Yes, I’m game. If you agree, @AndrewDowning, I’ll kick off this discussion with two excerpts from Clare Land’s Decolonizing Solidarity, from Chapter 3, Identity categories: how activists both use and refuse them.
p84:
and p91:
There are probably actually some much more interesting and insightful parts of the chapter on higher page numbers, but these will do fine to introduce the dilemma.
The dilemma being that in order to dismantle racism, one has to simultaneously question colonial/imposed identity categories and utilise them to rectify injustices they have (and continue to) caused.
The general theme that if you want to create a treaty with a group, that you must start by acknowledging the group as a group, seems self evident. Not sure it needed so many words.
The idea that the concept of a collective indigenous identity was imposed by the colonists seems right too, although it’s much less evident that such collective identity has been accepted by the wider indigenous population, or that there actually exists a collectively representative group.
There’s also not clear lines between indigenous people and non-indigenous people; people with every possible degree of non/integration into the modern western style democracy that is the Australian nation. What of them? Can identity be fractionated like that? Is it even useful to do so?
It’s an interesting paradox but i wonder if it is resolved to some extent by overlapping identities? The colonial identity binary was in totality and exclusionary. So indigenous people were nothing more than indigenous in the eyes of colonialists. That’s not really the case anymore, i’d have thought.
Not sure if i’m on the right track here. I probably need to read that book!
