Dear friends and supporters,

I am reading The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023) by Ned Blackhawk, an award-winning Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. The book is on the long list for the National Book Foundation’s 2023 National Book Award for nonfiction.

The book opens with a question which is significant in the context of the campaign for the upcoming referendum for the Voice in Australia.  ‘How can a nation,’ asks Ned Blackhawk, ‘founded on the homelands of dispossessed indigenous people be the world’s most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations.’

I agree with Ned Blackhawk. The question should  haunt Australia as well. I hope that the referendum will provide most of us an opportunity to find an appropriate answer: an answer based on historical facts.

It doesn’t surprise me that many past Australian Prime Ministers and ministers, especially on the conservative side of politics, have claimed that colonisation has been beneficial to the indigenous peoples of Australia. Some eminent historians and journalists support a similar position. In fact, this idea is also expounded by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the shadow Indigenous Australians Minister and a campaigner against the Voice. In her recent address at the National Press Club, she explained that some indigenous organisations sought to ‘demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement.’ In the same speech, she also denied any ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. Listing positive impact of colonisation, she noted the availability of ‘running water’… and ‘readily available food.’   Her advice is that we should stop telling indigenous people that ‘they are victims,’ because ‘we are effectively removing their agency and giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives.’

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s view about the colonisation of indigenous peoples in Australia has been criticised by her opponents and many well-known historians. For example, Ken Wyatt, a former minister for indigenous Australians and a supporter of the Yes side in the Voice campaign notes that ‘the history of this nation is well and truly documented in so many publications, diaries, journals and historical records that reflect the interaction between the First Nations people and who settled in the lands where traditional owners had existed for 65,000 years’ (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-referendum-jacinta-nampijinpa-price-ken-wyatt)

Ken Wyatt is clear that people like Jacinta Nampijinpa Price either don’t know or don’t want to know the history of their own people or have for one or another reason tried to ignore that history or misrepresent it, most probably to please a large number of conservative supporters on the ‘No’ side.

Knowing and acknowledging history doesn’t make the indigenous peoples victims. In my opinion they take huge pride from their will and resilience to endure and survive the most brutal attacks on them, their culture, and their way of life. The colonial power in Australia, as we know, tried several ways and means to assimilate and ‘breed out’ the indigenous peoples. (See: Henry Reynolds @ https://johnmenadue.com/assimilation-re-emerges/)

We won’t go away, they proudly said and say now. We won’t disappear, because we know how to survive. They are truly proud and strong people.

In his book Ned Blackhawk writes that ‘… a multicultural America struggles to extend its national promise to every one of its citizens and live according to its founding proclamation that all are created equal. Despite assertions to the contrary, American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indian.’ His words sound true when applied the contested history of Australia. Like indigenous peoples in Australia, ‘Native peoples,’ he writes, ‘were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, by which time the federal governments had seized hundreds of millions of acres of land from Native nations in more that three hundred treaties. Tens of thousands of Native peoples were killed by settler militias and U.S. armed forces during the Civil War era, and government sponsored campaigns of child removal from reservation communities resulted in 40 percent of Indian children being forcibly separated from their families and taken to boarding schools by 1928.’ The impact of colonisation on American Indians was devastating; ‘the worlds of Native peoples became irrevocably disrupted by the most traumatic development in American history: the loss of Indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.’

Unfortunately, the indigenous peoples in Australia have a similar story to tell. It’s time we give them an opportunity to speak and be prepared to listen and say to them that we are ready to undo the harm. They deserve this chance. We owe them. All of us, including migrants like me.

Thanks once again for your support and comments.

With best wishes,

Subhash