administration, including their assumption that there would also be external Indigenous representation, could shed light on tensions that are still present today.

Art as a Weapon: The Inverted Gaze in Julius Lips The Savage Hits Back

Abstract This article investigates the history of the book, The Savage Hits Back or the White Man Through Native Eyes (Yale University Press, 1937), which opened up a kaleidoscopic view of global representations of Europeans, thus inverting the colonial gaze on the “Other.” The author, the German anthropologist and museum director Julius Lips, published his book in the heyday of race theory in Germany. Driven into exile by the Nazis, he read Indigenous representations of Westerners as a tool of empowerment against the hegemony of colonial power and merged a critique of colonialism and fascism. By analyzing the scholarly reception of The Savage Hits Back, the author revisits Lips's crucial assumptions. Honing in on Lips's ambiguous and strategic use of Indigenous North American objects against the background of his exile in the United States, this article illuminates the mutual imbrication of Lips's biography and his scholarly work in politically volatile times.