The source of life or the source of wealth?

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, has someone pulled up the stakes or filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’ (Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality,1755) Cited in Simon Winchester’s ‘Land’ (2021)

Indigenous people throughout the post colonial world continue to suffer deprivation and marginalisation. This can lead to alcohol and drug abuse, family violence and higher imprisonment rates. Lower life expectancy, poorer health, higher infant mortality, and so many more markers which separate the indigenous from the colonising communities.

In all colonial invasions there was an understanding that the land being occupied had a collective ownership, a communal ownership, but once over run by the interlopers the ownership was transferred from one entity or community to another entity, the Emperor, or King, the highest person enthroned on a seat of absolute authority. Or in the twenty-first century world, perhaps a multi-national corporation.

And most significantly, the benefits of colonialism seemingly by-passed indigenous people as the colonisers take possession of the land.

The opening quotation from ‘Land’ is later replaced by another to open another story:

It is a comfort to know that you stand on your own ground.
Land is the only thing that cannot fly away.
(Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

The period of European colonialism, where the Americas, Africa, Australia, South and South East Asia were claimed as colonies the lands were changed from being settled by indigenous peoples essentially living off the land, and in spiritual terms, actually being part of the land, the very life blood of those populations, to being resources for the creation of wealth, the raw materials for feeding the newly created industrial machines which would enrich so many, yet enslave whole populations in the quest for material possession.

This was brought home to me not long ago when travelling on what was then a brand new road from Kalgoorlie to Leonora, a road connecting many of the mines and old ghost towns in that region. What impressed me was that in the short time of European settlement in that region, about 125 years, the landscape had been changed dramatically.

A sealed road connecting slag heaps of mining residue existing mines operated by fly in fly out workers. Tourists and travellers visit ghost towns deserted when the mines stopped producing their bounty, the remnants of old buildings, houses, hotels, brothels, stores, and holes where miners used to clamber deep into the earth to extract their riches, now left exposed for the unwary to fall into… and yes, that has happened, as have some strange disappearances, a troublesome partner perhaps…

Yet alongside the road where there are no mines, a seemingly endless landscape of ghost gums, shrubs and other vegetation, kangaroos and emus grazing, but hardly a human footprint to be found. The landscape unaltered in thousands of years, the land as yet unclaimed for extracting the wealth, perhaps still claimed by the First Nations people who live there, if they haven’t been shuttled out to live in Kalgoorlie or some other city so the land can be dug up to reveal its treasures at some later date.

And that has been the way, hasn’t it, time and again, a plot of land is taken without any negotiation. The people who dwelt there, who were the spiritual custodians of the land were moved on, and if they did not move, were forcibly removed or just killed… poisoned flour perhaps, poisoned water holes, disease infested blankets. However it was done, the land was cleared to be used as a resource.

Those who remained were taken in by church-based missionaries to teach them the ‘true religion’, not the animistic religion of nature worship, the concept of a spiritual connection with the the earth which not only bore them but nurtured them through their lives and allowed their spirit to return to complete the circle of life.

It is that very disconnecting which lays the foundation for continued marginalisation and deprecation of indigenous peoples. What is described above has been and continues to be repeated where people are removed from their traditional lands, the lands of their ancestors, their spiritual and material heartlands, and forced into a new religion, one which separates them from homelands and language, that separates them from their identities, the very description of who they are, and stripped of those connections flounder in a ‘no man’s land’, they are neither who they (or their ancestors) were, and do not belong in the world they find themselves in.

Where the land was once their very identity, it is now a resource for the invaders, the colonisers who will take from it whatever wealth they can find, whether that be the mineral wealth of gold or iron ore or the rare earth minerals needed to further enrich those who have too much, or to clear the lands of the vegetation which had nourished generations of First Nations people, to replace it with broad acre farm to produce commercial crops for sale to the highest bidder. The land is stripped of its spirit to be replaced with a money making enterprise, and the spirit which renewed the land, season after season was removed allowing the land to degrade, to need fertilisers to continue to produce, yet with the stripping of the trees and other deep rooted vegetation, the water table rose to produce acre after acre of salted barren soil.

Those displaced by the enterprise of colonialism become fringe dwellers in the new world which replaced their ancestral world. The are marginalised, do not fit. The very ideals, their morality and ethics, the laws governing their custody of the land and the enduring relationship both within and the bordering countries of the First Nations, the communal ownership, no, that is the wrong word, that is the colonialist’s word, their custodial commitment to their lands have been replaced with a new order which is not their order.

The very term ‘ownership’ is an anathema to them. The replacement religion which allows the rape of their lands, the theft of what was theirs, replacing it with a religion of salvation from sins which include the sins of theft and of murder does not fit with them since their lands have been stolen and those who resisted were murdered. They are in limbo, between their traditional ways and the imposed, but now belonging to neither.

Being between the cultures is a place where laws are imposed to enforce conformity, and if that fails the harshness of removal, imprisonment. The impossibility of conformity leads to a ‘shit life syndrome’, a reliance on drugs and alcohol to ease the pain of the nothingness they endure, anger leads to domestic violence, and more imprisonment.

Children grow up seeing just the disfunction of the marginalised world they live in, but gaze across the divide to see the privileged colonialist, perhaps now third, fourth, fifth generation settlers, but still colonialists, and steal what is not theirs, the cars, the alcohol, the food.

The root cause of this disfunction is an open secret. We can see what it is if we care to look. But that may mean coming to terms with the damage done through colonialism, the damage done in dispossessing people of their natural heritage. As has been the habit of this coloniser, the best way to deal with such behaviour is imprisonment. Not really surprising when we consider that the first coloniser to settle here settled to establish a colony of prisoners, of the unwanted, unwashed from their homeland.

New laws are carefully written to ensure they are not blatantly racist, not blatantly addressing one group of people, but somehow it seems they are racist, are targeted at one group of people. We need look only at the incarceration rates, particularly in the NT, Queensland and Western Australia. Rates of imprisonment are disproportionately high for First Nations people. Racism it seems in endemic in police forces. It is almost as blatant as the laws which divide Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza. It seems there is is a crime to be Palestinian, and here it seems at times it is a crime to be Aboriginal.

That was pointed out to me a while back when an Aboriginal workmate proudly put a sticker of the Aboriginal flag on his car and was repeatedly stopped by the police. The stopping stopped when the sticker was removed.

We see it in the statistics of traffic infringements. Proportionately there are more First Nations infringements from traffic stops that there are on the speed cameras which are just about every where. It seems that First Nations people tend to obey the traffic rules except when they are effectively charged with ‘driving as an Aboriginal’.

In other parts of the world prisons being closed, new ways of dealing with ‘criminals’ are found, choosing to sentence with suspended sentences but with conditions, mental health support, education and skills training instead of sending the ‘criminals’ off to the Universities of Crime where the skills learned will further alienate them from the society they will re-enter on release. Recidivism rates have dropped substantially in those countries.

Law and Order makes for great, simplistic election campaigning: “We know how to sort crime, build new prisons and lock ‘em up… Even kids as young as ten years old.”

Except it doesn’t work. Statistics show that crime rates are actually declining, and for those who are still committing crimes, they need to be dealt with in ways which actually address the reasons and motivations for their criminality.

Yes, there is a need for prisons, yes there are people who can only be housed in such institutions, but most are not, most need to be given a second, and even a third opportunity through suspended sentences with counselling and support to allow them to get on with life. With First Nations children, a programme to help them identify as First Nations people through a return to country programme under the leadership of elders, to initiate them into their cultures, to help them regain pride in their heritage has been proven to help take them from the fringes, to fit in mainstream society with pride and dignity.

By not imprisoning, these people stay in their communities, stay in their jobs, stay in the lives they need to live. Are able to change their lives through the support of community.

It really is time to address this so that we get no more deaths in custody, we stop the racial profiling of shop lifters or develop programmes to help kids as they struggle with growing up, to help parents deal with the pressures that kids lay on them.

And those programmes are best when not forced through a paternalistic way, but are worked within the communities.

We see this with migrant groups, where church or mosque or other culturally comfortable centres become the springboard to adapt to the new life in the new country. Where leaders help the new immigrants through the cultural minefields and challenges that exist.

 

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