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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.

My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.

It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.

I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.

There's also this trend towards this Schrodinger's box of Indigenous society in which it simultaneously was too primitive to have concepts like land ownership and losing a war but also simultaneously owned the land and actively worked on upkeeping. Depending on the particular circumstances the declared nature of Indigenous society flip flops a lot in Australian politics.

Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:

  1. They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
  2. They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.

Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.

Ok, I have a perhaps stupid question. But my impression is that unlike Amerinds, who often have actual tribes and in some cases a continuation of the old tribal government, aboriginal Australians absolutely do not, only the names remain in most cases. So who would be the actual people that own the land and can overrule the Australian federal government? @RandomRanger @OliveTapenade

The short answer is no.

There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.

Yeah but the Maori had a bunch of hallmarks of settled agricultural society that the Indigenous lacked plus entrenched defensive positions which made it easier to just cut a deal with the local headsmen on the absolute colonial fringe.

In the Northern Territory (tropical, desert wasteland for the most part) and parts of Queensland there are tribes with some significant level of continuity from elder to elder. The last uncontacted ones were only found in the 1950s I believe. But that's not really the case down in the populated, developed south east of the country. American tribes were much more organized, they had chiefs who could negotiate treaties whereas the aboriginals never really got that far, it was all a very collaborative, collectivist, longhouse kind of society.

Part of the slogan we hear so often, at almost every event and in many meetings is some variation of:

acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.

At one point it was elders, past, present and emerging. But nobody really knows who is an emerging elder, so apparently the progressive thing to do is to take out the 'emerging'. There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

Torres Strait society was pretty different to Aboriginal society. Having done a year in Darwin and been around a bunch of those locations, they had agricultural and land ownership norms that weren't really a thing on the continent itself. I think the validity of their argument for ownership of their islands is more reasonable than the Aboriginal one by some degree.

True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.

Not really, no- indios in Latin America are very heavily the descendants of settled tribes. There's only a few thousand Chichimeca even left and they occupy the same very bottom of the racial hierarchy that Mayans do. Latin American racial snootiness is mostly about being whiter, sometimes with a dose of hybrid-vigor ideas, not about differences between various tribes.

Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.

Yeah, the Aztecs did have something substantial. Pretty sure the Indigenous know they lost a war (they want recognition of massacres on the frontier after all) but want to relitigate it. There's a website that shows you what was happening (or at least what they managed/chose to record) and it was totally one-sided: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php

With the Native Americans in the US, they managed to somehow eke out 2:1 or 3:1 native deaths for each white death. In Australia it was 20:1, maybe as high as 60:1.

Yeah but the point of 'sovereignty wasn't ceded' arguments is essentially that the lack of any sort of a coherent political union or body of Aborigines with which to negotiate a surrender means that they didn't surrender meaning that they still own the territory of Australia under illegitimate occupation. Galaxybrain shit.

It also contributes to an active resistance towards archeological or other historical investigation of Australian history in order to reduce the chances of anything that might contradict the official narrative. There was a semi-recent case in which Mungo Man, the oldest Homo Sapiens discovered in Australia, was reburied in accordance with Indigenous wishes to prevent further scientific inquiry.

There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

I’ve got to admit, it would be pretty funny if, 80 years from now, there are just a bunch of lily-white, blonde, “Aboriginal” people leading the various tribes, like some sort of real life Burroughs or Haggard novel.

We're already there to a large extent: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/unsw-s-newest-indigenous-doctors-come-from-all-walks-of-life

But in 80 years they'll be Indian.

Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.

But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.

If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.

That's essentially what was proposed with the National Voice, which got shouted down hard in the most recent referendum. Now certain states (ironically the ones with by far the actual lowest population of Aborigines and highest population of liberal Whites) are trying it on a trial basis.

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