Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World (Australian Fulbright papers)

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Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World

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This book is dedicated to Daisy Borduk and Geoffrey MacDonald. They reached across cultures, believing in the value—despite having experienced the hazards— of an interconnected world.

Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World EDITED BY

Claire Smith AND

Graeme K. Ward

ALLEN & UNWIN

Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. First published in 2000 Copyright © this collection Claire Smith and Graeme K. Ward 2000 Copyright in individual pieces remains with the authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 9 Atchison Street St Leonards NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Indigenous cultures in an interconnected world. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 86448 926 X. 1. Indigenous peoples. 2. International economic integration. 3. Social change. I. Ward, Graeme, 1943– . II. Smith, Claire, 1957– . 305.8 Photograph on p. i: Airi Ingram using a conch to call a gathering together (photo: Northern Territory News) Internal design by Simon Paterson Set in 10.25/14 pt Adobe Caslon by Bookhouse Digital, Sydney Printed by South Wind Production, Singapore 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword

A

s Chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission I am asked to participate in hundreds of events each year. It is, perhaps, not surprising that many quickly fade in the memory. Others continue to burn as bright and clear in the mind as they did on the day of participation. Such is the case with the Fulbright symposium Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World held in Darwin in July 1997. I’m sure the memory still burns bright for all participants. I am confident the papers from the symposium which are contained in this volume will bring the proceedings to life for those who could not attend. The symposium brought together people from sixteen countries, including Indigenous brothers and sisters from nine countries. Around half of the participants, and two-thirds of the presenters, were Indigenous people. Rarely, in my experience, does a symposium organised by a non-Indigenous organisation attract a large percentage of Indigenous participants. Rarely are they conducted in a manner that actively empowers those Indigenous participants. This symposium achieved both. It explored the effects of an interconnected world on our Indigenous cultures and, in particular, the challenges and opportunities posed by globalisation. v

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I N D I G E N O U S C U LT U R E S I N A N I N T E R C O N N E C T E D W O R L D

It is a matter of fact that we live in an ever-shrinking world due to the rapid pace of technological change and the advent of mass tourism. Increasing globalisation is inevitable. In the face of this, Indigenous peoples across the globe are having to fight harder and harder on an increasing number of fronts to secure their cultural survival and to find new means of asserting their rights and autonomy. But they are also harnessing the new technologies to sustain and strengthen their communities. So, in effect, globalisation presents both a threat and a challenge. This volume draws attention to some of the myriad ways in which this phenomenon will affect the lives of Indigenous peoples in both the positive and the negative. On reading the papers it becomes clear, in the words of some of the authors, that this is a time of great opportunity, uncertainty and risk, creating the potential for cultural change at an unprecedented rate and scale. The papers highlight not only the new possibilities for Indigenous peoples that are emerging from the development of global communication networks but also the strategies Indigenous peoples are using to deal with the pressures. While its primary focus was on Australia and America, the symposium also stimulated wider debate on these issues and outlined strategies for action in order to guide and inform both Indigenous and non-Indigenous policy-makers in all parts of our interconnected world. I am confident this book will help foster a deeper understanding among non-Indigenous people of Indigenous views, concerns and aspirations. I commend it to academic and general readers around the world. Gatjil Djerrkura Chair, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, 1996–99

Contents

Foreword Figures and Illustrations Contributors Preface

v ix xi xiv

1 Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples: Threat or Empowerment? Claire Smith, Heather Burke and Graeme K. Ward

1

2 Resources of Hope: Learning from the Local in a Transnational Era Faye Ginsburg

27

3 From Clan Symbol to Ethnic Emblem: Indigenous Creativity in a Connected World Robert Layton

49

4 Cyberspace Smoke Signals: New Technologies and Native American Ethnicity Larry J. Zimmerman, Karen P. Zimmerman and Leonard R. Bruguier 5 History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective Julie Gough vii

69

89

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6 Indigenous Presence in the Sydney Games Lisa Meekison

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7 Elite Art for Cultural Elites: Adding Value to Indigenous Arts Howard Morphy

129

8 Cultural Tourism in an Interconnected World: Tensions and Aspirations in Latin America Penny Dransart

145

9 Past and Future Pathways: Innu Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-first Century Stephen Loring and Daniel Ashini

167

Notes References Index

190 201 221

Figures and Illustrations

1.1 3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1 9.2

The relationship between age and power in societies based on oral traditions The relationship between travelling and local heroes and clan estates ‘The Trouble with Rolf’, 1996 ‘Magnum as Cook in the Time/Space Continuum’, 1997 ‘Folklore’, 1997 The ‘Millennium Athlete’ image The ‘Festival of the Dreaming’ image A pile rug of alpaca fibre woven for the tourist market, Oruro, Bolivia A shopfront in Arica, Chile, of a tour operator offering guided tours The church of Isluga A blanket woven by Soria Mamani Challapa, Isluga, Chile Chusi blanket woven in 1995 by Soria Mamani Challapa, Isluga, Chile Map of Nitassinan and the Quebec–Labrador peninsula An Innu hunter and his daughter on the portage trail that begins at Amitshuakant, 1921

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16 55 95 103 105 114 122 148 155 156 161 163 168 182

x

9.3 9.4


Innu students at Pathways training program at Amitshuakant, Nitassinan, 1993 Charles Pokune searches for caribou from top of ‘Signal Hill’

183 186

Contributors

DANIEL ASHINI is Vice-President of the Innu Nation in western Canada. In this capacity and as former director of Innu Rights and Environment he has been actively involved in the Innu struggle to reclaim their homeland. LEONARD R. BRUGUIER, a member of the Ihanktonwan nation (Yankton Sioux), is director of the Institute of American Indian Studies and Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Dakota. He earned a PhD in History from Oklahoma State University. HEATHER BURKE has a PhD in Archaeology from the University of New England. She is the author of Meaning and Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Style, social identity and capitalism in an Australian town (1999, Plenum). DR PENNY DRANSART is a lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her research focuses on the herding of llamas and alpacas in the Andes, in textiles woven from camelid fibre, and issues concerning dress and gender. She is editor of Andean Art (1995, Avebury) and, with Linda Mowat and Howard Morphy, co-editor of Basketmakers: Meaning and form in Native American baskets (1992, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford). xi

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GATJIL DJERRKURA was Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Canberra from 1996 to 1999. FAYE GINSBURG is Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University where she is also Professor of Anthropology and a MacArthur Fellow. Her work is in cultural activism in a number of arenas. Over the last decade she has sponsored fellowships for Indigenous media-makers at her Center and has been researching and writing about their work in a number of venues. JULIE GOUGH is a Palawa artist who lives in Tasmania and works with materials and narratives that have impacted publicly on the construction, perpetuation and means of approaching and negotiating notions such as memory, identity, race, time and difference. She has had two solo exhibitions in Melbourne and featured in the group exhibitions at the Cologne Art Fair in 1996 as well as in the forthcoming Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, England. She was awarded the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship for 1997–98. ROBERT LAYTON is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Durham. Recent books include The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape (1999, Routledge, edited with P.J. Ucko) and An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology (1997), Australian Rock Art (1991) and The Anthropology of Art (1991), all of which are published by Cambridge University Press. STEPHEN LORING has been conducting archaeological and ethnohistorical research in Labrador since 1975 and in the Aleutian Islands since 1993. Dr Loring is a museum anthropologist with the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. LISA MEEKISON is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Oxford University. This research is being undertaken with Australian Aboriginal people.

Contributors

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HOWARD MORPHY is Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University and Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Recent books include Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (1991, University of Chicago Press), Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1998, Yale University Press, edited with Marcus Banks) and Aboriginal Art (1998, Phaidon). CLAIRE SMITH is a lecturer in Archaeology at Flinders University, South Australia. Her doctoral research received the David Phillips Memorial Award in Aboriginal Studies. Aspects of this are the subject of a forthcoming book, Cultures in Contact: Colonisation and an Australian Aboriginal community (Wakefield Press). GRAEME K. WARD is a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. He has conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous communities in Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia as well as Australia. KAREN ZIMMERMAN has an MA in Library Science and in History and is currently coordinating an instructional technology program at the University of Iowa Libraries. She also serves as the librarian liaison to the University’s American Indian and Native Studies Program. LARRY J. ZIMMERMAN is Visiting Professor of Anthropology and head of American Indian and Native Studies at the University of Iowa. Recent books include Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the critique of anthropology (edited with Tom Biolsi, 1997, University of Arizona Press) and Native North America (1996, Little Brown).

Preface

T

he chapters in this book arise from the Fulbright symposium Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. This symposium was held on the traditional lands of the Larrakia people in Darwin, Australia in July 1997. It was initiated and sponsored by the Australian–American Educational Foundation (Fulbright Commission). The original idea was that of Ross Wilson, a board member and at the time American Consul to Australia. The participation of 130 Indigenous people at the symposium was made possible through the support of the Jawoyn Association, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Rio Tinto, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Australia Council for the Arts and Sothebys. The focus of the symposium was the effects of an interconnected world on Indigenous cultures and, in particular, the challenges and opportunities posed by globalisation. The Fulbright symposium brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts from a range of disciplines, allowing key stakeholders to became familiar with each other’s problems, quality innovations and conceptual advances. This book highlights the main issues that emerged from discussions. It contains some of the papers presented at the symposium, revised by their authors in light of current debates and the themes outlined in Chapter 1. The book remains true to the intention of the original sub-themes: discussion of new approaches to art and reprexiv

Preface

xv

sentation; Indigenous lifeways, cultural tourism and enterprise; and Indigenous people and the information age. All of these are informed by the necessity for Indigenous voice as well as Indigenous peoples’ concern to control their cultural and intellectual property. Above all, we have focused on the manner in which Indigenous cultural values intersect with—and inform—an interconnected world. It is important not to limit the discussion of Indigenous questions to literary forms. These issues are of public importance, and not all Indigenous or non-Indigenous people read academic publications. Indeed, some people read rarely, or not at all. Thus this book is only one form in which symposium discussions have been published. Already a documentary, Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World (Burke and Smith 1999) has been produced and a CD-ROM is planned. This approach articulates with the Indigenous cultural and intellectual imperative to communicate—and with the Indigenous strategy of using a variety of media to gain access to a range of audiences. One manifestation of the interconnected theme of the symposium was the live broadcast of events and discussions by Indigenous broadcasters from Australia, New Zealand and North America. Radio broadcasters from Batchelor College, the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasters’ Association Radio, and Radio Larrakia collaboratively produced a live outside broadcast for four hours a day, over the four days of the symposium. This broadcast went to Indigenous communities in remote as well as rural and urban areas. It was aired in all parts of Australia, as well as in New Zealand through Aotearoa, the Indigenous radio network, and across North America through the American Indian Radio on Satellite network. On the final day it was augmented by live-to-Web Internet coverage of the symposium. This live international broadcast promoted public awareness of Indigenous issues and perspectives, contributing to a greater understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Perhaps its greatest significance, however, lies as a practical demonstration of how Indigenous input and control can expand the horizons of a project, channelling activities into new and exciting areas.

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The format of the symposium had several innovations that aimed to provide a more culturally appropriate setting for Indigenous participants. These included an outside setting, the live broadcast to Indigenous communities, and the integration of cultural workshops and demonstrations into the program. This grounded the discussions in Indigenous wisdom and cultural expertise, and in the strengths of Indigenous cultures in performance and in teaching roles, thus creating a strong foundation for Indigenous people to voice their opinions. That the atmosphere was empowering is demonstrated by the fact that some Indigenous people—even from remote areas and with little command of English—were prompted to give unsolicited presentations in panel discussions as well as impromptu cultural performances and workshops. Their perspectives inform the papers presented in this volume. Taken together, these papers document both the diversity and commonality of responses by Indigenous peoples to globalisation. They place the contemporary challenges and opportunities within their broader historical, social and political contexts. We hope that this book will promote a greater understanding of the issues that affect Indigenous peoples. As it stands, the greatest barriers that such people face are the negative stereotypes made about them by some members of the community. Such barriers can only be broken down through increased cross-cultural understandings. The papers in this book contribute to such understandings, acting indirectly as a stimulus for much-needed change. This is crucial to the global process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Vital to the realignment of Indigenous peoples within an interconnected world is the promotion and development of their visions at an international level. The authors of Chapter 1 thank Gary Jackson and Trevor Fitzgerald for commenting on early drafts of this paper; Jodus Madrid assisted with the design of Figure 1.1. Julie Gough thanks the School of Art, University of Tasmania, who funded aspects of her research, and gives special thanks to meika von samorzewski, Greg Lehman, Kim Pearce, Tony Marshall, Vicki Farmer and Lindsay Broughton. All the contributors acknowledge the help they have had from colleagues.

Preface

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This publication has been supported by Rio Tinto and Flinders University. The photographs which open each chapter, unless otherwise acknowledged, were taken by C. Tambling for the 1997 Fulbright symposium. Finally, we thank the people whose help was integral to the success of this venture. John Lake, executive director of the Australian– American Educational Foundation, gave valuable support and guidance in the planning of the symposium. John Iremonger of Allen & Unwin provided encouragement and talented editorial direction. We are also very grateful to Venetia Somerset and Brian Johnstone. Gary Jackson and Heather Burke gave crucial assistance at all stages of this endeavour. Neither the symposium nor the book would be in the same form without their contributions. Claire Smith, Adelaide Graeme Ward, Canberra

Image Not Available

Ainu performance by Masahiro Nomoto (photo: Northern Territory News )

1 Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples: Threat or Empowerment? C L A I R E S M I T H , H E AT H E R B U R K E

T

AND

G R A E M E K. W A R D

he unchecked expansion of European nations since the sixteenth century has signalled over 400 years of significant change for the world’s Indigenous1 peoples. This process of colonisation did not end with the arrival of European people but persisted as European goods, European technology and European beliefs perpetuated the process of invasion. Globalisation threatens to accelerate this process of colonisation. Networks that were once restricted to individual communities, nations or continents are becoming globalised through the latest innovations in communication technologies. With the advent of these technologies and the extreme mobility of modern peoples, the geographic boundaries that formerly shaped a people’s understandings of themselves and the world are collapsing. In the rhetoric of transnational corporations and markets, globalisation entails the removal of limitations, allowing the exchange of ideas across boundaries by people from all walks of life. In reality, mass tourism is shrinking the world, bringing once-distant peoples quite literally face 1

2


to face. Telecommunications technologies such as the Internet are providing worldwide access to identical information and entertainment, while consumers from opposite corners of the globe can purchase the same products from the same multinational corporations. Just as the introduction of cheaper, faster air travel since the 1950s has permitted younger, less wealthy travellers to reach once distant lands (Bankes 1995: 7), so too are modern communication technologies allowing many more peoples access to one another across the gulf between cultures. The Internet is the single fastest-growing medium of communication in the world. It took 75 years for 50 million people to be connected to the telephone—it took only ten years for the same number of people to be connected using the Internet (Nathan 1997). As cultural boundaries dissolve and fundamentally Western understandings and attitudes become dominant, more and more people are conversing in the universal language of popular culture. While the mass changes that attend these developments are commonly censured in terms of very real social problems such as the increasing commodification of culture, the entrenchment of inequality, growing feelings of insecurity and a loss of identity, Indigenous peoples are seldom considered in discussions of the ‘globalisation juggernaut’. While there are approximately 350 million Indigenous persons across the world, they comprise only 6 per cent of the world’s population. The process of globalisation began in the West and has mainly fostered the expansion of Western ideas, values, lifestyles and technology. Globalisation creates unprecedented opportunities for people to see, hear, visit and experience, with an ease previously unimaginable. For Indigenous peoples, globalisation threatens to extend the process of colonisation begun 400 years ago, giving rise to the possibility of a new invasion. For many non-Indigenous peoples, globalisation is merely a means of opening up new markets and finding new ways of ‘selling’ Indigenous culture. For some it provides access to a smorgasbord of cultural practices that are seen as public property to be ‘borrowed’ at will. Certainly, globalisation makes Indigenous cultures available to a wider audience, often without that audience ever having to leave home. It deliberately invites the outsiders in. The result is that

Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples

3

Indigenous peoples are having to fight harder on a variety of fronts to ensure their cultural survival and to find new means for asserting their rights and autonomy in the face of the new threats posed by globalisation. The key issue here is control—control over land, control over knowledge, control over the past, present and future. The object of the struggle is not only Indigenous cultural and intellectual property but the continued future of Indigenous societies themselves. This conflict establishes an arena for radical change in the social and political environments of Indigenous peoples. At the forefront is an emerging process of decolonisation, which involves not only the deconstruction of colonial processes and the many assumptions on which colonialism is based but also, as a result, the transformation of social and political orders. The value of this to Indigenous peoples lies with the empowerment that comes from identifying common goals, many of which arise from the lived experiences of colonialism, and from being active agents in the process of decolonisation; as Daryle Rigney (1996: vi) has said: ‘My research is a commitment to exposing the systematic de-powering, silencing and exclusion of Nunga [Indigenous] behaviours, consciousness, culture, ideology and social formations. It is time for the Invader Dreaming to end.’ There is the potential for Indigenous peoples from those countries with colonial histories to find a sense of unity and common purpose arising from their colonial experiences. Indeed, one of the core concerns that emerge from this volume is the overwhelming extent to which Indigenous agendas are transformative, concerned with ‘change in and transformation of the roles and structures which control [them]’ (Daryle Rigney 1996: 2). The formation of global economic, social and political networks will no doubt be a focus of Indigenous empowerment. Indigenous struggles for recognition and self-determination are shaped by changes in their apprehension of the world as much as by the changing ways in which the world understands them. In this vein, increasing public awareness of the diversity of Indigenous lifeways and raising concern for Indigenous issues and rights is one means to empower Indigenous communities on a scale never before possible.

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Contemporary forms of communication, particularly expressive media such as film, video and the Internet, thus become not only a way of sustaining and strengthening Indigenous communities but also a means of transforming them. On the one hand, the creation of new kinds of cultural forms is a means of revivifying local languages, traditions and histories, and articulating community identity and concerns. On the other hand, these new forms are also used to further social and political transformations of dominant hegemonies, as Faye Ginsburg emphasises in Chapter 2. In this book we draw attention to some of the myriad ways in which globalisation is likely to affect the lives of Indigenous peoples, both positively and negatively. For Indigenous peoples this is a time of great opportunity, uncertainty and risk, creating the potential for cultural change at an unprecedented rate and scale. On the one hand, there are areas of serious conflict that need to be addressed. What are the implications of these new ways of knowing and new modes of access for Indigenous systems of knowledge and authority? What are culturally appropriate methods for sharing Indigenous knowledge? What protocols should be developed for its curation? On the other hand, globalisation provides the chance for Indigenous peoples to advance recognition and acceptance of their cultural values in innovative and effective ways and to empower themselves by harnessing the power of public opinion and by becoming familiar with each other’s problems, solutions and successful strategies. The authors in this volume are concerned not only with the opportunities for Indigenous peoples that emerge from the development of global communication networks but also with the strategies by which Indigenous peoples are dealing with the pressures that arise from being part of an interconnected world.

C O M M U N I C AT I N G

IDENTITY

Fundamental to this struggle is the issue of Indigenous identity and its articulation with place. Indigenous peoples inherit rights and


5

responsibilities to particular tracts of land. These rights to land cannot be bought, sold or reinvented. They were established in the ancestral pasts of Indigenous peoples around the world and are reiterated in the present through conceptualisations of spirituality. Thus land is central to the definition of self, is expressed in a variety of media, and is crucial to the survival of Indigenous identities. Globalisation can involve a redefinition of identity on many levels. Integral to this is the complex interplay of forces tending towards nationalism and/or the emphasis of local Indigenous identity on the one hand, and those of globalisation and broader notions of identity on the other. Kahn (1995) has highlighted the paradoxical nature of stressing the former at a time when a ‘borderless world’ of communications and universal trade and investment is developing, along with a concomitant apparent cultural uniformity. This applies not only to the nation-states that Kahn discusses, but also to ethnic minorities— often defined by invasions and colonisations—of Indigenous peoples within nation-states, such as the Native Americans and Indigenous Australians, whose reactions to the pressures of, and use of the opportunities provided by, this process of ‘globalisation’ are the subject of this book. The process of creating ethnic identity is a core concern of many of the chapters. Ethnicity is a phenomenon only found in complex societies, where several different communities with different cultures have to interact since they belong to a single society (Chapter 3). Within an ethnic group there is some recognition of a shared history, language, culture or religion, though this may arise as much from an external process of lumping together people with shared characteristics as from self-definition (Chapter 4). As Zimmerman and his co-authors point out, ‘it is not necessarily the common culture of a group that makes them think of themselves as related, but the other way around. Once considered to be related, those so identified develop rules, or at least understandings, about who they are and who is or is not a part of the group’. Thus for ethnic identity to emerge in Indigenous societies, the people in these societies first had to suffer incorporation into a complex society,

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after which an often diverse series of distinct populations commonly became combined into a single category, such as ‘Indian’, or ‘Aboriginal’. It is possible to view Indigenous ethnicity as an artefact of colonisation, since it was colonisation that created a sense of Indigenous peoples as Other. This movement from independent Indigenous societies to ethnic minorities embedded in modern culture is at once a powerful description of the loss of identity that occurred as a result of invasion and an illustration of the power of colonialism to collapse boundaries and redefine a dwindling world. Just as colonisation demanded new expressions of Indigenous identity to combat dispossession (for example, Chapter 3), globalisation also will demand this. Global communication technologies are clearly used by some to maintain and reinforce ethnic identity as a specific entity, while also being used to explore a broader sense of pan-identity. In Chapter 4, Zimmerman, Zimmerman and Bruguier identify two principal ways in which communication technologies are used by Native Americans: first, to emphasise the unique characteristics of particular tribes, and second, to key into a pan-Indian or even a global Indigenous identity. Likewise, in Chapter 3, Layton highlights some of the tensions involved in this process as reflected in paintings by the late Melbourne artist Lin Onus Barinja, in which he used clan designs from northern Australia (to which he did not have a birthright) in order to assert his Aboriginality in a more general, pan-Australian sense. Although this is in itself problematic, colonisation and globalisation can be viewed as two moments around which the expression of new forms of ethnic Indigenous identity crystallised in different ways. On another level, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia, important facets of identity are founded on aspects of Indigenous cultures, often appropriating Indigenous imagery as a marker of a more generalised national identity (Chapter 6). It follows that any rethinking of Indigenous identities will affect conceptualisations of regional, national and global identities. Morris-Suzuki has developed similar ideas in the context of a study of the development of modern Japan. She uses the term ‘formatting’ to describe the basic process of creating a ‘single underlying common


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framework or set of rules’ used to coordinate local sub-regimes (1998: 164). In discussing the development of scientific endeavour in Japan, for example, she stresses the ‘importance of the distinction between the global format of methods, theories and taxonomies of knowledge (defined almost entirely in the West) and local content [as] important . . . for early Japanese scientific researchers’ (1998: 165). Thus for nation-states, the process of incorporation into the global system—globalisation—tends to be one of adoption and adaptation of a framework—formatting—that can be varied to meet particular circumstances, while retaining a universal familiarity. We are able to identify a comparable process happening in Indigenous communities that are, in turn, sub-sets of modern nation-states, themselves subregimes within a global system. In this light, the papers in this volume document the emergence of a global sense of Indigeneity that coexists with a strong sense of Indigeneity at a local level.

HISTORIES

OF CONNECTEDNESS

Having said this, it is important to recognise that this interconnectedness between forms of identity articulated at different scales is not necessarily a new phenomenon. One of the strongest contributions that many of the papers in this volume make to the debates surrounding globalisation is one that is unique to the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Our very description of the problems associated with globalisation could be taken to allude to the earlier Western notion of insular and isolated ‘pristine cultures’, unsullied by, and therefore needing to be protected from, contact with a wider world. As the many archaeologists and anthropologists in this book point out, however, this stereotype is not, and has never been, the case: many groups of Indigenous peoples have experienced considerable and extended contact with outside ‘others’ for centuries. Individual histories of contact, of course, vary widely. Since at least the eleventh century, when Greenland Vikings arrived in northeastern Canada, the Innu people, for example, have had to adjust repeatedly

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to the challenges posed by contact with non-Innu peoples (Chapter 9). Contacts between the Innu and Thule and Dorset Eskimo groups, or with Inuit people, were common over the last 8000 years, though the pace of contact increased as the nations of Europe began to take advantage of the rich potential offered by Innu territory. French, English and Basque fishers and fur-traders first arrived in Labrador in the sixteenth century, eventually establishing series of trading posts along the northern coast and, by the eighteenth century, the expanding nations of France and England were both vying to dominate and exploit the resources of Labrador. In describing the Innu people’s range of responses, both past and present, to such contact, Loring and Ashini highlight an aspect of Indigenous cultures that is central to understanding both their survival and their potential: the dynamism of cultures that repeatedly have had to adjust to the challenges posed by other peoples in competition for their resource base. Similarly, Layton (Chapter 3) explores the original ‘connected world’ of the Indigenous Australians, who, before White invasion, commonly moved through landscapes of regional communities, each of which contained between 250 and 500 people. Layton examines the creation of human cultural identity and the long tradition of Aboriginal people in emphasising difference through language and symbolism, while still maintaining connectedness through a regional network of relationships. In addition, many Aboriginal groups maintained generations of contact with eastern Indonesian and Papuan peoples, contacts that influenced their social networks through art and trade (Chapter 7). Both Dransart (Chapter 8) and Zimmerman and colleagues (Chapter 4) draw attention to similar histories of connectedness among the people with whom they work, reminding us that Indigenous communities have always maintained mechanisms for cross-cultural communication. This history of connectedness should not be underestimated in understanding the potential of Indigenous communities to take advantage of the new technologies for communication. The papers in this volume make it clear that there can be no doubt that Indigenous peoples understand the importance of communication. Indeed, exchange of information has always been imperative for survival, not


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least because it was essential that people knew where water and food could be found. Travel, in particular, has always been a means of acquiring status and collecting information, as a way to acquire knowledge about resources and other people (Chapter 9). Indeed, one can argue for the existence of an Indigenous imperative to communicate that arises from oral traditions that invest their energies in complex social structures, rather than in technologies. After their colonisation, Indigenous peoples have taken advantage of any means to help them keep in touch with one another. The goods that many Indigenous peoples value most highly are those to do with communication: telephones, televisions, videos, radios, cars, technologies that are often used by Indigenous peoples to restore and facilitate traditional information exchanges such as ceremonies (Michaels 1986: 5; Langton 1993: 63). This imperative to communicate places Indigenous peoples in a powerful position to take advantage of the many possibilities provided by globalisation. Through radio, film, video, recorded music and now the Internet, there is the potential for Indigenous peoples to tackle the problems posed by globalisation and to transform its technology in unique ways. Each of these chapters challenges the stereotype that Indigenous societies ‘live in the past’ and are unable to shape their culture to adjust to new challenges and situations. Indigenous societies before Contact were both dynamic and flexible, possessing a creative strand that both then and now ‘repeatedly generates new variants of cultural practices and . . . transforms the cultural structure itself’ (Layton, page 66; see also Chapters 5 and 7). This raises another core issue underlying much of the discussion in this book: the notion of authenticity. As many others have pointed out, authenticity does not reside in a past that is unchanging, lacking any internal dynamic (Edwards 1997: 63). By proliferating and perpetuating stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as pristine and unchanging, globalisation may become a tool for disempowering Indigenous peoples on the ground that the practices of a contemporary present may not be the same as those of an idealised (and unrealistic) past. The creation of influential images of what constitutes ‘authentic’ Indigeneity can constrain Indigenous peoples in real and material ways,

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limiting their social, economic, and political capacities. That process is made manifest in the statement by Jimmie Durham (cited by Gough in Chapter 5) that ‘none of us feel that we are real Indians . . . for the most part we feel guilty, and try to measure up to the white man’s definition of ourselves’. On the other hand, authentic representation can also become an important aspect of Indigenous empowerment. In particular, as both Morphy and Layton demonstrate in Chapters 7 and 3 for the northern Australian Yolngu and Alawa people respectively, and as Dransart makes clear in Chapter 8 for the Aymara people of Chile, the notion of authenticity is central to the production of Indigenous art, the negotiation of Indigenous identity through art, and the explicit assertion of rights that can flow from this. Stereotyping Indigenous cultures as static ‘voices from the past’ lies at the heart of many cultural property issues, particularly the misuse of Indigenous images, designs or sounds by non-Indigenous peoples. This form of cultural appropriation is akin to theft and denies the complex reality of Indigenous societies where rights to land, and to the stories, music and designs that connect people to place, cannot be separated from Indigenous peoples’ identity. As Julie Gough (page 106) argues: ‘The selective borrowing of aspects of the religious and spiritual belief systems of Indigenous cultures by Western civilisation has been an ongoing practice for over 400 years and is an irreverent external corruption of the truths of Indigenous connections to land, nature and the hidden forces governing it.’ Under such a system, to claim falsely the rights of another is a serious offence, and traditional power structures have always been concerned with ensuring that designs, stories, ceremonies, dances and songs are only employed by those with an ancestral right to practise them. In Kalimantan in Indonesia, for example, Iban people who wish to use a design that belongs to another must pay for it, and the right to use it is officially bequeathed in a formal ceremony (C. Smith pers. comm.). Such a system, with its attendant rights and responsibilities, imparts a profound respect for the cultural property rights of others. For Indigenous peoples, cultural property and intellectual property are parts of the same integrated system. They are both aspects of a living heritage.


INDIGENOUS

11

SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE

Nowhere is the gulf of misunderstanding that frames the clash between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures more apparent than over the issue of cultural and intellectual property rights. This is mainly a clash between divergent knowledge systems, as there are numerous significant differences in the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples formulate knowledge. While this can be simplified into dichotomies between oral and written, narrative and definitive, practical and canonical, fluid and fixed, the reality is far more complex. Merlan (1997), for example, distinguished between Indigenous and non-Indigenous representations of the significance of place in terms of a ‘narrative’ or ‘definitive’ character. The former is concerned with what happened at a place, while the focus of the latter is the essence of what the place ‘is’. She interprets this Indigenous ‘lack of definitiveness’ as part of a tradition in which the meanings associated with a place are subject to ongoing negotiation and reformulation as people continue to visit and interact with the place (Merlan 1997: 10): ‘Understanding is a grasping of what things mean and knowing how to interpret them and how to respond in the course of events, and is not about giving a definitive representation of them as an independent reality.’ This process is one aspect of the Indigenous practice of revealing knowledge in a gradual manner and at different levels according to what is considered appropriate for the interpreter to know. Information in Indigenous systems of knowledge is rarely definitive. Instead, this knowledge, grounded in oral traditions, is multivalent, ambiguous and open to alternative renditions according to the context of interpretation. In contrast, the search by non-Indigenous peoples for absolute forms of representation is steeped in the essentialism of written traditions. In an interconnected world one issue that arises is how to transmit the fluidity of Indigenous understandings to a public whose education is grounded in written traditions. Is it possible to present the fluid and multivalent characteristics of Indigenous systems of knowledge in an authentic manner, one that is not canonical but that is open to the subtle formulations that are part of living practice

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and traditional cultural values? Particularly within cultural tourism enterprises, which often aim to fix Indigenous meanings in definitive interpretative materials, the problem lies in attempting to render Indigenous culture as a product, such that ‘the’ Indigenous meaning of a place or a thing becomes extended beyond the capacity of the individual person/informant to define it (Merlan 1997). Indigenous peoples are continually frustrated by the expectation that they are speaking on behalf of a community or a cultural experience, rather than simply expressing their own individual, contextualised views on the world (Meekison, Chapter 6). As a result, Indigenous activism is focusing increasingly on the ownership, control and protection of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property. While this is not accommodated adequately by existing legislation, we are at a turning point (Golvan 1996). In countries with Indigenous peoples, legislative changes are being considered in order to accommodate Indigenous ways of knowing and curating knowledge. Such changes include revising patent legislation to recognise the contribution made by Indigenous knowledge to the development of new medicines; changing copyright legislation to recognise the communal and multi-level ownership of designs and cultural knowledge; and changing legislation relating to performer’s rights so as to recognise the secret and restricted nature of certain Indigenous performances (see, for example, Janke 1997). Significant within the context of globalisation is that these changes not only incorporate the recognition of Indigenous rights of ownership over, and control of, Indigenous intellectual and cultural property in accordance with traditional customary laws, but that they also recognise the right of Indigenous peoples to benefit commercially from the authorised use of this property (cf. Golvan 1996; Janke 1997). This need not be a matter of compromising Indigenous systems of ownership for commercial profit; once again, an anthropological and archaeological understanding of how Indigenous societies functioned in the past can be instructive. Many Indigenous groups before colonisation were accustomed to producing objects whose purpose was to be traded across boundaries as part of extensive trading networks ‘in


13

which the intention was to produce something that the market required and to which people responded’ (Morphy, page 140). Thus the contemporary production of Indigenous art, textiles and other artefacts for consumption by tourists is part of a long tradition of creating objects explicitly designed to be traded across boundaries and thus to serve as mechanisms for cross-cultural communication: The objects that were traded were often problematic, posed questions, and forced the development of categories that were not always pre-existing parts of the recipient culture. While concepts like fetish or totemic object were inadequate and tended to be overused to the point of becoming meaningless, they were part of a process of widening European conceptions of the world, and Indigenous peoples were often consciously trying to get their ideas across and to affect global understanding. (page 140)

Morphy uses these ‘acts of persuasion’ to illustrate the fact that the consequences of transformation through such cross-cultural representational processes depend both on the nature of the discourse involved and the aims of the respective parties (also Morphy and Banks 1997: 28). He intends it as a reminder of the dangers inherent in reducing difference (in this instance between art in Aboriginal society and art in Western society) to a dualistic opposition that fails to recognise fundamental areas of compatibility. These ‘acts of persuasion’ were of mutual benefit and suggest some of the motivations of Indigenous peoples. Focusing on areas of compatibility is particularly relevant when one considers the potential for the celebration of things Indigenous to contribute towards the commodification of Indigeneity, a process that some have argued has become a central feature in the creation of global, particularly tourist, markets (McConaghy 1997). Acknowledging the process of commodification returns us directly to the problem of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights as they are articulated through the central issue of control over Indigenous culture. There can be little doubt that the use of Indigenous identity as a

14


marketing tool may have adverse effects, in spite of good intentions. Such marketing can reinforce negative stereotypes of a passive or subdued people, or of Indigenous people as children of nature, either unable or unwilling to modify the world around them. Moreover, it can fail to recognise the richness, complexity and diversity of Indigenous societies; or it can serve to sanitise the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples into a familiar social and political reality that is not questioned and open to reformulation (Chapter 6). The potential positive rewards, such as expressing the health and vitality of Indigenous cultures as living societies, and the provision of basic information to those who know little of Indigenous cultures, can only be achieved if conducted in an appropriate manner that ensures rewards for Indigenous peoples. Many would argue that an ‘appropriate manner’ in this sense could only be one that is managed for and by Indigenous peoples. As the Tasmanian artist Julie Gough states (Chapter 5), the current debate on the representation of Indigenous cultures is an acknowledgment that representation is no longer the unquestionable right of the colonial majority. Like many Indigenous artists, Gough’s work has the avowed intention of using Indigenous voices to present an alternative interpretation of the past. For her, her art-practice ‘centres on recontextualising historical stories and the cultural meanings of objects by retelling documented events from an alternative perspective, one differing from that of the Western historical “record”. My intent is to challenge the recorded past by subversively reworking it from my personal viewpoint of the “invisible Aboriginal”’ (page 106). Of course, to recognise the agency of Indigenous peoples is also to recognise that they are not only entitled to, but may also desire to, make their products available to a non-Indigenous audience. Most of the contributors to this volume hold a position that makes this very clear: for many Indigenous communities, cultural tourism and art production offer a way to achieve economic empowerment. This is not an arena into which Indigenous peoples have been unwillingly dragged, but rather one to which Indigenous peoples who have been unwillingly colonised have turned as a means of asserting their rights and


15

autonomy (Chapter 7; Chapter 8). The arts are particularly suited to increasing acceptance of differences among peoples since they are a major route through which many obtain an understanding of other peoples. Not only do visual images provide the most readily accessible representations of other cultures, but the often small size of many items of cultural expression make them an ideal medium to sell to tourists. In addition, cultural tourism is widely recognised as an area with significant potential for growth in all regions inhabited by Indigenous peoples. In some regions this potential has only begun to be realised in the last few years. Yet the possible benefits to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are great. Representation is particularly problematic within the relatively new and comparatively unrestricted context of the Internet, which actively seeks to operate free from control and censorship. However, this freedom can be both a blessing and a curse for Indigenous peoples, who may find they have no control over how others choose to represent them, or over the use of their music, designs or stories. There are numerous instances of Native American and Australian Aboriginal images and music being used without permission on the Internet and elsewhere (for example, Johnson 1996; Morphy 1998). As Zimmerman and colleagues (Chapter 4) point out, ‘such theft is virtually impossible to control, and for Indians, who the dominant society already has a tendency to see as an artefact of the past, their voice against such usurpation seems mostly lost’. There are other crucial issues for the Internet relating to access and equity and how these will affect traditional social relations. How will communication technologies impact upon traditional knowledge systems? Traditionally, one waited until knowledge was given. Conversely, in Western, written societies, knowledge can be readily accessed without older people acting as intermediaries or gatekeepers; and in the information age one actively ‘searches’ for and ‘takes’ knowledge. Certainly, the movement from oral to written practice contains risks for traditional ideologies. Oral societies are structured so that old people have high status as the custodians of knowledge, which they restrict and distribute at their discretion. In these traditions power is

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Age

related directly to knowledge that is acquired with age, with plateaus at particular rites of passage (Figure 1.1). For women, plateaus might happen at the onset of menstruation, at marriage and with the bearing of children; for men, they might mark various stages of formal initiation, as well as marriage and the advent of parenthood. One implication of global communication technologies is a predominance of young Indigenous voices, which could seriously undermine the structural position and power held by elders. Furthermore, the Internet as it is currently configured is limited in terms of the needs of some Indigenous peoples. In Australia, for instance, Indigenous participation in online services is limited and the rate of individual computer ownership is extremely low (Aspinall and Hobson 1997). This is due in part to the high costs involved for individuals, many of whom live well below the poverty line. Use of the Internet is also largely dependent on the user having literacy skills that

Power Figure 1.1 The relationship between age and power in societies based on oral traditions


17

are not necessarily present among older people in remote communities, some of which have undergone extended contact only in the last 50 years, or in remote areas of Asia and South America, which are undergoing extended contact at the present time. Despite this, while the Internet is perceived by some as a potential vehicle for American cultural imperialism (for example, Gates 1995) and an all-encompassing ‘One World, One Culture’ homogeneity, this is contrary to the manner in which it operates. The Internet is different from other media in that individuals have a high degree of control over the material they access, actively searching for the information they require. This ‘democratic’ aspect of the Internet encourages the development of networks of people with particular interests, rather than cultural imperialism per se. Native American broadcaster John Belindo (1997: 4) has argued that the formation of new alliances for sharing information creates new possibilities for informed decisionmaking and the attainment of Indigenous rights: This new communications network will lead to the development of regional and global networks enabling people world-wide to share information and ideas on the issues important to cultural survival. Indigenous broadcasters will employ strategies for maintaining and strengthening their culture and ensuring that they have legacies to pass on to future generations.

This dovetails with both global and local Indigenous struggles for control over their cultural and intellectual property, and concomitant empowerment in political and economic spheres. As many of the writers in this book reiterate, however, the use of synthetic forms of communication by Indigenous peoples to establish and broaden cross-cultural awareness is not a new phenomenon. In this sense, the Internet is merely another form of communication, much like the sign language used on the Great Plains of North America to signal the location of bison herds or mutual enemies, or the smoke signals from smudge-fires used in the American Southwest to exchange information across great distances (Chapter 4). The nature of the

18


Internet, with its particular reliance on visual imagery to be effective, is such that it is not so far removed from traditional forms of Indigenous communication—the sense of community is immediate, given without interpretation by non-Indigenous peoples, except as technicians and facilitators where needed. This may well be one of its main strengths, and the imperative to communicate, grounded in traditions of oral and visual forms of communication may, in fact, be one thing underlying the rapidity with which Indigenous peoples in First World nations have adopted the new technologies. In this vein, Gough (Chapter 5) argues that Indigenous peoples have a distinct advantage in the process of globalisation, which she sees as extending processes inherent in colonialism. While those in the West have to deal with the new challenges that arise from the dislocations involved with contact and a loss of cultural insularity, those who have already been colonised have long been in transit and transformation, and merely have to adapt their tools of cultural survival to suit the new situation. Gough’s process of adaptation is highlighted in the chapters by Ginsburg, Zimmerman and his co-authors, and Loring and Ashini, all of which demonstrate the ways in which Indigenous peoples are using new technologies to challenge their places in colonial histories and the power relations on which these are based. Certainly, many Indigenous peoples are well aware of the potential value of the Internet for promoting political agendas. Examples in Australia and North America have been provided by ATSIC (1999), Aboriginal Australia (1999), the Northern Land Council (1999), Tribal Voice (1998), Yothu Yindi (1999), and those sites mentioned by Giese (1995, 1997a) and Tafler (1997) and by Loring and Ashini and Zimmerman and colleagues in this volume. In this way, greater use of information technologies by Indigenous peoples increases the viability of physical separation from nonIndigenous peoples as an option. New technologies allow communities to increase their profile in the mainstream without the infringement of autonomy that is inherent in much direct or extended contact with non-Indigenous peoples. This has the potential to provide greater security for Indigenous values and plays an important part in enabling


19

Indigenous peoples to position themselves outside colonial nationstates. In the not too distant future, it could emerge that Indigenous peoples have more in common with each other at a global level than they do with the non-Indigenous peoples who share the countries they live in. At the same time, this is unlikely to occur at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ local identities, or of their core relationships to culture. The development of a pan-Indigenous identity need not entail a loss of local cultural integrity. As Morphy’s research shows (1991; this volume Chapter 7), Aboriginal peoples have long been adept at operating in different arenas in which the same objects can have very different meanings. These traditional systems of knowledge make Indigenous peoples socially and intellectually well placed to take advantage of new systems of interconnectedness. A point to stress here is that much of the material in this volume is the product of research into Indigenous cultures by non-Indigenous people. Many Indigenous persons, especially those educated within Western traditions of scholarship and aware of the potential political significances of research, value the increasing opportunities to control research endeavour as it relates to their own cultures, either by conducting their own projects or somehow directing the research of outsiders. The contributions to this volume of Gough (Chapter 5) and Loring and Ashini (Chapter 9) are eloquent on this topic. In some quarters, any research relating to cultural matters by outsiders might not be welcomed by Indigenous peoples. In part this may be the manifestation of a desire by these communities to take stock, to hold off the onslaught of researchers until Indigenous peoples themselves are better able to identify the benefits they will obtain through research. It is in the hands of researchers themselves to adjust their methods so that the communities they work with do benefit. This adjustment is likely to entail engagement in the Indigenous struggle to gain control over their past, present and future. Lester Rigney (1997) has presented the view that: Indigenous peoples have the fundamental right to expect research and its epistemologies to address the issues and racialising practices

20


that have been part and parcel of post-invasion history . . . What must be emphasised here is that from an Indigenous perspective, my people’s interests, experiences and knowledges must be at the centre of research methodologies and the construction of knowledge about us.

Scott (1994: 15) has pointed out that we may have only the slightest inkling of the questions that minority groups might have about their past. While this is true for many ethnic groups, it is particularly true for Indigenous peoples, whose voices have been stifled by what Rowse (1994: 129) identified as ‘the currency and academic prestige of the “Aboriginality” expounded by experts’. Overwhelmingly, these experts have been drawn from another class as well as from another culture. Indeed, one wonders how we could ever have thought that middle-class, non-Indigenous researchers could have represented adequately the views, interests and needs of economically and socially marginalised Indigenous peoples. This is not to say that there is no role for non-Indigenous researchers in collaborative research endeavours.2 One of the most important things that has to be defined in the immediate future is the role of non-Indigenous peoples in these endeavours. To some extent this may require the reinvention of disciplinary practice, as Loring and Ashini (Chapter 9) contend. For them, the most interesting and dynamic aspect of archaeology in the Labrador region lies in the alliance between archaeology and Innu politicisation: It confronts the colonialist assumption that the ‘expertise’ of an academically trained ‘scientist’, supported by materialist ‘evidence’ in the form of ancient stone tools and radiocarbon dates, has more validity than the testimony of Innu elders with their legacy of oral traditions, history and personal experiences . . . The research did not so much seek a concordance of the past . . . as it sought to empower people with the relevance and authority that control of the past conveys, especially in light of the usurpation of Innu control over their land by government.


21

The collaborative research conducted by Innu people and the Smithsonian Institution in the Pathways Project shows that academic and Indigenous interests need not be in opposition, and demonstrates the substantial benefits that can be gained by researchers working in tandem with Indigenous peoples. Times of new opportunities, though, are also times of uncertainty and unrest. Collaborative research projects not only have the potential to engender new and more productive research agendas but may also change radically conventional ways of establishing identity by questioning hitherto unchallenged assumptions, themselves contingent on colonial power relations.

A

TRADITIONAL FUTURE

Globalisation constitutes an unprecedented threat to the autonomy of Indigenous cultures as well as an unprecedented opportunity for Indigenous empowerment. The papers presented in this volume highlight not only the new possibilities for Indigenous peoples that are emerging from the development of global communication networks but also the strategies Indigenous peoples are using to deal with the pressures of globalisation. Taken together, the various chapters document a number of distinctly Indigenous views and ways of thinking and interacting that have endured the colonial process. First, there are Indigenous notions of time, in which an ancestral past might be seen to hold up the immediate past, which in turn imbues the present. This is in contrast to the linear notion of time held by most non-Indigenous peoples. An Indigenous notion of time is manifest in Gough’s reworking of colonial history, which is based on the assertion that there can be no closure of the past. The view that the past imbues the present is common among Indigenous peoples from rural, urban and remote locations in various parts of the world. It can be argued that it underlies what Zimmerman and his colleagues call the ‘remnant anger’ of American Indians about their colonial pasts. As Loring and Ashini point out, the past ‘is an integral feature of the present, not a distinct abstraction’. Second, Indigenous peoples take a more contextual view of the

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world than do non-Indigenous peoples. Loring and Ashini, for instance, contrast the ‘cyclical aspect of northern worlds’ with the ‘linear approach of [non-Indigenous] archaeological and governmental administrative logic’. This complements the distinction drawn by Merlan (1997) between ‘narrative’ and ‘definitive’ characterisations of place in northern Australia. Indigenous, contextualised ways of knowing contrast with the linear, compartmentalised ways of thinking that are integral to societies with written traditions. Third, Indigenous peoples retain hereditary links to particular tracts of land, the topographic features of which serve as a mnemonic for a community’s history. It’s not new in itself. One can identify a dichotomy in Indigenous strategies, one that articulates the affirmation of rights and responsibilities to specific homelands with the development of global networks of Indigeneity. Those Indigenous peoples who develop an identity as global citizens are unlikely to do so at the expense of their local identities, which are securely tied to place. Fourth, Indigenous peoples have a particular and profound respect for the intellectual and cultural property of others. One manifestation of this is a reluctance to speak on behalf of other Indigenous peoples, evident in all of the papers in this volume that are written by Indigenous people. This profound respect for each other’s property is grounded in cultural systems in which this property constitutes an important facet of land ownership, and in traditions of restricted knowledges with the severe penalties that can attend the infringement of rights in these cultures. Of course, none of this is intended to imply that Indigenous peoples have ‘natural’ affinities with each other, or that they are in any sense homogeneous. They do not and they are not. Lester Rigney (1997) has commented that an ‘automatic or natural rapport’ among Indigenous peoples does not exist within a single continent, as there are many cultural barriers and diversities. This observation is even more applicable to Indigenous peoples globally. There is, however, the possibility of common interests and goals. Clearly evident in the papers in this volume is the potential for Indigenous peoples from First World


23

countries to find a sense of unity and common purpose arising from their shared colonial histories. At issue, perhaps, is the degree to which the outlooks and interests of Indigenous peoples in First World countries key in to those of Indigenous peoples in Third World countries. As Indigenous global networks expand, will they include Indigenous peoples in those regions of the world that do not have ready access to the Internet and other modern communication devices? There are notable silences in this book, as well as in other First World writings, on this subject. At present we know little of the views and priorities of Indigenous peoples from Third World countries. Certainly, the issues under debate in these countries are likely to be essentially different—but there are also unifying features, such as the grounding in oral traditions and philosophies that are based on hereditary and inalienable rights to land. It would be a mistake, however, for either Indigenous or nonIndigenous peoples to construe their relations in terms of essentialised binaries of Them and Us. It is important to recognise that both Them and Us are complex and multivalent constructs and that individuals are situated in specific historical contexts. Such essentialism is overturned by exploring the manner in which historical constructions of Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity have been contingent on colonial power relations, thus revealing the fluid and shifting natures of these identities. As Attwood and Arnold (1992: xv) have pointed out, this involves a new object of study—Ourselves: ‘These new praxes and knowledges radically destabilise conventional ways of establishing identity or the existential conditions of being [for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples] . . . but they also have the potential for offering new means for a mutual becoming.’ In terms of Indigenous art, Morphy (1998: 420) has extended this line of thinking to argue that one possible development would be ‘to include within the category of “Aboriginal art” other art that has influenced Aboriginal artists. The boundaries between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art history would be dissolved, but in such a way that world art history would be rewritten in relation to present Aboriginal art practice’. As Indigenous peoples reposition themselves in their struggle for

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recognition and self-determination, so too must others in an interconnected world. The players in the struggle are Indigenous peoples on the one hand and the embedded social and political constructs of colonialism on the other. Researchers (both Indigenous and nonIndigenous) are often the scribes and intermediaries, but the audience is global. The Indigenous Ainu people of Japan have a word, ureshipamoshiri, to describe the world as an interrelated community of all living things (Anon. 1996: 10). Changes in any part of this community cause ripples and adjustments throughout. Moreover, as Trigger (1997: x) has commented, change is not a violation of culture but the realisation of a potential.

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Peter Manabaru and George Jungawunga leading a cultural workshop

2 Resources of Hope: Learning from the Local in a Transnational Era F AY E G I N S B U R G

I

start this chapter with a story as a way of dramatising the gravity of some of the concerns that surround the development of Indigenous media and their relationship to representational practices in the dominant media, one of the key ways in which contemporary Indigenous cultures are ‘interconnected’ to a range of social worlds. Too often, in theoretical discussion of media and their circulation, we can forget what the stakes are for those who are unable to control representations of their lives. The story below belongs to the Tuscarora artist, photographer and professor of Native American art Jolene Rickard, who used it in an essay written for a conference, held in 1997, on Native American Art History. In it, Rickard (1997: 1–2) clarified how crucial it is to understand the political situation and historical processes within which Indigenous cultural work is produced. She described how she experiences the power of the state over the Iroquois Nation’s self-governance in an immediate, phenomenological sense, as she loses power for the 27

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computer she is writing on, a cut-off by New York State authorities following the beating and arrest by the police of two Seneca women who had been peacefully protesting a decision to tax their territory. May 8, 1997. The phone rang only twice before I welcomed the distraction from writing a position paper for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History. A Seneca colleague reported that two Seneca women had just been beaten by the New York State police at the border of the Cattaragugus Reservation. A special New York State swat ‘team’ was sent in to subdue (club) and arrest Iroquois resisters (women and children) again on May 11 at the border of the Onondaga Nation. Within minutes of the Seneca incursion my phone was dead and the electricity powering my computer was off. These conditions are common if you live within the territories of the Tuscarora nation in western New York state in the late 20th century. The beatings were not reported in the local newspaper and the ‘incident’ was played down on the Buffalo and Syracuse evening TV news . . . What is significant in this modest telling of a moment in contemporary Iroquoia within the global discourse of visual culture? . . . Artists living with these experiences are deeply affected by these events . . . Therefore I am suggesting that the cultural arena is a viable site to enact and witness art that probes indigenous experience in the ongoing struggle to have a presence in the global cultural space. The complication with the arts discourse as it relates to Native issues is that there is a longstanding relationship of framing the ‘space’ accorded to this work based on the reflection or needs of the dominant west.

The moment Rickard described crystallises for her (and her audience) the distinctive circumstances—and ongoing experience of political and epistemological struggle—that motivate and surround her own work. It does so also for other Indigenous cultural activists who have turned to various expressive forms as a means of worldly inter-

Resources of Hope

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vention (Ang 1996: 45–6, 79; Abu-Lughod 1997: 128) that can simultaneously strengthen their own communities and assist in, and insist on, the broader presence of Indigenous perspectives in a variety of arenas. In 1994 the international circulation and critical acclaim of the very successful Maori feature film Once Were Warriors (Tamahori 1994) marked a real watershed for the possibilities of Indigenous media productions to receive widespread acclaim and recognition on a world stage. Specifically, it enabled a story of contemporary Maori life to take on a powerful presence in the transnational world shaped by the circulation of independent film, although there has been considerable debate in the Maori community regarding the images of violence (Pihama 1996).1 On the other end of the media spectrum, much of the Indigenous media being produced are oriented initially to local concerns and connections, part of self-conscious efforts to sustain and transform culture in contemporary Indigenous communities, what Tony Bennett and Valda Blundell (1995), in a journal issue devoted to cultural politics and First Peoples, have called ‘innovative traditionalism’. For example, the Inuit group Igloolik Isuma Productions, directed by Zacharias Kunuk, has creatively engaged in communitybased video production, in which elders create dramas about their lives in the early part of the century, as a means of recuperating languages, ceremonies, and histories across several generations. The series they made based on that process, Nunavut, has been seen by other northern native communities all across northern Canada on TVNC, the station linking these communities (Berger 1995a, 1995b; Fleming 1995; Roth 1994). Others have been using media to enhance struggles for native rights, to ensure that their views (often erased in dominant media coverage) are heard and seen beyond their own communities, as in the extraordinary epic film Kahnesetake (1994) by Abenaki film-maker Alanis Obamsawim. Using her position as a veteran director for the National Film Board of Canada, she was able to document the prolonged struggle at Oka in 1990 by Canada-based Mohawks who fought to maintain rights to sacred burial grounds that were being claimed for a golf

30


course. While the film made a powerful claim for Mohawk interests in the current debate, it was also intended to provide historical documents for future generations; Obamsawim, acutely aware of the absence of knowledge of these kinds of events from the native point of view from the colonial past, has always regarded her films as part of a political and cultural legacy to the next generation.2 With similar intentions, but mixing genres, Hopi film-maker and artist Victor Masayesva Jr has both drawn upon and satirised documentary film to deconstruct the ways that Native Americans have been portrayed in dominant media. For example, in his feature-length film Imagining Indians (1993), a humorous yet stinging indictment of Kevin Costner’s film Dances With Wolves, he offered a direct critique not only of contemporary Hollywood representations of Indians but also of the treatment of Native actors who acted in these films. In an effort to underscore what their work is about, I use the term ‘cultural activist’ to describe the self-conscious way in which they are, like people in many other societies, using the production of media and other expressive forms as a way not only to sustain and strengthen their communities but also to help transform them through what one might call a ‘strategic conservatism’. This position is crucial to their work but is effaced from much contemporary cultural theory that emphasises dislocation and globalisation, as Rickard argued in the opening quote (1997: 1–2). The cultural activists creating these new kinds of cultural forms have turned to them as a means of revivifying local languages, traditions and histories, and articulating community concerns. They also have seen media as a means of furthering social and political transformation by inserting their own narratives into national ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1990: 7)3 as part of ongoing struggles for Indigenous recognition and self-determination. Increasingly, the circulation of these media globally—through conferences, festivals, co-productions, use of the Internet, and the like—has become an important basis for nascent but growing transnational networks of Indigenous media-makers and activists. These activists were attempting to reverse processes through which aspects of their societies have been objectified, commodified, and appropriated by the dominant

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society; their media productions and writings were efforts to recuperate their histories, land rights, and knowledge bases as their own cultural property. These kinds of cultural productions are consistent with the ways in which the meaning and praxis of culture in late modernity has become increasingly self-conscious. Indigenous media practices have helped to create and contest social, visual, narrative and political spaces, for local communities and in the creation of national and other kinds of dominant cultural imaginary that have, until recently, excluded vital representations by First Nations peoples within their borders. For example, through televisual media production, Aboriginal media-makers working in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Indigenous Programs Unit have been able to assert the visible evidence of Aboriginal histories and lives in a national public culture where Aboriginal activism and political claims had been effaced, until quite recently, from the official histories (Ginsburg 1993b, 1997). The capacity of such representations to circulate to other communities, from Indigenous neighbours to non-government organisations (NGOs), is an extension of this process, and is rapidly moving into other forms of mediation such as cyberspace (Danaja and Garde 1997). Indeed, as I was working on an earlier draft of this chapter in September 1996, a letter of appeal to Nelson Mandela for support against threatened budget cuts for Aboriginal communities was sent over the Internet signed by the members of the Murray District Aboriginal Association and their non-Indigenous friends.4 Such examples make clear that Indigenous media have raised important questions about the politics and circulation of knowledge at several levels: within communities this may be about who has had access to and understanding of media technologies, and who has the rights to know, tell, and circulate certain stories and images (Michaels 1985, 1986; T. Turner 1990). Within nation-states, media are linked to larger battles over racism, sovereignty and land rights, as well as struggles over funding, airspace, control over satellites, and networks of broadcasting and distribution that may or may not be open to Indigenous work. This was readily apparent in Australia in 1997 when threatened cuts to the budgets of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait

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Islander Commission (ATSIC) and Indigenous media operations (noted in the e-mail cited above) were a reminder of the fragility of the victories of the 1980s that enabled the establishment of a few of the early and significant centres of Indigenous media production, such as Warlpiri Media, Ernabella Video and Television (EVTV), the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and the Indigenous Programs Unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In North America, native Canadians are facing radical reductions at previously sympathetic sponsors such as the National Film Board of Canada (Obamsawim, pers. comm.), while in the United States, Native American media-makers are finding fewer sources of funding in the current climate of privatisation. Ironically, as support for production is decreasing, there is increased vitality of events organised around the exhibition of Indigenous media, such as the burgeoning biennial Film and Video Festival of the National Museum of the American Indian, which in 1997 showed over 50 films and videos, as well as radio and Web sites from or about over 30 groups throughout the Americas. Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, a more mainstream venue, has in the 1990s developed a regular program within the larger event devoted to Native American work, a decision Native American producers have both praised for its support as well as criticised for its implicit ghettoisation of their work (Vail 1997). We need to track and analyse these kinds of contradictory and fluctuating relationships between arenas of (Indigenous) cultural production and government support and cutbacks, both historically and in the present, because they form the context that enables or constrains the production and circulation of different forms of cultural mediation.

MARGINALISING

THE LOCAL

The impact of these fluctuations can be tracked in a variety of places: in fieldwork, in policy documents and in the dramas of everyday life in cultural institutions. In this section I briefly discuss two instances in which one can see how different frameworks for understanding

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globalisation, media, and culture are naturalised, operating daily as ‘commonsense’ in institutions in ways that marginalise Indigenous media (and other parallel activities) either as irrelevant, or to a position of dangerous intervention in the status quo. How do we, as activists, media-makers, or scholars, operate in the creation and circulation of discursive frameworks for Indigenous media that can either support people’s understanding of it or marginalise its significance? Do we want simply to mirror the widespread concern about increasing corporate control over media production and distribution, and the often parallel panic over multiculturalism (Appiah 1997)? Or, following Rickard, can we help illuminate other possibilities emerging out of locally based concerns, and speak for their significance in contemporary cultural and policy arenas? The first story illustrates how easily activities of people in ‘out of the way places’ (Tsing 1993: iii) can be constructed as marginal and dismissed, even by the sympathetic, a process that Anna Tsing refers to as the politics of the periphery (1993: 39). It took place at an event of a sort that probably occurs often in the halls of academies, foundations and government agencies but in this case was at a dinner held at the university where I work. The guest of honour was a scholar who is probably one of the key intellectuals today trying to ground our understanding of processes of globalisation and to look at the complex ways in which these forces become localised. The dinner was sponsored by a dean who in general regards himself as someone who wants to diversify the cultural perspectives represented at the university but who is still in the grip of hegemonic understandings of ‘what matters’; he started the conversation by asking, ‘How are we to understand the increasing internationalisation of the world here in the university?’ After hearing people deliver laments about the homogenisation of culture, exemplified by the presence of McDonald’s fast food restaurants in remote Middle Eastern villages, some of us mentioned other kinds of examples, such as the effective use of cyberspace and video by Tibetan Buddhist activists to keep alive an international support movement for their human rights and for independence from China; or the video work of the Kayapo Indians in Brazil, who

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orchestrated a remarkable and successful pan-Indian demonstration at Altamira to protest a World Bank-sponsored project to create a dam that would have flooded their lands and villages. Their savvy use of media—in which they used their spectacular appearance and performance style, as well as their association with the rock star Sting—succeeded in attracting the world press and in the end helped to cancel the loan for the dam (T. Turner 1992). The dean listened patiently and then said, ‘Yes, but tell me, is this important?’ Clearly it was difficult for him to see these kinds of actions—and the people themselves—as anything but marginal and certainly irrelevant to the concerns of the academy. By contrast, the second instance is one that attributes disproportionate power to such activities. The encounter I describe took place at the aforementioned conference on Native American Art History, convened to address the importance of bringing such work into the canon. At least a third of the participants were Native American scholars. In the question period following comments made by a non-Native American and tenured historian of pre-Colombian art, one of the Indigenous scholars (a community leader working on a doctorate) asked him why he chose to study this topic. His response was to accuse the questioner of being the kind of person who had created the conditions for backlash against multicultural support systems and affirmative action in California. Everyone in the room was stunned by the virulence of the response. Jolene Rickard stabilised the explosive moment with the following remarks (notes on comments by Jolene Rickard, June 1997): At a time when the fashions of contemporary discourse, and the world itself, seems to point towards the globalization of space and human experience, Native American and other indigenous activists are advocating the importance of specific cultural enclaves, of choosing to remain together despite all the pressures—historical and contemporary—to give that up. We provide the opposite of the way the human condition is moving, floating and migrating around the globe. Instead, we are

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strategizing to reconfirm a continuous relationship with a very particular part of the world. That’s what we need to get to—but we need to clarify that it is about decolonizing, and sustaining our relationship to a particular space.

Her comments helped to re-centre the exchange around the issues and dilemmas faced by Indigenous cultural activists who find their positions misunderstood and even out of mode in contemporary discourse. At the same time she called attention to a key point that is both obvious and one we constantly need to remember: that institutional structures are built on discursive frameworks that shape the way in which phenomena are understood, naturalising shifts in state support for a range of cultural activities, as exemplified in the last decade of controversy over multiculturalism in the United States. In government, foundation and academic institutions, these frameworks have an enormous impact on policy and funding decisions that, for better or worse, can have a decisive effect on media work. While this is true of many cultural forms, it is particularly true of media such as film or video whose production and distribution are expensive, for everything from cameras and editing, to the festivals that underwrite the circulation through which this work can begin to have a global presence that nonetheless sustains its connection to its community of origin. In trying to understand the present moment, then, it is crucial to examine current ideas regarding media as social phenomena—in particular the current preoccupation with their globalisation from across the political spectrum (Schiller 1976; Featherstone 1990; Tomlinson 1990; Bagdikian 1992; Postman 1992; Appadurai 1996; Barber 1996; Wilson and Dissanayake 1996; During 1997).

OPENING

D I S C U R S I V E S PA C E S F O R T H E

INDIGENOUS

MEDIA

The two anecdotes in the previous section are instances of some of the models circulating that attempt to comprehend Indigenous media in an interconnected world. One of the most influential frameworks

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comes from work in communications, ranging from the technophilic Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan to the darker concerns of writers such as John Tomlinson, succinctly expressed in the title of his book Cultural Imperialism (1990). It is only a few decades since the idea of the global village, introduced by McLuhan’s writings, became common parlance (McLuhan 1964; McLuhan and Powers 1989). The metaphor evoked a vision of the next century transformed by the widespread availability of media technologies that would, in his words (1964: 24): abolish both space and time as far as our planet is concerned . . . when the technological simulation of consciousness, the creative process of knowing, will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

While McLuhan is not much in fashion these days (and I am not arguing for his recuperation), his books and ideas were landmarks in their time that gave fundamental shape to North American attitudes towards rapid transformations in communications. More contemporary North American media visionaries such as Bill Gates (1995) and Nicholas Negroponte (1996) have not substantially altered McLuhan’s paradigm. In their arguments for the potential of new technologies to create more fluid social arrangements and electronic democracies, they, like McLuhan, failed to appreciate fully the significance and persistence of cultural difference, as well as social and economic inequalities. In the current romance with cyberspace, there is little concern with the fact that for most people on the planet access to a telephone is difficult if not impossible (Zarroli 1997: 3), let alone locating the entrance to the information superhighway. In these models (as in the first anecdote in the previous section), the local—especially in its non-Western and/or Third or Fourth World variant—is inevitably cast as marginal, or at best merely a stylistic problem for successful marketing, in relation to corporately driven processes engaged in what the business community euphemistically call ‘global localisation’.

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On the other hand, books such as Ben Barber’s influential Jihad vs. McWorld: How globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world (1996)5 have pointed with understandable alarm to the increasing presence of corporate popular culture—from Disney to McDonald’s— everywhere on the globe in the wake of transnational capitalism. At the same time, what he calls ‘tribal’ conflicts (subsumed under the notion of ‘Jihad’ regardless of their cultural bases) are viewed as threatening, likely to destabilise the supposedly culturally neutral space of civil society. (What do we lament in the domination of Hollywood film on the world market if not the loss of the very local culture that Barber finds so pernicious a force elsewhere?) While one shares Barber’s concern about the effects and ubiquity of American media and fast-food franchises, what are we to make of his blanket judgment against the assertion of culture as indicative of a dangerous ‘tribalism’ fragmenting social life beyond the destruction wrought by the macroeconomic transformations summed up in the neologism ‘McWorld’? Such jeremiads are tone-deaf to variations in the assertion of cultural identity; in their totalising sweep, they fail to recognise local efforts to create new cultural possibilities, and cultural and political spaces that offer countervailing tendencies to globalising trends controlled by multinational corporations. Where, then, can one find a scholarly accounting of the impact of Indigenous media? It is beginning to be present in media scholarship and/or globalisation theory, mainly through the posthumous publication of Eric Michaels’ writing in the 1980s on the Warlpiri Media Association (WMA) at the Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu in Australia’s Central Desert (1986). Michaels’ descriptions of the early days of that group gave it unexpected visibility. For various scholars, alarmed at the ‘wasteland’ of television, WMA acquired an iconic status as a plucky outback David whose tiny satellite dishes and funky video productions served as a kind of well-targeted epistemological slingshot against the globalising satellites and accompanying programming of media giants. Through Michaels’ writing, scholars such as Dick Hebdige (1994) and Sean Cubitt (1993) took the example of Warlpiri television (and the exotic sense of high-tech primitivism associated with

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it) as a model for alternative possibilities of television production, distribution, and reception. John Tomlinson’s Cultural Imperialism gave the social fact of Indigenous media a slightly different spin, with a visual image of Aboriginal people sitting outside a house watching television in the desert, in a book whose central argument focused on the threats posed by cultural imports to Indigenous cultures. Interestingly, none of these writers seems to be concerned with what has actually happened either to WMA or with Aboriginal media more generally since then. The result is that the image of WMA at Yuendumu remains fetishistically frozen in the past decade, even as that community has been developing new forms such as the compressed video link-ups created with the Tanami network (Ginsburg 1993a), and more recent work with CD-ROM technologies and, in 1997, a documentary production, Night Patrol, being made as part of a national documentary series to be shown on the ABC. Australian media scholar Toby Miller offered an interesting perspective on this fetishistic tendency in his review of the ways in which Aboriginal life has been taken up as an object of Western fascination, from Durkheim and Freud, to the current romance with Aboriginal media in cultural and media studies. Miller (1995: 15) noted that First World scholars have too often written about Aboriginal people as a means of elevating their own academic status, rather than as a part of an effort to support the broader project of Aboriginal cultural creativity: Clearly a fine line has to be walked between a sloppy appropriation that willfully loosens the sign from its referent in the form of a continuing process of logocentric white projection, and the desire to give some extraordinary political, theoretical, and aesthetic developments in First People’s media their due significance.

Part of walking that fine line is to demonstrate the importance of this work in its own right, as Miller argued, not only as a counter to dominant theory but also as part of broader and historically grounded

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social processes through which new social arrangements emerge that counter the dominant cultural formations. Other scholars, concerned with critiques of globalisation that recognised more generally the significance of Indigenous and other locally situated cultural practices in relation to dominant models of globalisation such as Barber’s, pointed instead to the importance of the productions/producers who were helping (among other things) to generate their own links to other Indigenous communities through which local practices were strengthened and linked. In the introduction to their edited volume, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (1996: 14) pointed to such processes as part of ‘an aesthetic of rearguard resistance, rearticulated borders as sources, genres, and enclaves of cultural preservation and community identity to be set against global technologies of modernization or image-cultures of the postmodern’. Indeed, simultaneous with the growing corporate control of media, Indigenous producers and cultural activists are creating innovative work, not only in the substance and form of their productions but also in the social relations they are creating through this practice. While many Indigenous media efforts are resolutely local and intentionally political, as in the creation of numerous media cooperatives in Oaxaca with the rise of the Zapatista movement (Wortham 1996; Berger 1997), others were forming broader nation-based alliances to support their own media production, including the Native Americans Producers Alliance in the United States, the Aboriginal Film and Video Arts Alliance in Canada, Te Manu Aute in New Zealand, and the National Indigenous Media Association of Australia. These groups have created a social field that changes the ways we understand media and its relationship to the circulation of culture more generally in the late twentieth century. They challenge, for example, those who focus on media as being simply the product of individual auteurs or capitalist or state-driven desires. Groups often organise to represent themselves collectively, sometimes in a manner that actively resists the imposition (or seduction) of government interests, as in the development of ‘pirate television’ at Yuendumu and Ernabella in Australia, which later became, ironically, the model for the development of BRACS,

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a government-sponsored low-power television project for remote Aboriginal communities (Molnar 1990; Ginsburg 1997). Another prominent example of this process is the Inuit Broadcast Corporation (IBC) in northern Canada (now Nunavut), one of the earliest and most successful Indigenous media efforts. Its formation was the result of a long battle by Inuit people to gain some control over the use of communication satellites that had initially been launched over Canada’s far north as part of military and corporate experiments with new media technologies (Roth 1994). Such efforts are evidence of how Indigenous media formed over the last decades at the conjuncture of a number of historical developments. These included the circuits opened by new media technologies ranging from satellites to compressed video and cyberspace, as well as the ongoing legacies of Indigenous activism worldwide, most recently by a generation comfortable with media and concerned with making their own representations in it as a mode of cultural creativity and social action. They also represent the complex and differing ways that states have responded to these developments—the opportunities of media and the pressures of activism—and entered into new relationships with the Indigenous nations they encompass. In some cases, as in the stories that follow, protests to events such as centenary celebrations triggered a shift towards multiculturalist politics—especially in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States—that at first helped to create new public understandings of the relationship between cultural and political rights.

C U LT U R A L

ACTIVISTS AND COUNTER-PUBLICS

The kind of historical conjunctures that occurred in North America in the 1960s transformed the sense of opportunity for an emerging generation of Indigenous activists. Drawing on the works and lives of pioneering Native North American media-makers and activists— Sandy Osawa (Makah), Loretta Todd (Metis/Cree), and Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), in this section I examine how such activists, shaped by a

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particular historical moment, are part of and creators of new social formations, what Nancy Fraser, in her important critique of Habermas’ public sphere, called a ‘counter-public’ (Fraser 1993). Through a variety of activities and formations—organisations, expressive media of all kinds, protests, school curricula—they and others of their generation have been engaged with making visible their own communities’ histories and struggles as well as the politics of knowledge that shape representations of Indigenous cultures. These concerns are at the heart of the narrative that prize-winning film-maker, writer and activist Loretta Todd tells about her introduction and attraction to media as a young native woman coming of age in western Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. I quote from an extensive interview carried out with Todd by Carol Kalafatic (1997), Barbara Abrash and myself as a part of a series of dialogues with Indigenous film-makers at the Center for Media, Culture, and History in New York City.6 During this part of the dialogue, Todd recalled the early emergence of Indigenous media in western Canada. Her account detailed the ways in which a counter-public sphere was catalysed by several specific developments: the migration of Canadian native people to cities and the subsequent emergence of Indigenous activism; the beginning of an Indian presence on popular television shows; and Vancouver’s Centennial Celebration of the Canadian Confederacy in 1967 at which the actor, Chief Dan George, articulated a collective sense of anger at the erasure of an aboriginal point of view at that event. As she recollected: When I was very young, some aboriginal people were gathering around the idea of media. One of the first media societies that occurred in Canada was in Alberta, Edmonton. It was a group of people who were really political people who came out of the political process and who wanted to do radio and film and video, who wanted to tell stories, who still had that connection and realised the power of the story. They realised that their political activity didn’t just have to be to run political organisations and realised

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that wasn’t what their politicisation was meant to lead them to. They wanted to be storytellers. . . . There really was a galvanising of people around the idea of stories of the life of Indians in these new places. I remember what happened with Chief Dan George playing the Indian in this TV series that the CBC was producing about life in western Canada called ‘The Caribou’. He became a means for us to realise that we could tell our stories too. In 1967 at the Vancouver Centennial, Chief Dan George was invited to the celebrations. When he got there, he stood up and said to the crowd, ‘I have nothing to celebrate’. He then unleashed a powerful stream of oratory and poetry, of story, and there was this kind of realization, with the native people living there who weren’t necessarily from the territory—Cree, Dene, a lot of people down from the coast and from the prairies, maybe 50–60 different tribes in this one place. And that’s probably something you hadn’t seen for many centuries; when tribes had gathered in that number they would never live together for an extended period of time. And they started forming things like the Vancouver Indian Center. And Chief Dan George reminded us that we were storytellers. So he brought this really interesting confluence of people in one place and time in Vancouver, and a lot of people wanting to tell stories.

This sense of an emerging counter-public was further catalysed, in what Marshall Sahlins (1985: iii) would call a ‘structure of conjuncture’, by the unprecedented introduction in the late 1960s of small-format video (Boyle 1997) to First Nations communities in North America by progressive White activists who Todd called ‘media missionaries’ because of the zeal with which they hoped to convert politically and culturally disenfranchised communities to these new forms of communication. They were remarkably successful as their efforts spurred the formation of Native American communications societies, which were the formative base for most of those engaged in Indigenous media-making today, including Loretta Todd:

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And then video came along. And you get all these hippies, these earnest politicals, creating all these media collectives. And they thought, well, they’ll go into the Indian community, you know, teach us to be political. Yeah right. I call them media missionaries. But none-the-less, they had the technology, and we were becoming increasingly interested in who we were as storytellers, so people started to pick up this medium. Then you started to see a lot of Native communications societies, people trying to form collectives, to take the values by which we lived into this medium, so we’d be collectives, you know, serving the community. I was too young to be directly involved, but I knew the people who did that, and heard their stories. So I was able to build on it and help form an organization called the Aboriginal Film and Video Arts Alliance in Canada. It’s not like we have a president and a board . . . What we are is a circle of people who really believe in the principles of collective action, who really have a relationship to their community, who want to preserve the power of the storyteller. We could go to different cultural institutions in Canada, to help put them on the red road, not as places of career enhancement but as places that speak to who we are as those people living on that land called Canada, and how we protect that land or don’t. So you know, we’ve always felt really strong about trying to create partnerships and alliances with other aboriginal people and other non-aboriginal people who want to protect the land.

Similarly, Northwest Coast Makah film-maker Sandy Osawa, a founding member of the Native Americans Producers Alliance and director of a number of award-winning documentaries on struggles over Native American rights concerning land, sacred sites, fishing rights and cultural property, situated herself in the activism of the 1960s and the particular spaces it opened up for young United Statesbased Native American activists at the time. She had not only been active in Makah life, but she had been deeply influenced as a college student by her participation in the National Indian Youth Council in

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the 1960s, sponsored by the Association on American Indian Affairs, which brought young Native Americans together from around the country to learn about Indian history and foster leadership. Her experiences there, indicative of those of many of her generation and not unlike those Todd described as part of a more informal process in Vancouver, fostered a sense of translocal identification. As Osawa (June 1997 interview) described it: People that went there went on to work for their tribes . . . I had a very clear understanding of all the dynamics involved with our own political situation and how we fit in with the whole American scene . . . This also helped shape my feeling that I could really grasp, work with other tribes, because I felt like I had such a good overall background. It was not unusual for me to want to do something with the Navajo people when I made the film In the Heart of Big Mountain, or the Chippewa when I did Lighting the Seventh Fire because I already had this background in terms of what really affects us politically in common. I felt it was important to respond to issues in any part of the country. In fact, I would say, with indigenous people everywhere, I think it is important for us to pay attention to how indigenous people are treated. So that’s really my own personal bent, to be interested in indigenous issues no matter what tribe or what area. Because that says something about, you know, the whole world.

CONCLUSION I would like to conclude on a note of cautious optimism. The remarkable florescence of Indigenous media over the last two decades, whatever problems may have accompanied it, is nothing short of extraordinary. Now, in the 1990s, we are seeing a backlash in the United States, Canada and Australia against the influential efforts in earlier decades to reframe the national imaginary in a more inclusive manner, as evidenced by the decline in affirmative action and National Arts

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agencies in the United States, the defunding of the cultural units at the National Film Board of Canada, and the popularity of politicians running on racist platforms such as that of Pauline Hanson in Australia. What that will mean for the continued production and circulation of Indigenous media remains to be seen. Certainly the generation of people like Loretta Todd, Sandy Osawa and Jolene Rickard, schooled in the political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s that affected First Nations people worldwide, have a legacy of struggle, a finely honed knowledge of media to fall back on in lean times, as well as an expanding base of media production with a growing infrastructure that ranges from Indigenous initiatives at national film commissions, to regional production and broadcast centres, to the mushrooming of local small-scale production centres.7 In Australia alone, the first fragile experiments in video production at Yuendumu and Ernabella, and regional television and radio at CAAMA, are now only three out of over a hundred community-based initiatives, along with the Aboriginal work coming out of urban centres by independent media-makers such as those whose works were developed by Walter Saunders at the Australian Film Commission, which were broadcast nationally in 1997 in the Sand to Celluloid series, as well as others engaged with the Indigenous program units at the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the ABC. Formations such as these, working out of grounded communities or broader regional or national bases (such as Canada’s Aboriginal Film and Video Arts Alliance) offer an important alternative to those who are blind to this vitality, dazzled by the media spectacles that stand for the master-narrative of globalised production. As a counter to that, Wilson and Dissanayake argue (1996: 17) that ‘local spaces of contested identification and belonging, if scrappy and minor in this micro-political sense, can still generate what Raymond Williams called “resources of hope” within contexts of transnationalization’. Indigenous media offer an alternative model of grounded and increasingly global interconnectedness, created by Indigenous people about their own lives and cultures. While scholars like Barber may choose to ignore such phenomena in their own right or as examples

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of alternative modernities, resources of hope, a new dynamic in social movements, or as part of the trajectory of Indigenous life in the late twentieth century, those creating Indigenous media, as well as those in power, do not regard it as irrelevant. Whether for commercial or political purposes, controlling the representation of conflict, culture and historical processes by non-dominant groups with claims on the majority culture is always significant. This was violently clear in the opening narrative to this chapter by Jolene Rickard, whose writing was stopped literally mid-sentence by actions of the state, concerned to control knowledge of contemporary Seneca resistance to the enforcement of new taxation. This is at the other end of the spectrum from the more utopian vision invoked by Claire Smith in the planning document (1996: 1) for the conference on which this book is based, in which she made the case for the potential of media technologies for ‘indigenous people to advance their cultural values in the face of the pressures arising from an interconnected world’. In either case, it is clearly time for theoreticians of the globalisation of culture to take Indigenous media into account. As we all struggle to comprehend the remapping of social space that is happening as new media forms are being embraced, appropriated, and indigenised, this work offers some coordinates for understanding what an interconnected world might be like outside a hegemonic order. It is this sort of remapping that Rickard addresses in her insistence on cultural productions that sustain a relationship to a particular part of the world. Given the significance she attributes to recognising sources of knowledge and who has the rights to articulate that knowledge, often in storied form, it seems only fitting to complete this chapter with her words. Drawing on the activity of beadwork—a practice for which Tuscarora are justifiably famous—as a metaphor for cultural practice, Rickard writes (1992: 111) of her own efforts: My work is another bead on the cloth, visually linking our worldview to our experience. It is on our experience that I focus my eye, looking at the bits and pieces of our daily life while sorting through what belongs to us and what we picked up along the way. These

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images are not radically chic. I am just one Tuscarora woman who has identified the ‘center’ as anywhere indigenous people continue to live, knowing that we have the oldest, continuously surviving cultures in the world. That has to mean something. Every day I explore that meaning from the inside looking out.

Image Not Available

Paia Ingram teaching Papua New Guinean basketmaking

3 From Clan Symbol to Ethnic Emblem: Indigenous Creativity in a Connected World R O B E R T L AY T O N

D

avid Turner has described how he began his fieldwork on Groote Eylandt in the late 1960s by mapping the landscape, locating clan boundaries and recording kinship relations, then, finally, making a superficial study of the people’s music. Fifteen years later he returned to study the music in more detail and asked one of his old instructors how the tunes he sang were created. ‘We always wondered why you never asked us about this,’ Gula replied, and went on to explain that Turner had conducted his field enquiries ‘backwards’; he should have begun with the tunes and then moved outwards to the way in which relationships between people, other people and the country are constructed through the medium of music, song, and legend (Turner 1997: 1). The rebuke encapsulates the distinction I wish to make in this chapter between creative action and its consequences in the world. On one 49

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hand, those who are competent in a cultural tradition use its intellectual resources to build outwards into the world. They construct metaphors, similes and other tropes that play on congruences between different orders of experience, and they construct causal hypotheses about how the world ‘works’. Deployed in practical settings, these become assertions about the social order. On the other hand, such creative actions are produced into a world beyond their creator’s control, which determines their fate as others take them up or reject them according to what is desirable or possible in particular social circumstances. Nonetheless, since cultural constructions are always underdetermined by their environment, creativity cannot be reduced to the effects of an encapsulating world. ‘Experiences call for changing a theory, but do not indicate just where and how’ (Quine 1960: 64). In a connected world, the social and natural environments promote or inhibit the effects of creativity but do not determine what the creative urge will produce. In this chapter I will trace the evidence for creativity in Aboriginal art and legend through its traditional roots to contemporary transformations.

IDENTITY

AND THE CONNECTEDNESS OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

The original context?

The social environment of traditional Aboriginal creativity was that of a community organised into small social groups or clans, some of which clustered to form a regional community. Members of such communities often visited each other, and the boundaries of these communities were themselves permeable, with groups on the margins claiming dual membership of communities on either side of them. It is currently fashionable in socio-ecology to claim a direct parallel between chimpanzee and human aggression. Writers such as Boehm and Knauft have pointed out that the male members of a chimpanzee troop cooperate to defend the boundaries of their territory and aggressively attempt to expand it at the expense of surrounding troops. A parallel

From Clan Symbol to Ethnic Emblem

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is then made with warfare in small-scale human societies such as the Yanomamo and New Guinea highlanders and the conclusion drawn that these behaviours have a common origin, genetically programmed into the human psyche (see, for example, Knauft 1991; Rodseth et al. 1991; Boehm 1992). I consider that these authors make a fundamental error in not examining the way of life of hunter-gatherers living in the kind of semi-arid environments resembling those where our early evolution is thought to have occurred. It is here, I argue, that the original context for human artistic creativity may be found. A comparison of group size among chimpanzees and huntergatherers shows that traditional hunter-gatherers normally live, day to day, in social groups of about the same size as those of chimpanzees. They differ, however, both in the way that individuals can become members of the local group and in the kind of relationships that exist between local groups. These differences help to explain how human cultural identities are created. The typical hunter-gatherer band is no larger than the chimpanzee troop. Among chimpanzees, however, males are confined to the same local group all their lives; even females can only change group membership when they are young adults. Chimpanzee local groups defend the boundaries of their territories against other chimpanzees (Ghiglieri 1984: 3–8, 185; Goodall 1986: 86–7, 207–28). On the other hand, among hunter-gatherers such as the Mbuti of central Africa (Turnbull 1965: 218–23), the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert (Lee 1979: 42) and the Yankunytjatjara of the Australian Western Desert (Layton 1986: 30–7), adults of both sexes can change band membership freely. This is possible because several bands form a regional community containing between 250 and 500 individuals. Dunbar (1993: 686) identified such regional communities as distinctively human. There are no groupings of this scale among chimpanzees, and they therefore appear to provide the original ‘connected world’ within which hunter-gatherers moved. Recent hunter-gatherers in Africa or Australia are of course far removed in time from the original human condition. While they may live under similar socio-ecological constraints, the divergence of their cultural trajectories demonstrates the creativity of human culture.

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Neighbouring bands within a hunter-gatherer community frequently forage over each other’s territories. One study of a central African pygmy group suggested that they travel more often to visit friends and relations than to go hunting (Hewlett et al. 1982). When Haskovec and Sullivan (1989: 62) reconstructed the life of the Arnhem Land artist Najombolmi, they found that his rock paintings were distributed across an area of 18 000 square kilometres in the Mayali language area, within and beyond his own clan estate. Members of the regional human community may never all assemble in one place. There are three ways in which relationships are maintained within the regional human community, whose members will often be spread over a wide area. Humans are unique in exchanging objects as gifts that symbolise social relationships. Humans are also unique in their possession of language. Chimpanzees and baboons maintain ‘friendships’ within their group by grooming each other. Humans are unique too in their possession of other forms of symbolic communication. Relationships, or positions in society, can also be represented through art and ritual. In Australia, each local group (clan) within the community identifies itself with particular artistic motifs, while the wider community tends to identify itself as the speakers of a particular dialect. Often the word the community uses to describe itself is simply its word for ‘people’. In other cases, neighbouring dialects are named after particular words they use: Pitjantjatjara = the people who use the word pitjanyi for ‘going’ Yankunytjatjara = the people who use the word yananyi for ‘going’. There is evidence that neighbouring Aboriginal communities deliberately exaggerate differences of accent or vocabulary between their dialects to set themselves apart. Wiessner found that material culture expressed community identity among the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. Each San (Basarwa) community has its own style of arrowhead. Wiessner (1983: 269) showed arrows she had collected from other San groups to !Kung San: ‘When


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shown G/wi and !Xo arrows, !Kung men reacted with surprise and anxiety.’ They would be disturbed to find such arrowheads in their own country. They said, if a man makes arrows in the same way (as yourself) you can be fairly sure that he holds similar values to you about hunting, land rights and general social behaviour. Conversely, people who make unfamiliar arrowheads may not be trustworthy. Attempts have been made to link motif styles with regional communities in Australia, but convincing correlations have not always been found (Rosenfeld 1997 has provided a review). Like the !Kung of the Kalahari, Indigenous Australian communities were traditionally suspicious of those from outside their community. Sixty to seventy years ago, Warner collected an example of this attitude from the Yolngu of northeastern Arnhem Land. Warner (1937: 554) was told that ‘far away in the bush country, this is very deep inside, the men there have no mouths in the proper place, but it is found on the top of their heads. The sun does not go down there, but stays in one place all the time’. The mouth ‘opens like a door and is covered over with skin . . . the skin is kept in place with wax’ (1937: 555). Such men are compared to trickster spirits and murderers (1937: 557). This may sound like the kind of claim one ethnic community might make of another, but the !Kung and the Yolngu live in self-contained communities in their own land. Ethnic identity is a phenomenon found in complex societies, where several communities have different cultures but belong to a single society and must, therefore, interact with each other to some degree. For ethnic identity to develop in Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal people would have to be incorporated into a complex society. This began when the British colonised Australia in 1788, though it reached parts of central Australia as late as the 1930s. After colonisation a quite different, connected world was constructed in Australia, demanding the expression of new forms of Indigenous identity. Creativity in traditional Indigenous communities

Despite the similar structure of social organisation among tropical and semi-tropical hunter-gatherers on different continents, each cultural

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tradition has created its own representation of, and reflection on, the connectedness of hunter-gatherer society. The conceptual space of traditional culture in contemporary Australia is bounded by the creation period. During this period indeterminate possibilities became determined through the actions of heroic beings who left their mark on the landscape and gave society its structure. Choices were made between death and regeneration, social obligations were established, upheld or denied, and the focuses of clans’ foraging zones were mapped out as sites created by the heroic beings. The events of the creation period are retold in legend. One of the most ubiquitous, albeit primarily male-oriented, representations of the interconnectedness of Aboriginal clans is through the travels of ancestral beings from place to place. Some of the heroes of the creation period travelled hundreds of miles, identifying clan estates, leaving the spirits of unborn children in waterholes, and shaping the landscape. As they travelled, such heroes interacted with local beings who rarely travelled more than a few miles and generally remained within what was to be a single clan estate. Since two or more travelling heroes may cross the estate of a single clan, the legendary narrative and the re-enactment of the ancestors’ travels in ceremony thus express both local identity and a regional network of relationships (Figure 3.1). The travels of the totemic ancestors are re-enacted in rituals at which living members of the clan take on the personae of the ancestors. The participants’ distinctive body paint conveys the dual human-animal essence of the ancestor and, like the heraldic devices of medieval Europe, asserts the actor’s right to membership of the clan and its estate. In central Australia, traditional ceremonies are performed around ground paintings that depict the ancestors’ travels. Often the ancestor’s footprints are shown passing from site to site. Each telling of a legend, each fresh realisation of a painted composition and each performance of ceremony nonetheless necessitate creative decisions by the narrator or the managers of the performance. A structure of this kind allows several types of creativity. The route of the travelling ancestor can be extended to take in new local events. The symbolic


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Image Not Available

Figure 3.1 The relationship between travelling and local heroes and clan estates

resonances of each incident can be elaborated to reveal deeper levels of significance in ritual and legend. Mundane events can be construed as following the ancestral paradigm. Warner (1937: 219) has described how an unusually high monsoon flood in Arnhem Land some years before his fieldwork was ended when a ritual expert caught the legendary serpent responsible for flooding the district in the creation period: A few years ago, a tremendous flood came down the Buckingham River and rose higher and higher until the people climbed the highest trees with their babies and dogs . . . Warlumbopo . . . dived in the

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water and caught Muit, the totemic python, pulled him back and sent him down into the well again. The rain stopped and the flood ceased.

Venbrux has recently published a detailed analysis of a funeral on Melville Island, off the coast of western Arnhem Land. ‘In the rituals the performers or narrators fit their own stories within the overall framing story . . . The stories “told” by the performers . . . [are] related to current happenings in their social life. As these stories run through the lives of the narrators, they help them shape their culture and adjust to new situations’ (Venbrux 1995: 141). Where ancestors left the spirits of unborn children in pools of permanent water along their track, the clan person’s spirit ideally returns to the water from which it came at death. Where a person’s spirit originates in a water outside their father’s estate, it is also possible to negotiate their membership of the group owning the estate of conception. The cultural system thus provides a syntax of social relationships. Ambiguity is eliminated by assigning people to positions specified by the system mapped out on the landscape by the ancestors’ travels. The ambiguity inherent in attitudes to the dead can be resolved in more than one way, depending on how immediate experiences are likened to prototypical events. In the 1920s, for example, Yolngu gave Warner (1937: 413–15) conflicting accounts of the nature of a dead person’s spirit; while believing, in principle, that each person left two spirits, the ancestral birimbir and the trickster mokoi, some said that the spirit’s identity was in doubt until his or her clan song cycle had been performed. In the 1980s Morphy (1984: 87ff) showed how the series of songs performed by the Yolngu to transport the deceased’s birimbir back to the clan well are put together anew for each funeral, depending on the place of death, the possible routes the spirit might take across other clans’ countries to reach its clan waterhole, and which of these clans are represented at the funeral. In the Western Desert, where each person is recognised as the living embodiment of a particular ancestor, the actions of living people inform the remembered image of the ancestral prototype, which


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becomes a kind of palimpsest of its successive embodiments (Layton 1995: 219–22). The funeral analysed by Venbrux is structured around the legends of the Tiwi creation period, but also around a seminal killing early this century whose features seemed to have been repeated in the actions of those descended from the participants, so that the remembered killing was taking on some of the structuring qualities of legend. Despite the many opportunities for creativity in traditional Aboriginal culture, there were also strict limits to the incorporation of new elements in the tradition. Michaels (1994: 108) pointed out that ‘a new or invented story threatens the web of narrative that supports the law . . . Desert Aborigines have no category of fiction’. Munn demonstrated that women’s art among the Warlpiri of central Australia was at least as creative as men’s art, since women were often inspired during dreams to create new variants on existing compositions. Paradoxically, however, the existing corpus of women’s motifs was smaller than that in men’s art. Munn (1973: 40–1) argued that the men’s clan-oriented cult art provided a forum in which new variants could be adopted, regularly performed and carefully memorised within a corporate group, whereas women’s cults were performed less frequently and by more variable, contingent sets of participants. Bern also noted that men’s religious cults constitute the most elaborated aspect of Aboriginal culture. Yet, he argued (1979a: 126–7), the segmentary structure of men’s cults, in which members of each clan held an exclusive body of knowledge and designs, orally transmitted, itself imposed a limit on the extent to which social differentiation can accumulate. Each clan’s knowledge constitutes a segment of the totality associated with the tracks of ancestors who passed through its territory. Men’s authority is built on reciprocal dependence, both in the exchange of marriage partners and in the performance of ceremony. Claire Smith (1993) has shown how the new medium of acrylic painting on masonite and canvas has enabled Warlpiri women to transfer their tradition from the human body to a more durable medium, thus enhancing the opportunities for the negotiation of a distinctive gender identity.

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CONNECTEDNESS

IN COLONIAL SOCIETY

Outcomes of colonisation

In broad terms, there are four possible outcomes of the colonial enterprise. Had Aboriginal resistance compelled the signing of treaties, then one or more Aboriginal nations would have been born as, indeed, the Aboriginal flag seeks to assert. Native communities in North America can refer to themselves as nations, such as the Sioux Nation, the Navaho Nation, because they signed treaties with the European colonists. Treaties are signed between sovereign peoples. In Australia no recognised treaties were signed. Complete assimilation would have resulted in the incorporation of Australia’s Indigenous people into the class structure of colonial society, while incomplete assimilation would have created an ethnic community. Success in preserving a traditional way of life on the Indigenous community’s own land laid the grounds for the assertion of land rights. Becoming a nation, an ethnic group or a social class

Colonial policy towards Aboriginal people has, as is well known, gone through three phases: extermination, assimilation, and multiculturalism and separate development (Rowley 1970; Howard 1981; Anon. 1985). The early colonisation of much of Australia took place at a time when Social Darwinism was the dominant philosophy. As one nineteenth-century colonist wrote, ‘The fact is that mankind cannot choose to act solely as moral human beings. They are governed by animal laws which urge them forward . . . The Anglo-Saxon cannot choose but intrude on the haunts of other races’ (Sutherland 1888 quoted by Anon. 1985: 12). Aboriginal people were regarded as survivors of a lower stage of human evolution, ‘an inferior race “fading away” in the face of western culture’, and were doomed to ‘die out’ (Rowley 1970: 6, 59). Once it became apparent that Aboriginal people were not going to ‘die out’, the governments of Australia decided they should be assimilated into non-Indigenous society. In the bush, missions and governments


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set up communities where Aboriginal children would go to school and learn to read and write, to cook and to sew. In the worst regimes children were separated from their parents and forced to sleep in single-sex dormitories, thus growing up with no experience of family life. Children of mixed parentage were taken from their Aboriginal mothers and sent to boarding schools many miles away. One of the Kungarakany with whom I worked in Darwin told me how she was informed the policy would ‘rescue their White blood’. This policy continued until the 1970s. Many such children, now grown up, are trying to find their Aboriginal relatives. It was only in September 1996 that August Sandy, a senior Alawa then aged 70, was reunited with his sister Marie Burke, aged 82, who had been taken from her community before the First World War. Had the policy of assimilation succeeded, Aborigines would have become members of the Australian working class. They were given no specialist training. Many were expected to become servants. Out in the bush, many indeed became very skilful stockmen and women, but few actually found work in towns. Val McGuinness, another of the Kungarakany with whom I worked in Darwin, recalled how, as a young man, the law prevented him from holding his own bank account. His money was banked by a non-Indigenous Australian designated as his guardian. On one occasion, asked by his guardian why he wanted to withdraw some cash, Val had responded, ‘I’m studying.’ ‘Studying for what?’ his guardian enquired. ‘To mind my own business,’ Val retorted. There were urban Aboriginal leaders from the late nineteenth century onwards who campaigned for better conditions for Aboriginal people, but it was not until the 1970s that a national Aboriginal ethnic identity began to crystallise. Two processes were central to this: the achievement of land rights and the development of new forms of artistic expression. Ritual and the assertion of land rights

Several anthropologists have argued that the cults that are performed over much of the Top End of the Northern Territory this century were

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devised in response to colonisation. There is no doubt they were spreading during the colonial era. The spread of the G.1 is well documented (Berndt 1951: xvii–xx; Elkin 1952: 251; Elkin 1961: 167–9; Stanner 1963: 244–5; Meggitt 1966), as is the spread of the Y. (Bern 1979b: 48). All of the key elements of the Gulf Country G. were seen to be duplicated by Ronald Berndt in 1949, in a performance in northeastern Arnhem Land (Berndt 1951: 40–7). Berndt (1951: xxv) argued that the cult had spread into northeastern Arnhem Land from the Roper River. He noted (1951: 148) that the heroes celebrated in the Gulf Country G. are associated with a hole in a creek on Alawa or Mara country near Hodgson Downs Station. Elkin (1961: 167) considers that the Y. also developed in the middle and lower Roper Valley, close to Alawa country on Hodgson Downs and a centre of early colonial conflict. It is therefore possible that new or modified religious cults were introduced to assert pan-Aboriginal traditional claims to land ownership in the face of attempted dispossession by pastoralists. One of the most interesting aspects of these cults is the way in which the travelling heroes they celebrate interact with local heroes who assist or challenge them, as is sketched in Figure 3.1. What renders each clan’s body of tradition unique is not the identity of the travelling ancestors but the identity of the local ones belonging to its estate. It is tempting to speculate that the travelling figures constructed a sense of regional unity out of previously more self-contained clan traditions. Even if this is so, however, the regional cults may have originated before colonial intervention. Darrell Lewis and George Chaloupka have drawn attention to evidence for the antiquity of elements in recent cults from the rock paintings of western Arnhem Land. The oldest ‘dynamic’ tradition is one of lively compositions. A later phase, however, sees the appearance of two new motifs, the ‘Yam Figure’ and the Rainbow Serpent (Taçon and Brockwell 1995; Taçon, Wilson and Chippindale 1996). The meaning of the Yam Figure is lost to local culture, though a Yam ritual is performed on the Tiwi islands off the coast of western Arnhem Land during the monsoon season (Venbrux 1995: 119ff; cf. Lewis 1988: 109). On the mainland, the ‘Rainbow


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Serpent’ is today associated in legend with a catastrophic flood that led to the creation of a society based on totemic clans. One of the most interesting lines of evidence for the antiquity of modern religious cults is that initiates in the Rainbow Serpent cult of the Yolngu, a variant of the G. cult described by Warner, are said to be like flying foxes, which also appear in early Rainbow Snake paintings (see, for example, Chaloupka 1993: Plate 145). Darrell Lewis (1988: 91) has suggested that the appearance of the Rainbow Serpent is evidence for new cults precipitated by the crisis of rising sea levels. Both Y. and G. cults were recorded by the earliest anthropologists to work in the Gulf Country, Spencer and Gillen, who learned of them in 1902 (Spencer and Gillen 1904: 223), only twenty years after the introduction of cattle ranching. Spencer and Gillen’s account of the Nganji, southern neighbours of the Alawa, shows that the cultural system is essentially unchanged since the turn of the century. It is possible that the cults already existed locally or that they developed by modifying existing, precolonial cults. Today they are nonetheless performed as an explicit assertion of rights to land against the colonists. As August Sandy put it to a non-Indigenous Australian lawyer with whom I was working in 1994, ‘If we didn’t do that ceremony, someone like you mob might shoot us and drive us off our land’. Land rights

In 1968, Gurinji stockmen on Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory went on strike and attempted to establish their own station on traditional Gurinji land. In 1971, three Yolngu clans went to court claiming that an aluminium company had no right to mine on their traditional land without their consent. Throughout northern Australia at this time, groups started to leave missions and government settlements and return to their own land. In 1976, the Australian government supported this process by passing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This was followed by other land rights Acts in South Australia and New South Wales. None of these laws conferred land rights on all Aboriginal people. The Australian government’s Act

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was particularly restrictive, and attempted to reproduce the traditional structure of landholding by individual clans, reinforcing the way in which much contemporary Aboriginal art in the Territory was developing as an expression of traditional clan identity. Evidence that ceremonies continue to be performed has been central to many claims under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. All of these laws recognised that Aboriginal people had a special attachment to the land by virtue of their traditional cultural values. They also recognised that assimilation had failed, and that policies should be changed to enable Aboriginal people to maintain a distinctive way of life. In this sense they could be said to acknowledge Aboriginal ethnic identity, and the laws were interpreted this way by urban Aboriginal people, many of whom had campaigned hard for the recognition of land rights. Art and the response to colonisation

In central Australia, recent rock carvings and modern commercial paintings use essentially the same vocabulary of motifs as the ancient Panaramitee tradition. Nobbs and Dorn’s claim that the Panaramitee tradition was up to 30 000 years old has recently come into question (Nobbs and Dorn 1988; Watchman 1997: 21–2; Beck et al. 1998; Dorn 1998). Even if one takes the more secure age estimate of 9000 BP obtained by Dragovich (1986) in western New South Wales and Rosenfeld’s archaeological age estimate of 13 000 BP for the similar ‘Early Man’ tradition in North Queensland (Rosenfeld 1981), it is clear that elements of the Panaramitee tradition are very old. There is, however, evidence that the system has changed over time. Munn (1973) has identified the typical compositional principles that generate recent, traditional ground paintings as those of the ‘site + path’ and ‘core + adjunct’. The ‘site + path’ composition depicts the track of an ancestral being moving between sets of concentric circles that represent places (cf. Figure 3.1 above). The ‘core + adjunct’ juxtaposes a fairly generalised core motif such as a wavy line with peripheral forms that enable it to be identified as the trace left by, for example, a snake, possum’s tail or dragging spear (Munn 1973: 150–82). These compositional prin-


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ciples can also be identified in recent rock paintings and have been extended to commercial art, but they are not seen in the ancient Panaramitee rock carvings. Elsewhere I have argued that other changes in central Australian rock imagery suggest it became incorporated into a totemic system several thousand years ago (Layton 1992: 236). The increasing complexity of the motifs—the visual grammar—may be a related process. Mike Smith (1996: 67) has similarly argued more recently that the increasing complexity and proliferation of rock paintings are the result of ‘a resident rather than an itinerant human population’ in central Australia. When central Australian art entered the wider Australian economy during the early 1970s, it was therefore a tradition with a history of change. Bardon (1979) and Michaels (1994) have described how the tradition underwent further change in response to public exposure in shops and galleries. The commercial production of central Australian paintings was prompted by a project initiated by Geoff Bardon and Obed Raggett in 1971. Bardon was teaching at Papunya school, assisted by Raggett. Together they encouraged children at the school to decorate part of the school wall with traditional designs. Several senior men in the community joined the project and soon the entire school was covered with paintings. The project also produced paintings on masonite (hardboard), which Bardon undertook to offer for sale in Alice Springs (Bardon 1979: 13–15). These paintings derived from rock, ground and body paintings depicting the travels of ancestral heroes. Men from other central Australian communities were shocked when they saw secret compositions openly displayed in Alice, and a rapid reappraisal took place. ‘Almost overnight’, in Kimber’s words (1981: 8), detailed depictions of human figures, sacred objects and other ritually dangerous themes were eliminated, and the tradition began to display its now familiar emphasis on concentric circles, arcs and footprints dominated by a background of dots. The potential of the ‘grammar’ of ‘core’ and ‘adjunct’ motifs, which allow a range of compositions has, then, been explored in new ways on the large canvasses painted since the development of commercial art. During the 1970s the

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Papunya tradition gained a national, then an international reputation and became emblematic of the renaissance of Indigenous culture. In western Arnhem Land, the market for Aboriginal bark paintings was created by Baldwin Spencer, who visited the area in 1913 and bought a large collection of bark paintings through the agency of a local buffalo hunter. During the 1950s Ronald and Catherine Berndt promoted Aboriginal culture by arranging the exhibition of paintings from the area (Jones 1988: 74). It is now a well-known centre for commercial art. Commercial paintings have clear links with the rock markings of recent centuries but frequently use novel compositions which combine the recent ‘X-ray’ style with the older ‘dynamic’ tradition of human figures engaged in hunting and gathering. The depiction of plants, which are rare in precolonial rock painting, has also become more common. Bark paintings from northeastern Arnhem Land were first sold by missionaries to museums in the mid-1930s (Morphy 1991: 13–14). By the mid-1950s Yolngu had begun to appreciate the role that paintings could play in negotiating relationships with Europeans. The missionaries in charge of marketing Yolngu art during the 1960s and 1970s continued to treat it as a tourist souvenir: ‘In one case the express aim of the missionary was to ensure that enough cheap paintings and carvings were produced that every front room in Australia could have one’ (Morphy 1991: 20). By the mid-1970s, however, Yolngu paintings were appearing in the art galleries of southern state capitals. Thanks to the efforts of artists such as Narritjin Maymuru, Yolngu art joined the work of the Papunya school to create the category of Aboriginal fine art. Morphy has described how Yolngu clans in northeastern Arnhem Land made different decisions about which legendary themes to release for sale on commercial paintings; he also has shown how the ‘grammar’ of traditional design allows a wide variety of different compositions to be generated around a single theme (Morphy 1991: Ch. 9). Yolngu regard their paintings as an assertion of the rights to land conferred by the heroes of the Creation Period. When they sent a petition to the federal parliament seeking to halt bauxite mining at Gove, the bark painting to which the petition was attached was painted with designs


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belonging to the clans whose land was most threatened by the mining (Morphy 1991: 18). When Narritjin displayed his paintings in Canberra during 1979, he explained, ‘All these paintings got meanings . . . Everything has been done here in order to teach the Europeans in Canberra, so they can understand the way we are travelling and the way we are living’ (Morphy 1991: 37). The urban response

The success of the innovative artistic traditions of the Yolngu in northern Arnhem Land and the Pintupi and Luritja, who lived in central Australia around Papunya, had an important impact on urban Aboriginal artists. Yolngu and Papunya paintings were not in themselves an assertion of ethnic identity. Each artist painted subjects that were the property of the artist’s clan or mother’s clan. But urban Australians perceived the styles as characteristic of Aboriginal ethnicity. The fact that some were willing to pay thousands of dollars to own such a painting was appreciated by both urban and traditional Aboriginal people as a mark of recognition of the value of Aboriginal culture. Urban artists were encouraged to assert pride in their Aboriginality through the adoption of traditional motifs, but in a context that provided quite different constraints on and opportunities for innovation. Trevor Nicholls’ Untitled: Landscape with rocks 1982 (Sutton 1988: figure 207), for example, depicts a line of trees rooted in the concentric circle motifs that traditionally represent fecundity and waterholes in Western Desert art. Here there is no reference to a specific clan identity. The message nonetheless contrasts strongly with that of Gordon Syron’s Treadmill, painted the previous year (held by Flinders University Art Museum). In Syron’s painting a series of men (mainly black, but some white) on a clockwork toy rotate endlessly between prison and poverty. Another artist, Lin Onus Barinja of Melbourne, went to live at Gamardi, an outstation on the Blythe River in Arnhem Land, in order to make contact with traditional Aboriginal culture. Gamardi was the home of several traditional artists, including Jack Wunawun and John

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Bulunbun. Lin Onus Barinja’s paintings inspired by the visit combine traditional motifs in the styles of northeastern and western Arnhem Land (magpie goose, long-necked turtle and fish) with the artefacts of European origin that facilitate contemporary bush life—(the rifle, the wind pump, solar-powered two-way radio). Whereas animal figures were often painted as representations of ancestral heroes by local artists (West 1995), Onus intended his traditional motifs to be read as a sign of Aboriginality, evidence that ‘we have survived—damaged, yes, but not disintegrated’ (quoted in Anon. 1987). The changed meaning of the motifs encapsulates the shift between different forms of connectedness: the movement from independent hunter-gatherer culture to an ethnic group embedded in modern Australian culture. There is a strong conservative strand in traditional Aboriginal society that has enabled the impact of colonialism to be withstood and traditional rights to land to be asserted in a traditional idiom, yet there is also a creative strand that repeatedly generates new variants of cultural practices and, more rarely, transforms the cultural structure itself. The segmentary, relatively egalitarian character of traditional Australian societies normally determines the fate of creative variants in that setting. The explosive transformation of the social environment brought about by colonisation laid the grounds for radical change, in which creativity has been tapped as a means of reflecting on, rebuffing and taking advantage of the new connectedness within a national and international social order. Beginning in the homelands of Yolngu, Pintupi and Luritja, these transformed traditions were taken up and further modified by urban artists.


Image Not Available

Kelrick Martin and Liz Willis from Batchelor College, Northern Territory, organising the live international radio broadcast

4 Cyberspace Smoke Signals: New Technologies and Native American Ethnicity L ARRY J. Z IMMERMAN , K AREN P. Z IMMERMAN L EONARD R. B RUGUIER

A

AND

merican Indians, for their relatively small numbers, are among the world’s most culturally diverse peoples. Even though there has been substantial decrease in population since European contact, much of this diversity remains intact in spite of assimilation policies of the dominant society. This diversity is of long standing. Although some pre-contact groups were geographically isolated, most had surprisingly broad contacts with other groups. Many engaged in wide-ranging and substantial trade networks. The so-called Hopewellian Interaction Sphere from 200 BC to AD 400 serves as a good example. Trade was common in exotic materials such as obsidian from the Yellowstone area of the Rocky Mountains in western North America, shark and alligator teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, and minerals such as quartz crystals and mica from the Appalachian Mountains in the east (Fagan 1995: 414–15). For other groups at other times, there was also intergroup exchange of marriage partners, and 69

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occasional trade in captives and slaves. Such activities required mechanisms for cross-cultural communication, and indeed these mechanisms existed. On the Great Plains in the centre of North America, there was a sign language effective for trade as well as giving locations of bison herds and positions of mutual enemies. In the Northwest, Chinook ‘jargon’ became a lingua franca in the substantial trade systems along the coast, incorporating non-Indian (usually European, English or American English) words after contact. Smoke signals from smudge fires allowed some groups on the Plains and in the Southwest to exchange information over great distances and across cultures. Where synthetic forms of communication developed, they actually worked to preserve identity rather than break it down. At the same time, they helped in forming some degree of pan-Indian identity, a process nearly institutionalised with the coming of the EuroAmericans. Both processes remain visible today, and new technologies have become the prevalent synthetic communication types. By exploring a few key examples, this chapter examines the role of new technologies, such as CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web, in the formation and maintenance of identity, but specifically as it is reflected in the difficult concept of ethnicity. The chapter also presents an incomplete catalogue of new technologies relating to American Indians. It contains numerous references to World Wide Web sites. Readers should be warned that the Web is very much more fluid than print media. Although all URLs worked as this chapter went to press, some may change or go out of existence.

ETHNICITY According to David Maybury-Lewis (1997: 59), ethnicity is like kinship, where people recognise themselves as belonging to the same ethnic group and feel like distant kin, ‘but so far back that no one can trace the precise relationship’. They recognise themselves as distinct from other groups based upon a common sense of history, shared language, culture and religion. Ethnicity, however, is not just a matter of self-

Cyberspace Smoke Signals

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definition. Some groups can have a common ethnicity imputed or ascribed to them by others even when they themselves do not recognise it. Ethnicity arises because people who share characteristics decide that they are members of a distinct group, or because people who share characteristics are lumped together by outsiders and treated as members of a distinct group (Maybury-Lewis 1997: 61). As Barth (1969) contends, it is not the common culture of a group that makes them think of themselves as related, but the other way round. Once considered to be related, those so identified develop rules or at least understandings about who they are and who is or is not a part of the group. Maybury-Lewis’s primary example of ascribed ethnicity is that of American Indians. Indians were a dramatically diverse series of distinctive populations, but were lumped into a single category by the European newcomers to the hemisphere. For example, there may have been as many as 300 distinct languages and more than 2000 dialects at the time of European contact (Zimmerman and Molyneaux 1996: 164). In spite of this, lumping is evident even to the point of many people believing that there is or was but one ‘Indian’ language. Sometimes even native speakers may say ‘I speak Indian’ (though they may know that they are speaking Salish, Chiwere, or some other tongue). The processes by which ethnicity is defined are not clearly delineated for American Indians, but Barth’s notions seem to be in operation in the use of new technologies. Two levels are apparent. Some use the technologies to maintain and reinforce ethnicity as a specific tribal entity, such as Dakota or Ioway, while at the same time others use it to push towards a more pan-Indian ethnicity. Complicating the issue is the matter of non-Indian ‘wannabes’1 participating in the process. These latter individuals universally ‘collaborate’ in an ascribed panIndian ethnicity.

LISTSERVS,

C H AT R O O M S A N D W A N N A B E S

‘Bulletin boards’ and ‘listservs’2 were among the first new technologies available to allow rapid, relatively open-format, multi-user

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communication of American Indians issues. As the Internet grew and the World Wide Web developed, many of the early formats made adjustments, some becoming Web ‘chat rooms’ where several users could discuss issues in near real time, with multiple ‘discussion threads’ possible. After attending the Tribal Lands Conference during September 1989 at Smith College in Massachusetts (the conference focused on the endangered land base of Indigenous peoples in all parts of the world), Gary Trujillo created NativeNet to facilitate discussion of a range of Indigenous issues. An initial mailing list in 1989–90 moved to Texas A&M University as a listserv in 1991 and has since moved to Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Minnesota. NATIVE-L disseminated news and information but soon added NATCHAT as a discussion group. The content of both groups was wide-ranging and, at the time of the Columbus Quincentenary in 1992, expanded to include a room specifically devoted to discussion of the impact of the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas as well as protests at celebrations of the event. NAT-HLTH appeared, dealing with Indian health concerns, and NAT-EDU, providing discussion of education (Trujillo n.d.a, 1996). These six independent NativeNet mailing lists have associated archives (Trujillo n.d.b). Of special interest is the fact that these lists are often one of the few places where Indians and nonIndians can interact in any kind of direct way. ‘Wannabes’ are an important ‘thread’ or discussion theme. Discussions on the NativeNet lists, but especially NATCHAT, have had a common thread about intercultural relations, particularly the protection of identity and culture from wannabes (Quickle 1994). These non-Indian individuals strongly identify with Indians, sometimes to the point of taking on selected Native cultural traits, often from the realm of the sacred, either by participating in ceremonies or imitating them. Many Indian people see wannabes as a hodgepodge stereotype of their cultures, with practices taken out of context, usually in a disrespectful way. Indian and non-Indian both comment in these discussions. On occasion there is an attempt by non-Indians to suggest that wannabes and other supporters should be made allies to


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assist in activist causes, but Indian contributors often rebuff these suggestions, worrying over a loss of control of cultural practices. The threat is very real. In the most noteworthy case, America OnLine (AOL), a private computer network, set up a chat room called Blue Snake’s Lodge. Blue Snake was an online ‘chief’, supposedly Eastern Shawnee, who devoted his time to teaching non-Indians Native American spirituality and healing. His introductory teaching, as Glen Martin (1995: 108) noted, ‘ushered you onto the cybernetic equivalent of Native holy ground’: Before you is a lodge, a large tepee . . . The silhouettes of its inhabitants are cast upon the canvas sides by the fire in the center. You hear only night sounds, a stream chuckles in the distance as it hurls itself headlong through the forest, an owl challenges the darkness as she hunts for prey, a coyote voices his loneliness as he waits for his mate.

Blue Snake is seated in the back of the lodge. At his feet, beside the fire, a pipe carved in the image of a rattlesnake rests on a cedar box. The pipe is a symbol of his authority. He bids you welcome. He raises the pipe then lowers it and points the stem at each of his guests. Six times he draws smoke . . . six times he exhales it, once to each of the four directions, once to the Everywhere Spirit above, once to Grandmother Earth below . . . Blue Snake speaks, ‘Welcome to my lodge. May you always feel welcome here, as in your own lodge’. Blue Snake, however, was Don Rapp, a software consultant from Ohio, and non-Indian. Blue Snake would adopt the participants as members of the Evening Sky Clan of the Red Heart Tribe, dispensing to them Indian spirituality based largely on his reading of published materials. The ‘wisdom’ was pan-Indian in the worst way, mixing, even as in his introduction, practices and traits from many tribes. By March 1993 some real Indians had logged on to the room, challenging most of Blue Snake’s ‘teachings’. Several made themselves so obstreperous that they were thrown off AOL, but continued to log on through friends’ accounts. In the end, the three federally recognised

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Shawnee nations sent a joint resolution to AOL and Blue Snake declaring that he was not a tribal member, and noting that their ceremonies and rituals were not for public consumption. AOL replaced Rapp and his room with a Native American-oriented chat room. Martin’s excellent coverage of this episode raises some good points about identity in cyberspace. He noted that the use of alternative personae lies at the heart of cyberspace culture, with people getting online because it embodies freedom. But as Martin (1995: 108) wrote, tradition-minded Indians ‘assert that there’s an uncrossable line in both cyberspace and the real world, a line that separates tribal religious rites from the commerce of everyday life’. Another notable bulletin board reflects strongly these Indian attitudes. The University of Iowa Student Computer Association (ISCA) maintains the largest student bulletin board in the world, with nearly a quarter of a million identification numbers and names given out since its inception. The board is a citadel structure with numerous topic rooms. About five years ago, an American Indian Studies ‘room’ started, moderated by a Native American graduate student in literature (online name is ‘Katchoo’).3 One of the authors of this paper (LJZ) has been with the room since its first week. Initially, the room was very much a mix of Indian and non-Indian, but mostly the latter. Almost from the start, an Anishinaabe man, a disabled Vietnam War veteran (online name is ‘Black Wolf’s Shadow’ or ‘BWS’), began to challenge any question he felt inappropriate to the room. In particular, he challenged anyone who asked questions that seemed stereotypical. For example, a question such as ‘Can anyone tell me the Indian word for . . . ?’ would draw his attention and ire. Any online discussion of religion became the target of his wrath, and any effort on the part of non-Indians to suggest they might know anything about Indians would be challenged (LJZ knows this from first-hand experience!). As BWS was older than most of the online participants, he was initially called an elder, a term of veneration and respect, which after some time he rejected. In his own words, he didn’t have the temperament of an elder, which requires patience. He often uses ridicule, and those who challenge at all can be ‘flamed’.4 At the


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same time, he will give praise to those who do stand up to him, though he will rarely give in. There is a relatively small group of Indians and non-Indians (all self-identified) who support him and dominate the room. Reading the room regularly, one can tell that there is a detectable background of private mail that discusses the actions in the room. Of interest here are not the actions of BWS and his supporters but the process of maintenance of ethnic boundaries. A common theme of the room is ‘no compromise’, and participants frequently remind users that it is an ‘Indian’ room. The room information is adjusted and expanded, but is very direct in the sorts of questions that are considered acceptable. A major issue is that of remnant Indian anger, commonly raised when a non-Indian asks why people are still so angry about what happened in the past, and why Indians don’t just move on. The strictures on what is or is not ‘on topic’, and the vigour with which wannabes or poorly educated non-Indians (and sometimes Indians) are flamed has largely served to limit discussion in the room, with rarely more than twenty messages a week, unless an issue or person is challenged. Then traffic expands to twenty or more posts each day. In that sense the room has become mostly Indian. Many non-Indians certainly lurk, but those who regularly contribute largely accept the crisply maintained boundaries. As a final episode, in mid-1997 Katchoo stepped down as forum moderator (FM). A non-Indian, self-declared pagan was given the temporary FM position. He allowed discussion of issues considered sacred by the Indian people using the room. They soon boycotted the room, and it virtually stopped. Reading between the lines of his ‘resignation’ message, it appears that many readers had flamed and threatened the FM using e-mail. He angrily stepped down and, as soon as he was replaced by an Indian, discussion returned to its former levels, with the Indian users declaring victory. Of interest is an effort on the part of BWS to establish an Indiancontrolled and operated mailing list and a Web site with a chat room. The site was slow to develop, and the chat room was being used less than the ISCA room. As this chapter went to press, his Web site could not be found at its usual URL and, for whatever reason, could not be

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found with several search engines. The disappearance of sites is a phenomenon fairly typical of the Web. BWS may have taken down his Web site, changed its address, or it may be that the search engines were unable to locate the site if its form had changed significantly. One might conclude that some level of intercultural tension is necessary for such lists and chats to have much life. The maintenance of ethnic boundaries seems to serve as their vital centre.

CD-ROM S

A N D D I G I TA L P R E S E R VAT I O N O F C U LT U R E

The role played by CD-ROMs in American Indian ethnicity is not as clear as that of the listserv or the Web, but the great importance of this technology appears to be its use in making accessible historical documents and in preserving culture. The former may be suspect in that CD-ROMs perhaps have more potential to preserve and present selectively, a concern to many Indigenous people. Selectively chosen and used information and images presented on CD-ROM may have a growing role in the way the dominant society develops its images of Indians. The substantial storage capacity of CD-ROMs has made them an ideal medium for collecting and disseminating information. Their real strength is their capacity and speed. For sound and image files they are particularly good and useable at speeds the World Wide Web cannot yet match. Although potentially interactive to the Web, most are stand-alone units. Some have become major projects linked to other media. A CD-ROM of the same title, for example, accompanies the video series 500 Nations (produced by Columbia Broadcasting System and hosted by actor Kevin Costner), and it is a beautiful use of the technology (Microsoft c. 1995). However, it tends to portray Indians as a people of the past with little present-day material on it, a major stereotype rejected by many Indian people. Better received has been the CD-ROM based on the series The Native Americans (Turner Publishing Inc. 1995); that series, and the CD-ROM, has interviews


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with contemporary Native Americans who present their contemporary perspectives, as well as a wide range of information. Other CD-ROMs have been used for bibliographic purposes, to hold, for example, vast amounts of information from treaty documents or other materials important for land claim cases or other legal issues. A good example is SilverPlatter’s (1998) half-yearly updated Bibliography of Native North Americans compiled by the Human Relations Area Files; this CD-ROM contains 80 000 records, including monographs, essays, journal articles, dissertations and other publications from the sixteenth century to the present. Similarly, the full texts of both Schoolcraft’s encyclopaedic six-volume Historical and Statistical Information . . . of more than 4000 pages (Schoolcraft 1851–57), and George Catlin’s Letters and Notes . . . (1844), along with the full texts of more than 300 treaties and collections of traditions, comprise the more than 10 000 pages of text and more than 1000 images of the CDROM entitled The Indian Question: The history of the Native American Indians (CD-ROM Access 1997). Another example is The American Indian: A multimedia encyclopedia (Facts-On-File c. 1995); it contains several different encyclopaedias, more than 1000 images, an atlas, treaty documents and music. Among the most promising uses of the medium is the preservation or restoration of language. The most notable example is that of the Center for the Documentation of Endangered Languages (CDEL), part of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University. Douglas Parks headed projects on the development of multimedia dictionaries and multimedia language lessons for several Caddoan and Siouan languages. Parks’ sound recordings are stored in the CDEL archive, and Center staff have prepared them for use in these projects, as well as enhancing and restoring historic recordings. CDEL staff have created a multimedia dictionary to provide a concise, intuitive presentation of the Skiri Pawnee language (Parks 1997a); this CD-ROM has complete reference to all terms in its extensive database, including pictures, photographs, sound, literal definitions, phonetic explanation and verb agreement. CDEL staff also have created the Yanktonai Lexicon (Parks 1997b) for the Yanktonai language.

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Another excellent use of CD-ROM technology with language is Wiyuta, an interactive CD-ROM developed by Professor Brenda Farnell and staff of Second Look, a multimedia laboratory at the University of Iowa. In Wiyuta, Farnell (1995) deals with the Assiniboine, a Plains tribe whose language combines spoken words and signing. The CD-ROM accompanies Farnell’s book on Assiniboine storytelling. Centred on the telling of three stories, the multimedia project combines graphics, digital video of the storytellers, audio and text in Nakota and English, as well as ‘Labanotation’, a written form of body movement. The language CD-ROMs best exemplify the main contribution of this technology to maintenance of ethnic boundaries for both cultural preservation and learning. Without a unique language, a culture uses the language of the dominant society, losing many of its important thought processes and altering its worldview. Also, print media or conventional classroom language instruction are difficult to use in traditional cultures reliant on oral presentation. On CD-ROMs, voices and texts can be combined with video, photographs, pictures and music to give accurate, contextualised presentations of linguistic and cultural knowledge.

WEB

PROMISE AND

WEB

PROBLEMS

The World Wide Web has seen the most dramatic use of new technologies by American Indians. In the short period of the Web’s existence, the number of American Indian (and Indian-oriented) Web sites has more than kept pace with the general growth of the Web. The appeal of the Web is obvious: it is easy to use, Web sites are easy to develop, and the appeal of the Web’s multimedia nature is much the same as that of CD-ROMs, only more immediate and updatable. American Indian Web sites range from those prepared by schoolchildren to those promoting Indian-owned businesses. In this chapter we cannot begin to discuss all categories but will attempt to cover those that represent general trends and their implications.


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Some Web sites are directly linked to CD-ROM and other research projects. For example, the Second Look Wiyuta project (Farnell 1995) has been expanded to include Web projects and workshops on the use of multimedia in preservation of endangered languages. A Web site of a three-week-long workshop (directed by Brenda Farnell) can be found on the Web with a list of participants, interviews with them and their multimedia projects (Farnell 1996). Those attending included both academic linguistic specialists and Indigenous language speakers. As one example, Betsy Buck, a Hodenoshaunee, is working on a multimedia presentation of her people’s Thanksgiving Speech. She comments that some schoolchildren learn to use computers before they learn to read or write, and the multimedia fit well with a learning style more like that based on oral tradition. Buck’s comments about the use of the Web for education are fairly typical. An emphasis on the relation of the medium to oral tradition is common, and it may be this that promotes Web use among many American Indian school pupils. It also provides a way for the tribal community to know what is going on in the classroom at the same time that it promotes key cultural practices and values. Early users of the Web for education were the tribally controlled colleges. An excellent example is that of the Community College, operated by the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe (1995) of northeastern South Dakota. One of the college’s goals is to preserve and extend knowledge of Dakota history, language and culture. Among the first tribal Web sites in the United States, its initial focus was on language, and the award-winning Dakota Language Homepage (Green 1996) has been online since late 1995. The Web structure, though with different Web servers, has been extended to cover the community newspaper and the Tiospa Zina Tribal School (c. 1996). Assistance in this effort has come from many quarters. The most noteworthy is the Native American Indian Resources site, the work of Paula Giese (1995). In 1995 she started a Web site for Indian teachers on how to build Web pages. Her site has now grown into a meta-site now hosted by Fond du Lac Tribal Community College, with more than 300 Web pages. When she began the site, she made it very clear

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that it was for Indian people and teachers who taught Indian students, not non-Indian teachers who wished to include Indian-related cultural materials in the curriculum of largely non-Indian schools. The tone of the site has become less forceful since that initial statement, but the overall content of the site is geared towards maintaining the ethnic boundary. For example, there is a major section on books with Indian content, and books are sharply evaluated as to their strengths and weaknesses. Those authored by non-Indians usually receive the greatest criticism (though, in fairness, some are well treated). From the site you can access lists of Web pages for many tribally controlled colleges and kindergarten-to-Year 12 schools. The latter, numbering more than 30, are especially interesting in the way they incorporate traditional educational approaches. An appealing example is a project from the Ducks Bay School in a Metis community of 500 persons in Manitoba, Canada. The idea is for students to help illustrate a children’s story about a little Metis child’s Internet trip to Australia (Falk 1996). Though the story is in text, it includes audio and video clips. The approach reinforces traditional visualisation skills while teaching reading, using new technologies and some cross-cultural skills. The apparent success of the Web for American Indian education, as well as communication in and between Indian communities, has prompted research projects by several groups. One activity of the Native American Community Alliance and Technology Project has been running through the late 1990s and is being conducted on government (NASA) funding. Education specialist John Hoover’s (1996) project targets Native American communities and schools in Arizona and New Mexico, South Dakota and Oklahoma. As described, the project will assist schools and communities to develop or expand local Community Alliances whose purpose is to improve upon and continue reforms in mathematics, science, and technology. [The] project assists the Alliances to engage in dialogue and to develop Action Plans to further community–school interactions and involvement in education. The project is also developing a data


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base of success stories and examples where technology has been used in Native American communities and schools.

The involvement of community is crucial to the success of the education initiatives; it also helps to maintain the ethnic boundary. American Indian communities are often at risk for many reasons, most of them economic. The Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress (1995), at the request of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, assigned the Industry, Telecommunications and Commerce program to conduct a study whose thrust was to identify and support uses of new technologies that would provide social and economic benefits. The project’s Web site identifies a number of major Indian-oriented resources, and the full text of the report is available online. Many Indian nations have developed their own Web sites. Their purposes vary from promotion of tribal economic development to communicating news and events. The first such Web site was that of the Oneida Nation (1998) in New York state. Watching its changes has been instructive. At first it was a very simple page, with little cultural or historic information. Now, from the top of the page, sovereignty is a key issue. Even the tribal police have a sub-page explaining that they have federal, state and local authority. The phrase ‘a sovereign nation’ appears often throughout the site. The site now also includes important information on the clans, economic development and a range of other material. The Native Nations Web page (Giese 1997a) lists 35 official tribal pages and more than twenty unofficial pages. For Canada, Giese lists nearly 40 official sites and sixteen unofficial pages. Certainly there are others not on her list. As well, there are many personal Web pages, established by individuals. Karen Strom’s (1994a) compilation of personal Web pages lists more than 130; these are probably not all that exist. The individual pages are fascinating, ranging from descriptions of likes or interests to cultural information and economic ventures. Tesunkenupa’s/Michael Two Horses’ (1998a) home page, for example, combines statements about tribal sovereignty with his liking for the Dilbert comic strip and his studies in law at the University of Kansas.

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There is also a number of pages for American Indian organisations of many types. Karen Strom (1994b) has collected information about nearly 60, ranging from the Native American Fitness Instructors Network, to the Native American Journalists Association and the Native American Manufacturers Network. The groups in this list reflect the way that the dominant society is using the Web for commerce and to publicise the function of sodalities. Still, among most of them there is a demonstrated need to declare that the sodality is American Indian. There is no real way to know how many American Indian Web sites there are, but Paula Giese estimates that there are more than 500, and that estimate may well be low.

AGAIN,

WANNABES

The proliferation of Web pages has made it difficult for many people to distinguish those pages developed by American Indians from those developed by the wannabes. With some humour, but with a great deal of apparent frustration, several people have made an effort to identify such pages. Michael Two Horses (Tesunkenupa 1998b) has put together a Wanabi Tribe home page which lists several of these. As he notes in his introductory statement, ‘We also have a responsibility as Indian people to protect the cultural integrity and cultural property of our various tribes; this page is my effort to do so’. He has apparently been sharply criticised for his effort, but provides a clear rationale for his opinion, quoted here at length: I have been accused of being judgmental and have been told in the same ‘breath’ that ‘Indians aren’t judgmental’. This is the worst kind of stereotypical nonsense . . . all human beings, including Indians, make value judgements based on a mixture of self-interest and community interests. The continual stereotyping of Indian people as somehow above the rest of humanity in terms of ‘nobility’ simply defeats attempts by Indians to self-define as human beings.


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I believe that it is essential that non-Indians either cease to attempt to define Indian cultures (not likely) or preface their work with statements that make clear that they are writing from an outsider’s perspective and therefore cannot pretend to accurately represent Indian desires and interests. I further believe that there is no punishment severe enough for white people masquerading as Indians, particularly for purposes of stealing/selling Indian (especially Lakota) spirituality . . . and like I say all over this page: this is my opinion. Therefore, the Wanabi Tribal Home Page is a listing of those sites which in my opinion, based on research, are run by nonIndians engaging in activities injurious to Indian self-definition and self-determination.

A particular target for his anger, and that of Paula Giese (1997b), was the ‘Tribal Voice’ (1998) Web site. Tribal Voice was one of the first Web sites with an Indian focus. It listed various Indian events such as powwows around the country, and made an effort to promote some Indian causes. With little effort to conceal it, non-Indians had obviously created the site, and began to use terms such as heyoka (a Lakota word for a trickster-like figure) to describe their own roles as Webmasters. With an effective, free, Web chat software, the site got to be very popular, won many awards, and began to be listed as an Indian Web site on numerous other sites. Paula Giese has made her opinions about the site very clear. Her research led her to discover that the site was founded by John McAfee, whose company makes Internet security software, as a self-funded educational charitable trust—or, as she says, ‘a tax dodge’. Her editorial on the subject is a scathing indictment of Tribal Voice and wannabe Web sites in general. Whether the result of Giese’s editorial and pressure from others, or simply the result of the demand for change common to the Web, this Web site has dramatically changed. Though it still features its ‘Powwow: Drumbeat of the Internet’ software, it no longer has much of the offensive material, and does not hide McAfee’s affiliation to it.

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I D E N T I T Y,

M I L I TA N C Y A N D

‘INFIGHTING’

Part of the process of maintaining identity and ethnic boundaries includes consciousness-raising, among both Native Americans and outsiders. The approach is often more militant, thrives on controversy, and is evident on some American Indian Web sites. Much of the militancy involves cultural property issues. For example, A Line in the Sand (1996) deals with many issues ranging from stereotyping to respectful treatment of human remains. The tone is forceful but respectful. Another more militant Web site is Native North America: First Nations/First Peoples issues. It is not clear if the Webmaster, Jordan Dill (1996a, b), is Native. The site is very large and well indexed, and is host to an ‘American Indian Movement’ home page. From its opening page, its tone is controversial; it begins with a quotation from the largest Indian-owned and produced newspaper in the United States, Indian Country Today: At Indian Country Today we use Internet sources as potential leads for stories. We carefully check the sources and authenticate information. We do not consider much of the Internet as a factual source. Indian Country Today will no longer visit the [First Nations] Web site . . . because of [its] continued proliferation of gossip, rumor and innuendo in their misguided attempt to support American Indian issues . . . misleading and misinformed sources may harm innocent people and cause others unnecessary anguish.

Jordan Dill responded: ‘In light of the Editor’s antipathy towards Leonard Peltier, AIM, Peter Matthiessen and his support for the FBI, I consider his declaration an endorsement of this site’s veracity.’ This bit of infighting reflects the issue of identity and its controversial nature that exists within most communities, not just American Indian. Its impact on ethnic boundaries is uncertain, but it may serve to cause outsiders to see that there is at least some diversity of opinion.


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CONCLUSION There can be little doubt that new technologies play a part in the establishment and maintenance of American Indian ethnic boundaries, but their role is not entirely clear. At some level they may simply be extensions of already extant traits and processes of maintaining boundaries. Certainly, the rapidity of their acceptance by Indian people is remarkable, but even that may be an extension of historical processes that required the development and use of synthetic communication devices. Tribal Web sites certainly allow tribes to demonstrate their sovereignty and unique characters. At the same time, this may not be enough to keep the larger community from imputing an ethnic labelling as ‘Indian’. In fact some sites that deal with pan-Indian issues may simply reinforce already existing boundaries. Of some interest is the broader issue of a further lumping of Indian people with other Indigenous groups worldwide as a category of ‘Indigenous’, ‘tribal’ or ‘traditional’. Many Indian-oriented Web sites, especially some of the meta-indexes,5 have already taken this approach. It is common to find Australian Aboriginal or Sami links on many American Indian indexes (for example, Henderson 1996). This too would simply reinforce existing categories, but at an even broader level. The issue of Indigenous rights to cultural property in the development and spread of the new technologies is yet to be determined. As it is, there are numerous instances where Indian images or music appear, without permission, on CD-ROMs and Web sites compiled by non-Indians. Such ‘theft’ is virtually impossible to control, and for Indians, who the dominant society already has a tendency to see as an artefact of the past, their voice against such usurpation seems mostly lost. Protection of these rights and working against Web commodification of materials certainly should be carefully considered before any group puts material on the Web. Interesting possibilities and questions about the use of new technologies may arise as new technologies become more standard. Already the Web is supplanting CD-ROM technology. Large online databases

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are much more accessible and more quickly delivered now than even a year ago. The Web is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to predict its future impacts on ethnic boundaries. Certainly some computer companies and Web sites are pushing a notion of ‘one world, one culture’ (cyberculture, we suppose!). That idea, however, lacks an understanding that synthetic communication has a push-pull effect that works to push groups apart at the same time as it works to pull them together. We suspect that, with American Indians, it will remain largely the same as it has been, though other more powerful circumstances, especially economic ones, may prevail, and tend to diminish ethnic boundaries.


Image Not Available

Tau Ingram demonstrating Papua New Guinean tattooing

5 History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective JULIE GOUGH

H

istorically, the West depicted the rest of the world as inhabiting two places, the internal space of the museum with its illustrated journals, globes and labelled specimens, and the external reality of ‘Other People’—languages, climates, land, flora, fauna and incomprehensible histories that were regulated to replicate each other once entering the internal world upon collection, capture or invitation. Both these worlds were ‘real’ in spatial terms—unlike today’s third position for representing the ‘global’, where interaction and two-way dialogues are possible in a placeless electronic cultural space. Hyperspace is not new. It is a world where time and space horizons have compressed and collapsed. Today it is described as a new experience of orientation and disorientation, with new senses of placed and displaced identity, new relations between space and place, fixity and mobility, centre and periphery, real and virtual space, frontier and territory. 89

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However, cultures experiencing colonisation since the sixteenth century have negotiated two worlds for four centuries. Nations of nonEuropeans have existed within their own worlds and the introduced netherlands brought into their universe by invaders. The colonisers brought and forced new language and text, religion and traditions including landscape and costume, education and science, disease and enslavement. The arrival of these new concepts of existence, which hurriedly became a transplanted reality in the ‘New World’, brought another universe to the Indigenous occupants of Australia, Africa and the Americas—a world as tangible as hyperspace is today to the West. When George Augustus Robinson recorded conversations with some Tasmanian Aboriginal people in his journal of the early 1830s he probably didn’t realise that he was providing detail beyond the everyday for future insight. Thus, for example, the discussion on the evening of 24 June 1831 (Plomley 1966: 365) is full of alternative readings: An aborigine who had been domesticated, asked me one night while gazing at the stormy firmament if I knew the planets Mars and Jupiter, and said if the sky had not been so obscured he would point it out to me. Gave him a piece of paper and a pen and he drew me a ship.

The skies and the ship this Aboriginal person describes and draws, while seemingly disassociated, are integrally connected. When the Tasmanian Aboriginal people at that time were asked the direction to England they pointed to the sky. Perhaps, because the ships arrived from the east (coast), the place of sunrise, England became, in the mythology of our people, a place in the sky and was woven into a part of the cosmology-based belief system of the island. Another contemporary comparative reading of this text lies in the progression from sky to ship in the thinking of the Aboriginal person and thus the conversation. This references the current Western confusion about one’s real place and role in the known world, and mirrors the late

History, Representation, Globalisation

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eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century inundation crisis of the ‘new’ and the ‘alien’ that invaded Tasmanian Aboriginal culture. New possibilities at the end of this millennium, including common media topics of alien/UFO landings and abduction/bodily interference, are replications of the experience of Indigenous peoples and their loss of control of land and self through becoming the object of scientific and anthropological study, and forced removal from traditional lands and family. In connecting the stars with a ship, the Tasmanian of 1831 was relegating both entities to beyond the known, intimating that the English ship and its unexpected arrival served to increase the known universe of that time and place, just as current UFO sighting claims serve today to reflect the fears of the almost incomprehensible expansion yet shrinkage of global horizons. ‘Globalisation’ is another term for a diminishing world where people, places and ideas are increasingly in contact in neutral terrain, perhaps to redress the damage that the colonialist ethic achieved. Thus, today, while cultures in ruling majorities are learning to juggle Other versions of history, and rewrite these into texts in order to enter a global discourse, these Other cultures have long been in transit and transformation. In Tasmania, after thousands of years of isolation, my people successfully incorporated dogs, cats, guns, glass, new food sources, new trade networks, travel patterns and a new language into their daily existence within a decade of invasion. This is not to suggest that the ‘natives’ of Tasmania were passive vessels waiting, seeking or requiring to imbibe the culture and implements of the coloniser to willingly become ‘civilised’ Christians. In fact these new resources were often used against the coloniser at a time when adaptation became recognised as our means of cultural survival. George Augustus Robinson, the government-appointed and selfappointed ‘saviour’ of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, documented the rapidity of cultural change. The Friendly Mission, a journal of his five-year evangelical mission around the state, recorded the non-static practices of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Robinson documented on 6 June

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1830 (Plomley 1966: 170), for example, that ‘the natives train up the English cat to catch opossums’. On 10 November 1831, when several of the fourteen Aboriginal people accompanying Robinson decided to relinquish stashed firearms to him, he wrote: ‘Informed that the natives intended using them against the whites as soon as they could get ammunition, and that they often practise with them’ (Plomley 1966: 511). Robinson also recorded the carefully wrapped and cared-for condition of these arms, and that some had a specially made sling. Dogs also were quickly appropriated by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Once taken, it was claimed in the popular press and Robinson’s journals, these dogs would not return to White people again. This was alarming to early ‘settlers’ as the price for a hunting dog was £25 in 1807, which could save a family from starvation. Apart from being trained to hunt, these animals quickly entered the mythology and kinship patterns of Aboriginal Tasmanians.1 Globalisation dissolves the barrier of distance, and, today, Colonial centre is encountering Colonised periphery on new terms beyond the culture of dogs and guns. In discussing post-modernity and its accompanying sense of dislocation and displacement, Morley and Robins (1995: 217) referred to Doreen Massey (1992: 9), who saw this current uncertainty as a First World perspective because, for those colonised by the West, ‘the experience of immediate destabilising contact with other alien cultures has a very long historical resonance. What is new is simply that this experience of dislocation has now returned, through patterns of immigration, from the peripheries to the metropolis’. Cultural insularity is a thing of the past, and the response to the fear and uncertainty of change that the West is experiencing is the renaming and quantification of the Other as ‘Hybrid’—in the new mutant neuro-drama of the 1990s. At first, some Indigenous people accepted the term ‘hybrid’ as a welcome external acknowledgment of the cultural changes, development and ingestion of foreign elements from external sources experienced for centuries by most Indigenous peoples. As Arjun Appadurai (1988: 39) commented: ‘Natives, people confined to and by the places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger world,


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have probably never existed.’2 Edward Said (1978: 332, quoted in Clifford 1988: 274) concurred: ‘The notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically “different” inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture or racial essence, proper to that geographical space is a highly debatable one.’ According to these cultural theorists, cultural hybridity is increasingly the experiential norm, and in this context, according to Morley and Robins (1995: 130), ‘any attempt to defend the integrity of Indigenous or “authentic” cultures easily slips into the conservative defence of a nostalgic vision of the past’. Hybridity, however, is a potentially dangerous notion, a scientific disclaimer of authenticity or originality, a reactionary term that Western societies allocate to other cultures in order to develop the binary codings necessary to elevate Self and subjugate Other: East and West, Black and White, Pagan and Christian. Western societies are nostalgically gazing back to a revisionist history and invoked purity of their own place and people in which the popularity of the heritage industry, with the return to sites, practices and customs, is evidence for the fear of unnamed Difference, and the recognition that Difference is not apart but now a part of the everyday—vocal and within society. By accepting the label ‘hybrid’, while Western societies devise some notions of their own cultural purity, Indigenous people relinquish the power to name themselves. To identify as biological mutants is to negate the means to cite strength, unity and continuity within a changing framework as our viable existence. Adaptability is not hybridity. Indigenous people are caught in a seesaw dialogue of existence within Western language—the choice to accept Self as hybrid or Self as the pure, untainted, unchanged Other. Neither is viable, and both are charged periodically with accreditation according to the needs of the West. Once drawn and measured and deemed harmless, the historical Other became an object of study to reflect and gauge Western attitudes, beliefs and practices. Periodically spotlighted by the West today to articulate and assess societal self-worth, Indigenous cultures are used to highlight ‘the way it was’ for Western peoples—a lament of falsely recollective nostalgia for some lost sense of spiritualism, family, place,

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unity, and so on. This notion of Indigenous purity is as damaging a construct as the hybridity ruse, because Indigenous people apply these externally constructed criteria to create a new unliveable self. Jimmie Durham (1983: 2, cited by Fisher 1989: 12) described this ambivalent loyalty to a shadowy self/nationhood in his book Columbus Day: ‘One of the most terrible aspects of our situation today is that none of us feel that we are real Indians . . . For the most part we feel guilty, and try to measure up to the white man’s definition of ourselves.’3 This unrealistic ideal of unchanging authenticity to which the Western postmodern world periodically longs to return can become a burden to Indigenous identity, which Kobena Mercer (1990: 69) described as ‘the sheer difficulty of living with difference’. This is where expectation and explanation of self are invented and trapped in language. Integral to my own art-practice is the knowledge that the stories I wish to unravel are usually only documented in the language, the tongue, and therefore the inferences, opinions and bias of the nonIndigenous observer. My reasons for often using the English language within my work are several, and include taking issue with the position of this language as the main means of representation of people’s stories within Australia, regardless of cultural inappropriateness. My suggestion is not that any other written language can fill this void, rather that the use of alternative visual/vocal language forms may help in offering other interpretations of stories without the inherent historical/cultural boundaries of the English language, and that if used within these possibilities the English language will appear the interloper rather than the omniscient inventor. I wish to draw attention to the confines of this language in the recent past in serving only categorisation, locational and other descriptive means when applied to Indigenous peoples—language as a device for control and placement, to render safe, to understand, to name and thus to ‘know’. A re-use at this point of language fracture is a means of drawing attention not only to the ongoing misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples but to the basic misunderstanding this stems from. Another reason for my working from this English-language frame-


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Figure 5.1 ‘The Trouble with Rolf’, plaster Aboriginal 1950s stockmen head wall ornaments, huon pine fence posts, fencing wire, text, variable dimensions (244 × 520 cm), 1996

work in teasing the visual from tempered words is to acknowledge that this is the position where I began some years ago in not consciously recognising my own Aboriginality, and thus experiencing stories with any Aboriginal content from the distortions of perspectives in school texts, missionaries’ diaries, anthropological/scientific studies, musical referents, books, newspapers or television documentaries. For the same reason, my research and work is based on situations affecting my own family or it is that of open public record. Michel de Certeau (1988: xxvi) described the discourse of power as emerging to transform the space of the Other through the conquering force of writing, of mapping and naming: ‘From the moment of rupture between a subject and an object of the operation, between a will to write and a written body (or body to be written) [this] writing fabricates Western History . . . This is writing that conquers, it will

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use the New World as if it were a blank, “savage” page on which western desire will be written.’ Morley and Robins (1995: 209) commented: ‘Control over the franchise on the representation of the past is always a powerful resource in the construction of identities, and in the mobilization of resources in the struggle over the direction of the future.’ The question at issue is, of course, one of power. Todorov (1984: 123), in claiming the international significance of the year 1492, provided as his example of the power of language the publication of the first grammar text (in Spanish) and the percipient words of its compiler, Antonia de Nebrija: ‘Language has always been the companion of empire.’ Stephen Greenblatt (1992: 83) also noted the power of the Word and the Name: The founding action of Christian Imperialism is christening. Such a Christening entails the cancellation of the native name—the erasure of the alien, perhaps demonic identity—and hence a kind of ‘making new’, it is, at once, an exorcism, an appropriation and a gift . . . the taking of possession [and] the conferral of identity are fused, in a moment of pure linguistic formalising.

When George Augustus Robinson endeavoured to ‘civilise’ and remove the Aboriginal population of Tasmania to Bass Strait, he included renaming the people and places he ‘discovered’ as a vital part of his appointment. Our people usually held three to five names, specially given at certain ages according to the natural phenomenon best suited to that individual—which could include place, plant and animal terms. Robinson doggedly replaced the names, and thus integral identifying symbols, of the people he ‘collected’. To document his own learned aspirations and self-worth, Robinson listed the new ‘given’ names in his journal of 15 January 1836 along with his justification for their bestowal: ‘I gave names to some of the Aborigines, their adopted names [given mostly by sealers] being the most barbarous and uncouth that can be well imagined. The natives were highly pleased with the change: it was what they desired—see list annexed’ (Plomley 1987: 878–80). Thus Big Billy (adopted name) was renamed Alfred


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(now twice removed from one of his actual names of Plerpleroparner), Doctor was renamed Alpha (actually Woorrady), Little Jacky renamed Buonaparte (Trembonener), Big Jacky renamed Constantine (Moreerminer), Jacky renamed Ajax (Maleteherburgener), Towter renamed Romeo (Towterer). Further ‘christenings’ included ‘Friday’, ‘Princess Clara’, ‘Queen Elizabeth’, ‘Queen Adelaide’, ‘Queen Andromache’, ‘Queen Charlotte’, ‘King George’, ‘King William’, ‘Washington’, ‘Colombus’, ‘Milton’, ‘Cleopatra’, ‘Omega’, ‘Hannibal’, ‘Leonidas’, ‘Algernon’, ‘Hector’ and ‘Nimrod’. This act of renaming was the European means of deliberately (linguistically then actually) displacing the original tenants in order to claim ownership and control. The land and the people had therefore no past, (re)emerging with names at the same time that the settlers had titled their new properties and districts in Tasmania. These provinces were, derivatively, named after ‘home’—England: ‘Kent’, ‘Buckingham’, ‘Cumberland’, ‘Dorset’, ‘Devon’, ‘Westmorland’, ‘Glamorgan’, ‘Somerset’, ‘Pembroke’, ‘Monmouth’, ‘Cornwall’ and ‘Hobarton’. In fact, to become the promised land rather than purely the familiar, towns and places were called ‘Paradise’, ‘Golconda’, ‘Jericho’, ‘Bagdad’, ‘Stonehenge’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Tiberius’ and ‘Mangalore’, to suggest a sense of history that the land here was not recognised by the settler/invader culture to have. Accompanying this desire for a familiar place to understand was the expectation that the coloniser would be understood by and in turn understand the Indigenous population. The English language, as absolute determinant of power, leaves us today with a diary account, of 10 August 1830, by Robinson expressing English amusement when told that two Scottish shepherds, ‘on seeing the natives and imagining they would understand Gaelic, [one] went to them and spoke to them in that language, and finding he was not understood seemed much surprised’. These first White people arriving in Tasmania had no other experience of Other people that had challenged their own sense of centrality in their universe. Tasmania’s White history is an interpretable text because of the predilection for naming, listing and collecting. By so readily textually

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inserting the known onto their unknown, invoking the desire for their past habitat to re-emerge onto the new Van Diemen Landscape, the settler was also invariably ready to reinvent. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart has kept a most contentious diorama on display—periodically concealing it, or placing current disclaimers of past display policies on its glass window, which allows a contemporary glimpse into the institution’s perception (c. 1930+) of Indigenous Tasmanians. Like a photographic still from a television documentary, three plaster Aboriginal figures surround a large lobster, endlessly awaiting meal-time. The couple and their small child stand alone, ideally immortalised and falsely suggesting that insular Western family units predominated. Is this a deliberate error, to humanise the race after the fact into a modern Western family folkloric representation with more melanin? This form of diorama mirrors the wax museum where historical figures are adjacent to the mythological folk of the fairy-tale time; space, place are compressed to present the jumbled memories of one particular culture. To recast Truganini in the role of relaxed campside mother and ‘wife’ ignores all the facts of a person, who, like her countrypeople of the time, were constantly fleeing gunshot, rape, chaining, and every other possible form of abuse during their lifetimes.4 This is a window into what could have (almost) been for her and us if White settlement hadn’t occurred, but having been made by the usurping invaders’ descendants it is more a victory cry of the museum and its public, who have captured us in every medium. Rather than suggesting any apology, these displays were built to cast us as mute curiosity. In the re-creation of Western history within fictional film, ‘authentic’ documentary, and written portrayals, non-Western participation has been portrayed as inconsequential, of ‘natives’ caught in an intangible non-urban landscape, enacting some kind of ritual with plant or animal matter, not planning, deliberating, or appearing coherently ‘involved’ in an ongoing ‘existence’. This unreal place, this never-never, is in fact how colonists often viewed and depicted this land. Alongside or amid the natural history


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of the known world, the peoples outside ‘civilisation’ were a curiosity to be acknowledged, partly in order picturesquely to plot the journeys of the East India Company and the earliest explorers. This confidence in depiction of the Other was also maintained in the practice of communicating with the Other. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur arrived in Hobart5 to find settlers fearing that vast hordes of murderous natives would beset them at any moment. One plan proposed to him by a settler/artisan was instigated from 1828. It comprised the affixing of painted wooden pictograms to trees in order to communicate that fair play and equal treatment of the native population was the new policy. White woman holding Black child and vice versa, Black and White men and dogs in harmony, and justice displayed by a White man being hung for a Black murder and vice versa. (It seems dubious to me that my forebears would have had the time and will to interpret these images while dodging gunshot.) What is interesting about the idea of affixing notices to trees is that the mythology the Whites were inventing about the Aborigines depicted them as forest beings akin to the folkloric gnomes of the European tradition. William Anderson, who was on board the Resolution during Captain Cook’s third voyage, wrote in his journal of a first meeting with the Tasmanians after the Resolution anchored at Adventure Bay, Bruny Island, on 28 January 1777: Many of the largest trees have their trunks hollow’d out by fire to the height of six or seven feet where they evidently live at times, from the hearths made of clay to contain the fire in the middle, which leaves room for four or five to sit around it so that what the ancients tell us of fauns and Satyrs living in hollow trees is here realiz’d. (Beaglehole 1967: 786)

Thus the cast for the memories about these people was being set to portray them not only as subhuman but inhuman, even animalistic. Bonwick (1870: 399) eulogised the Aborigines as gentle creatures: ‘The woolly-haired Tasmanian no longer sings blithely on the stringy-

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bark Tiers, or twines the snowy clematis blossom for his bride’s garland . . . Oh! if he were here, how kindly would we speak to him! Would we not smile upon that dark sister of the forest, and joy in the prattle of that piccaninny boy?’ Bonwick (1884: 14) also recounted Peron’s adventures in Van Diemen’s Land: ‘While wandering among the bush flowers of Tasmania, and admiring the sylvan charms of that Isle of Beauty, he encountered a company of Diana’s forest maidens, to whom, in the distance, the French Officers waved their handkerchiefs.’6 The flute-playing Robinson, writing on 19 March 1830 (Plomley 1966: 133), even cast himself as the antipodean Pied-Piper with the Aborigines as his mesmerised childlike-followers, his sable friends, sable adherents and poor creatures: ‘They all seemed anxious to go with me to my tent and when I set out twenty five of them accompanied me, laughing and dancing.’ This is the teleological history of Tasmania, that doctrine of final causes where developments are due to the purpose or design that is served by them. The portrayal of Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century as feeble forest nymphs dancing into an inevitable decline is an unacceptable text, unrepresentative of our subsequent reemergence as a community maintaining traditions yet accepting change. The colonising artists and writers not only attempted to rupture Indigenous culture via distorted representations but also recast time in order to invent an acceptable version of colonial events. Writers such as H. Ling Roth (1899) and James Bonwick (1884) rewrote history after the fact with the knowledge and task to either absolve (Roth) or condemn (Bonwick) Tasmanian colonial society of the guilt and complicity of attempting racial genocide. By describing Indigenous Tasmanians as shadowy spectres in the landscape awaiting an inevitable and convenient Darwinian demise in the language of Victorian lament for the lost innocents of a primordial garden, these texts lacked room to include the appendage of our cultural survival in Bass Strait and pockets of mainland Tasmania. We were written out of the future in an act of manageable closure by the writers, artists and poets of the nineteenth century. Artists such


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as Thomas Bock, Benjamin Dutterau, Robert Dowling, John Glover and Fanny Benbow all painted, sketched and modelled Tasmanian Aborigines in the landscape, or as placeless portraits in a desperate attempt to catalogue the Indigenous presence as Rousseauian and pastoral, or as missing-link anthropological art-works where depiction of emotional states was scientifically valid.7 These studies were based up to 50 years in the past, when corroboree and open campsites were a possibility, before guerrilla warfare raged openly. History, according to Eric Wolf (1982: 5), ‘is a term often used as a synonym for a particular, retrospectively constructed, genealogy of the West’. The fact there are now so many universally accessible divergent stories of the same events from a multitude of viewpoints is rather harrowing to some historians. Nancy Harstock (cited by Massey 1992:3) asked: Why is it, exactly at the moment when so many of us, who have been silenced, begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then, the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic . . . [that] just when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the world can be adequately theorized?

My interest lies in combating, or at least questioning, the single-viewpoint perspective of history maintained by fixing Indigenous peoples in a landscape as unmoving, unchanging, undeveloping, non-participating, singular and two-dimensional. The museum is a global decentred space, where the original site (as perceived by the West), provenance, ‘discoverers’ and their dates are delegated as primary facts about the objects collected because the actual significance and function of collected items was often considered either arbitrary or indeterminable and unfathomable. In the museum space, the collection was a metaphor for control and containment of the unknown ‘global Other’. Today, the ‘global’ is the postnational, in which large corporations and systems exist beyond any geographical border. The syndication of television programs with many nations

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transmitting their own pseudo-identical quiz shows is part of the ‘enforced sharing’ of cultural values and related conformity in language, behaviour and ‘rules’. Global collective learning suggests that here is there and then is now. Everything is together, untenable, bigger than you or me. Everything is available but nothing is complete, authorised or authenticated. According to Susan Stewart (1984: 152), a souvenir is about remembering, while a collection is about forgetting. By starting afresh due to the ‘difference of purpose’ accorded a deliberate grouping, a collection recontextualises itself through reverberating internal dialogues that are set up because of time and space anomalies between its components. Often, by using the ‘collection’ in my art-practice, with its components of reproduction, multiplicity, recognisability, nostalgia, ownership, I intend to connect the household with the museum, the scientific exploration of minute difference with the continuity factor of basic behaviour through time. Central to my work process is the maintenance of a sense of humour within myself and most pieces. My use of humour is linked to the inclusion of familiar objects in the reworking of stories, and is my means of further displacing borders, such as where-funny-meets-awful, or of releasing tensions within a Remembering that allow for fears and positions of uncertainty, involvement or even complicity to resurface in order to connect the viewer psychologically with the story. The installation Magnum as Cook in the Time/Space Continuum (Figure 5.2) contains a triptych of photo portraits of my immediate family in 1970. Surrounded by collections of Pacifica, shells, dresses, lights, souvenirs, we are centred above the 1970 Cook Bicentenary Melbourne telephone directory, its angled-on-lectern-ledge presentation suggestive of a biblical tome. We are captured, contained and therefore exist within the framework of this identifying and locational device of colonialist propaganda. This telephone book’s cover and accompanying commemorative souvenirs are falsely indicative of a united national complicity and agreement with Cook’s hallowed position in Australian history, when in fact he can be ‘celebrated’ only in White histories.


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Figure 5.2 ‘Magnum as Cook in the Time/Space Continuum’ (detail), mixed media installation, variable dimensions, 1997

This installation also comprises a triptych based on a ‘found’ painting of Magnum P.I. (Tom Selleck) in Hawaiian-print shirt and landscape. My suggestion is that through the television program, ‘Magnum P.I.’, television viewers last decade received most of their cultural knowledge of Hawaii and the Pacific—just as Captain Cook performed the same role of cultural purveyor and distortionist of the New World two centuries ago. Today, confusion about the ‘real’ continues, and has encouraged a new path of communication to develop with the potential to articulate beyond what is essentially a Western inability to resolve relationships coherently with an ever more present Other side of the world. However, the language projected by this medium is readable as one of fear, and centres on words such as ‘borderless’, ‘peripheries’, ‘hybridity’, and may be a further attempt to relegate disturbances and

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disturbingly vocal Others to a place and time that is not real, original or strong, and thus not to be held answerable. This new place is a quarantined world where we can have a Website voice, one that is switched on at the will of others. Vastly and differently distanced from that of the seven seas, there is the chance for dialogue within this superhighway, but concealment and detachment is the possible stance of any waiting voyeur. It is just a step from asking ‘Who holds the power to tell whose history?’, to questioning ‘Who is telling the stories of the present?’ Globalisation in the newsprint and television media is well known to be controlled by a very few; the Internet has the potential to tell alternative stories, but where are the borders between the real and invented, the stolen and given versions? Spatiality has been the geographical disposition at the heart of Western dominion, and the urgency of globalisation, according to Morley and Robins (1995: 108) is that as it ‘dissolves the barriers of distance [it] makes the encounter of colonial centre and colonised periphery immediate and intense’. This, suggested Homi Bhabha (1989: 35), is cultural translation: ‘Where once we could believe in the comforts and continuities of Tradition, today we must face the responsibilities of cultural Translation. In the attempt to mediate between different cultures, languages and societies, there is always the threat of mistranslation, confusion and fear.’ Edward Said concurrently pondered the position of self and other. In Said’s view (1989: 216), ‘the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question [is] of our relation to others, other cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies’. This fear of mistranslation and the accompanying loss of control of language and its means of distribution lie at the heart of the anxiety bordering this new spatial terrain where distance and time are lost. The prescriptive meanings and powers endowed by certain institutions are dissolving in the buzz of hyperspace and disassociating peripheries, and the power of representation and its current debate about who may speak judicially about what, whom and how is an acknowledgment


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that representation is no longer an unquestionable right of the ruling majority. The cultural framework is now rapidly changing for nations that have traditionally held the power bases. Increased global movement coupled with a now vocal and articulate once-colonised Other is an alarming factor in the recognition of a sullied past and the negotiation of an expansive future. This dialogue of globalisation is largely being held by Western institutions because the given order of all things held sacred and monumental by the Western power-structure base is under threat and being held questionable by this articulate Other who now speaks both languages of the colonial accountant and the cultural preserver and who will challenge unwelcome intrusions and depictions by outsiders. The uniqueness of computer-based global networks is that their

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Figure 5.3 ‘Folklore’, curtains, lightbox of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Diorama, lightbox 90 × 120 cm, 1997

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centre is not necessarily governmental and, similarly, their audience is not preselected or known. Communication can be at a peripheral unnamed hyperplace, the information unregulated, and people can choose their own levels of interaction. Perhaps the Western search for meaning in the new and integrity in the self must initially be a review of the past for a final recognition of Western culpability in invading many histories and challenging Other cultures’ integrity. While the Western world may be excessively searching in a global context for itself, smaller communities are trying to consolidate and identify selfhood and strengths in a process of localisation. Other dimensions and other spaces, which are also part of the conceptual challenges that globalism can be said to promote, are also linked to the spurious Western spiritual search for an international place and identity. The selective borrowing of aspects of the religious and spiritual belief systems of Indigenous cultures by Western civilisation has been an ongoing practice for over 400 years and is an irreverent external corruption of the truths of Indigenous connections to land, nature and the hidden forces governing it. My art-practice centres on recontextualising historical stories and the cultural meanings of objects by retelling documented events from an alternative perspective, one differing from that of the Western historical ‘record’. My intent is to challenge the recorded past by subversively reworking it from my personal viewpoint of the ‘invisible Aboriginal’. Through using familiar and therefore safe/non-threatening visual materials such as domestic, schoolroom, medical, holiday/ souvenir icons, I hope to invoke an air of recognition, of a momentarily returned nostalgia interwoven with my unexpected and possibly disturbing version of the times or events in question and on view. This action of re-use of a narrative, as with incorporation of used materials in my practice, is somehow linked to the perhaps unsatisfying notion within my work and myself that there can be no closure of the past—it is among and within us; there are no absolutes, and the sense of discovery that impels me does not lead to the satisfaction of being able to locate the ‘real’, the ‘truth’, the ‘facts’, only yet another


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approximation of them—my own. Any links suggested between the events I depict are as tenuous as those proposed historically; however, in reworking the past from the viewpoint of the Other, my work is physically proposing cultural continuity and growth within rearticulations and realignments as a cautiously viable alternative.

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Dean Yibarbuk and Charlie Godjuwa participating in a panel discussion

6 Indigenous Presence in the Sydney Games LISA MEEKISON

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he Olympics are coming, the Olympics are coming! And Sydney prepares: the Olympic site of Homebush is bustling, main streets downtown are getting fixed up, and parks are being replanted (see, for example, O’Brien 1997). But the literal, physical preparations in Sydney are only the most obvious manifestation of Olympic refurbishing and reinvention. In addition there is a vociferous public debate about Australian identity, fuelled by issues such as the Republican movement1 and the troubled process of reconciliation,2 and very much staged in the shadow of the coming Games. What sort of people are Australians? What will they present about themselves to the arriving visitors and world media? Central to this debate is the way Aboriginality is configured in Australian public discourse. The symbols and icons of Aboriginal culture and identity are used extensively, nationally and abroad, to suggest a unique Australian identity. Fink and Perkins (1997: 60–1) have written that ‘over the last century Aboriginal imagery has been appropriated consistently as a “marker of Australian identity” [yet] Aboriginal people remain shadowy figures in the national consciousness’. Further, 109

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as evidenced by the Native Title debate, social relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are fractious and troubled.3 However, Indigenous Australians remain socially and economically disadvantaged, with high rates of unemployment, high infant mortality, high rates of incarceration and deaths in custody, inadequate access to education, and so on.4 In other words, the social reality of many Indigenous peoples belies the sanitised images of their lives and cultures which feature so prominently in tourist and related advertising and marketing. Enter the Sydney 2000 Olympics: vast, expensive, exciting and attention-grabbing, the Sydney Games are going to be a major marketer and exporter—maybe even creator—of Australian culture over the next several years. How Indigenous culture is mined to further the Olympics, and to present ‘Australian’ culture, is therefore of some consequence for Indigenous peoples, Australian social relations, and notions of Australian cultural identity. In this chapter I inquire into the presence and use of Indigenous culture and imagery within the Sydney Games, at least as they have so far been made use of by the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG). This discussion will be based on the analysis of two quite different modes for the representation of Indigenous culture. First, I will consider representations of Indigenous culture presented by non-Indigenous peoples, which are arguably a form of cultural appropriation.5 Second, I will discuss representations of culture presented by Indigenous peoples through the genre of performance. Both aspects of cultural representation have already made high-profile appearances in the Sydney Games; for example, the former in the Sydney 2000 logo, the ‘Millennium Athlete’ composed of three boomerangs, and the latter in a broad sense in ‘The Festival of the Dreaming’, the first of the four Olympic Arts Festivals. I suggest that looking at both of these aspects of cultural representation in tandem provides insight into the ways in which non-Indigenous institutions make use of Indigenous culture, but also the myriad ways in which Indigenous peoples respond to this situation and seize venues through which they can make their own presentations of culture.

Indigenous Presence in the Sydney Games

‘B O R R O W I N G ’

BOOMERANGS:

INDIGENOUS

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SYMBOLS AND THE FINE ART

O F A P P R O P R I AT I O N

What motivates cultural appropriation? There are various answers. In Australia, the appropriation and/or representation of Indigenous culture occurs in many areas of social and public life including advertising, tourism and the fine arts. Existing thus in many facets of the nonIndigenous cultural fabric, the signs and symbols of Aboriginality function in diverse ways, from lending credibility to the new-age quasi-philosophy of a book like Mutant Message Down Under (Morgan 1993), to standing as icons for Australia in national and international forums. The latter phenomenon especially has been the subject of several recent essays and books, including those by Lattas (1990), Hall (1994), Jakubowicz and others (1994), Attwood and others (1996), Fink and Perkins (1997) and Langton (1997), having a variety of focuses and concerns but sharing a common note in the argument that non-Indigenous powers-that-be (identified variously as politicians, tourist promoters, artists, writers, and so on) tend to use Aboriginality to promote their version of what it is to be Australian in the service of their interests with little or no consideration for Indigenous views on the matter. The motives behind such appropriations are not necessarily sinister. There may be no intent to misrepresent, disempower or harm Aboriginal people. A tourist brochure, for example, might blatantly objectify Indigenous Australians, only intending to appeal to what its creators consider are the fantasies that travellers have about Australia. In fact, Jakubowicz and others have argued that ‘where Aboriginal people are presented in advertising, it is invariably in positive and sympathetic images’ (Jakubowicz 1994: 57). The problem is that the range of those images is very limited and tends to reinforce what nonIndigenous people think about Indigenous people rather than what the latter think about themselves; by way of example, there are advertisements from United Airlines and Mitsubishi, both of which feature Aboriginal men in traditional dress deep in the outback (Jakubowicz 1994: 57–9). These advertisers might feel that they are being socially

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responsible, even helpful, to Aboriginal people by portraying them as linked to landscape, traditional occupants of a vast land.6 It is important to remember, however, that whatever the intent might be when non-Indigenous people use Aboriginality to promote a product (including Australia) and/or what they perceive to be the nation’s interests, the actual consequences for Indigenous people might be something else altogether. Opinions on the effects of such uses of Aboriginality vary. A typical response is that it victimises Aboriginal people by commodifying them, their cultures and their histories, and by turning them into ‘objects of the white gaze . . . distant and iconic’ (Jakubowicz 1994: 60). Referring to tourist brochures and Aboriginal cultural shows used to draw people to Tumbalong Park in Darling Harbour, Sydney, Hall has written that Aboriginal history is turned into a ‘marketable commodity’; the result is that ‘issues of land rights, displacement and the marginal position of Aborigines in Australian society are sanitised for the benefit of the visitor into a “safe” social and political reality which does not lead the tourist to question’ (Hall 1994: 179). Others might argue that the use of Aboriginal imagery may be less ideologically problematic than it is practically unfair; that is, that the real issue is whether or not Indigenous people stand to benefit when non-Indigenous interests use their symbols and images. A recent report on Indigenous tourism (Anon. 1994: 20) advised that ‘although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander images are used extensively throughout the tourism industry for the marketing of Australia, Indigenous people do not currently enjoy corresponding rewards from this involvement either in employment or enterprise terms’. The implication here is that the use of Aboriginality as a marketing tool for Australian tourism (or whatever else is being promoted) is framed by the question of ‘how’ not ‘if’. In other words, it is not that the use of Indigenous culture in marketing is bad per se, but that it needs to be done in such a way that Indigenous people benefit from it, either directly through remuneration where appropriate (that is, if a specific design is used) or indirectly through, say, access to jobs in the industry being advertised.7 Finally, others might suggest that any


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use of Aboriginality that portrays Aborigines in a ‘positive’ light is generally a good thing, even if it romanticises Aboriginal people or glosses over the social reality of Aboriginality in contemporary Australia. While this point of view may signal a certain naiveté in terms of identity politics, it is one firmly held by those who believe that social change in Australia will only come about from the mobilisation of a critical mass of goodwill on the part of non-Indigenous Australians. Thus, the argument goes, the attachment of images of Aboriginality to positive concepts, such as environmental stewardship, spiritual awareness, the preservation of ancient traditions or, to use our example, the Olympics, might well culminate in non-Indigenous Australians having a much higher regard for Aboriginal people, and for social policies which benefit them. One (non-Indigenous) person with whom I spoke claimed that Mutant Message Down Under, which promotes a mythical version of Aboriginality as a poultice for the Western soul, must be of overall benefit to Aboriginal people for, at the very least, it is making many non-Indigenous Australians reconsider their notions of the value of Aboriginal culture. He held this opinion despite the fact that Mutant Message was sold as non-fiction, and horrified some Aboriginal people in Australia, who have requested that copies of the book ‘be taken from all Australian bookshops and pulped’ (Skelton 1997: 17).8 On an entirely different scale from the egregious Mutant Message, however, is the 2000 Olympics. It will be the biggest national and international event ever staged in Australia; it will attract thousands of people to Sydney and will be televised to billions of people in Australia and around the world. Clearly, representations of Aboriginality in Olympic marketing and merchandising are potentially of great consequence for international and national conceptions about the Indigenous peoples of Australia, their cultures, and their relationship to, and membership of, the Australian nation-state. SOCOG has already demonstrated a desire to incorporate Aboriginality into various facets of the Sydney Olympics. Thus the promise of a ‘Festival of the Dreaming’ was a central aspect of the bid itself; Bangarra Dance Theatre performed at the hand-over ceremony

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of the Atlanta Olympic Games, Yothu Yindi performed at the handover ceremony of the Atlanta Paralympic Games,9 and SOCOG created a Games logo that suggests the inclusion of Aboriginality in its use of the three flying boomerangs to depict a running athlete (Figure 6.1). In a Commemorative Supplement issued to ‘Pioneer Volunteers’,10 SOCOG described and explained the Games logo, the ‘Millennium Athlete’ (SOCOG 1997a, my emphasis): Our symbol represents a partnership between our unique past and our vibrant present while capturing the essence of Olympism. It echoes the famous sails of the Sydney Opera House, internationally identified with our harbour city. The sails are also reminiscent of the bid logo, recognising the enormous contribution of those who worked to win the Games for Sydney.

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Figure 6.1 The ‘Millennium Athlete’ image (courtesy of SOCOG)


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Most significantly, the sails double as an Olympic torch, symbolising the four-year journey which will culminate in the lighting of the Olympic flame. Consistent with our pledge to the IOC [International Olympic Committee] to make the athlete the focus of the 2000 Games, the central image of the logo is the athlete in motion. The Olympic credo of ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’—faster, higher, stronger—is embodied in a dynamic athlete. The athlete is formed from elements of our Indigenous heritage, essentially, three boomerangs. They represent the speed of the athlete, return of the Games to Australia and recognition of our past. The informal style of our symbol is in keeping with our familiar relaxed lifestyle and will become internationally identified with Sydney and with Australia.

It appears, then, that SOCOG is hopeful that the Games’ logo speaks volumes, part of which is that the past of Indigenous peoples is ‘our’ (non-Indigenous) past and Indigenous symbols are ‘our’ symbols. In interviews, staff at SOCOG have described to me their personal interpretations of the logo. One member of the Creative Design team told me that the three colours of the logo—white, yellow and red— are taken from the colours of Australia: yellow ochre, white clay and red earth. Further, he suggested that the red boomerang is a symbolic recognition of the significance of the ties between the Indigenous people of Australia and the Australian landscape, as well as the fact that Australia has a past far pre-dating contact by Europeans. Yet the forward motion of the running figure also suggests dynamism and optimism, fundamental characteristics of the contemporary Australian psyche. However, as discussed above, intent might not always be the issue when it comes to questions about the right to represent another culture and/or to ‘borrow’ cultural images for one’s own purposes. And a general, well-meaning but removed invocation of Aboriginality may be less telling about an institution’s regard for Indigenous peoples than, say, the structure and processes that were behind the creation of such imagery. Did Indigenous people have input into the creation of the

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logo? Did SOCOG extend to them an opportunity to comment on the use of Aboriginal images? Was there respect for an Aboriginal voice on the issue?11 The answer is ‘Yes, but . . .’12 The Sydney 2000 logo eventuated after a process in which SOCOG held a design competition, received many submissions from artists, then short-listed a few. SOCOG gave these few a brief of features the final logo had to include, such as the Olympic Rings, an evocation of the host city, and so on. A design committee, headed by Michael Bryce,13 and which included Indigenous artist Bronwyn Bancroft, considered each of the subsequent submissions. According to Penny Baker, general manager, Marketing and Image, Bancroft was ‘invaluable’ in her assessment of these submissions and rejected any designs she felt culturally inappropriate. In the end, however, the winning bid was not part of this design competition but was chosen internally by SOCOG ‘stakeholders’. Designed by Trevor Flett of FHA Image Design of Melbourne, it appealed to SOCOG because it incorporated the specified qualities and because, by suggesting a runner in motion, it put the emphasis back on the competitors in the ‘Athletes’ Games’. SOCOG did make some effort to ensure that the design had approval from other Indigenous people before its formal unveiling. Members of Creative Services consulted Steve Comeagain, one of SOCOG’s Aboriginal liaison staff, and Rhoda Roberts, artistic director of the Festival of the Dreaming. Comeagain supported the design and in turn discussed it with Indigenous organisations such as the Aboriginal Educative Consultative Group and the Land Council of New South Wales. No one opposed the image. In fact Comeagain asserts that members of these organisations were pleased to see SOCOG showing recognition of the importance of Indigenous culture by incorporating it into the design. Yet for all that, there was criticism of the logo when it was publicly released. For example, some Indigenous people with whom I have spoken have suggested that the logo is yet another case of nonIndigenous Australia using an Aboriginal symbol for its own best advantage rather than for the advantage of Aboriginal people. Others


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have said that they are nonplussed by the particular choice of the boomerang, arguing that it reduces the complexity of Aboriginal culture to a pedestrian (to non-Indigenous people) but familiar symbol, effectively negating the real, lived experience of Indigenous lives today.14 Steve Comeagain reasonably pointed out that dealing with Indigenous issues is not SOCOG’s main concern. It exists to stage the Olympics, after all, not to redirect Australia’s racial debates.15 Nevertheless, viewing the logo in juxtaposition with the Sydney Olympic mascots (an echidna, a platypus and a kookaburra), one woman suggested that SOCOG was treating Aboriginality as if it was just one more attractive aspect of Australia’s flora and fauna—a cute, relatively accessible, and above all marketable element of Australian life. It would seem then, that SOCOG is teetering on a precipice of cultural wrongdoing, that its desire to incorporate Aboriginality into Olympic imagery has been at best tokenistic and at worst appropriation, and its community consultation too limited to be ascribed validity. But there is more to the story here, and this leads us to the Festival of the Dreaming, the three-week ‘extravaganza’16 of Indigenous arts featuring theatre, dance, film, literature, comedy, art, music, storytelling and more—the biggest performance of Indigenous culture in Australia’s history. What are the implications of this Australian first? Was the Festival a splashy act of tokenism or was there more to it? Could the presence of an Indigenous arts Festival within SOCOG have made a difference to how it operates? And could the actual performances within the Festival have contributed to any long-term consequences for the way Aboriginality is both conceived of and used within SOCOG and even, perhaps, other institutions?

T H E ‘F E S T I VA L

D R E A M I N G ’: I N D I G E N O U S O LY M P I C R E A L M

OF THE

PERFORMANCE IN THE

PRESENCE AND

Let us now change tack and think about Aboriginality in terms of how it is performed as opposed to represented. These two methods of portraying images, symbols and culture to the world are each one side

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of the same coin in the currency of cultural politics. However, analyses of representation, while important for all the reasons discussed above, have as their usual focus what is made of Aboriginality and thus done to Aboriginal people. While some articles on this subject make room for Indigenous replies to non-Indigenous representations of their culture, or even have these responses as their sole focus (see, for example, Stokes 1997), certain others seem to overlook the agency of Indigenous people, thus omitting what Aboriginal people are, in fact, saying about themselves. I suggest that one way of addressing this imbalance is to focus on Indigenous performance. Many forms of social behaviour and expression fall into anthropological definitions of performance, but in this chapter I would like to take a very literal interpretation of performance and briefly discuss Aboriginal participation in the performing arts. This particular focus stems from my own interest and experience in the arts,17 and because it is through the arts that Indigenous people often reach some of their widest audiences: arts fans, moviegoers, tourists, and newspaper readers.18 Here, I suggest, we will see a very different portrayal of Aboriginality than that discussed in the section above, for in performance Aboriginal identity is less ‘fixed’ than fluid, less universal than personal, nuanced, explanatory, and revealing. Some anthropologists write of a great possibility for social and cultural change brought about by the engaging and transformative power of performance (Turner 1982, 1990; Myerhoff 1984, 1990; Turner and Bruner 1986; Kratz 1994). It is certainly possible—though very difficult to demonstrate—that dramatic representations change personal and social consciousness through some combination of education, inspiration, and emotional and imaginative appeal; David Parkin (1996) and Corrine Kratz (1994: Ch. 1) have provided excellent summaries of theory within the anthropology of performance. Whether or not this is the case with Indigenous performance in Australia, these performances are still having important practical effects. First, they express the health and vitality of cultures that some see as ailing or co-opted. Second, performances can illustrate that there are, in fact, many ‘Aboriginalities’, that is, that Indigenous cultures in


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Australia are numerous and diverse. Third, they provide basic information about Indigenous culture to those who might otherwise be uninformed. Fourth, in some cases they provide a means through which young artists can engage with more customary aspects of Aboriginal culture, through the instruction of ‘traditional tutors’, which NAISDA19 and Bangarra Dance Theatre facilitate, or by touring to communities in remote areas. Fifth, they provide role models for Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) youth, showing them another avenue through which they can participate in society and achieve success, as well as, through specific characterisations, different ways of being in the world with which they might identify.20 All this is not to suggest that Aboriginal performances of Aboriginality are not sometimes beset with the same sort of difficulties faced by nonIndigenous people who make free with representations of Aboriginality. The politics of identity is a thorny thicket that pricks most people who explore it sooner or later. Instructors at NAISDA, for example, stress to their students that they must always ask permission before using dances or any other intellectual property belonging to other individuals or communities, but it is still a sensitive issue.21 Bangarra, which takes Aboriginality to the world by virtue of the venues it gets, is sometimes accused of ‘getting it wrong’ by Indigenous people who disagree with their interpretation or presentation of aspects of culture.22 And finally, Indigenous artists sometimes get very frustrated with the fact that they are always assumed to be presenting something Indigenous, that is, that they are continually expected to speak for a community and/or a cultural experience rather than simply expressing their individual views of the world.23 And yet the fact remains that contemporary discourses about Aboriginality stand to be enormously enriched by such performances. Awareness of these media of expression enlarges social justice and social scientific discussions about appropriation, representation and commodification. Despite the wholly legitimate concerns voiced by those writing on such topics, the reality is that whatever the non-Indigenous community might be imagining about Indigenous people and culture,

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the Indigenous community is out there speaking for itself—and themselves. The Festival of the Dreaming was produced by Bundjalung performer and journalist Rhoda Roberts, and ran from 14 September to 6 October 1997. It presented an extraordinary venue for performances by Indigenous people. A full listing of events would be too extensive to provide here, but it included nine programs encompassing dance, visual arts, street theatre, solo works (primarily theatre and stand-up comedy), theatre, film, music and literature. All of the productions and exhibitions were by Indigenous people, though some projects were done in collaboration with non-Indigenous performers or staff, such as Ngundalelah Godotgay (Waiting for Godot), which was performed in the Bundjalung language but included non-Indigenous performer Max Cullen as Lucky. Participants included First Nations peoples from New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Greenland, Western Samoa and Papua New Guinea, but the emphasis was firmly on the Indigenous peoples of Australia. The Festival garnered significant media and community attention before its opening, and every news article or interview of its participants was a chance for them to articulate their social, political and cultural concerns; in other words, SOCOG’s programming provided an extraordinary stage for a living, breathing, vital antithesis to the appropriation/representation apparent in the Millennium Athlete image.24 This was not necessarily SOCOG’s goal for the Festival. Material in a press kit given out at the launch (23 June 1997) of the Festival image stated (SOCOG 1997b): ‘The Festival of the Dreaming takes us back to humanity’s beginnings. It will promote an awareness and appreciation of the uniqueness of Australian Indigenous heritage, with its traditional dance, song, story-telling, painting and craft.’ The key here is to whom the word ‘us’ refers: is it all Australians or is it non-Indigenous Australians? In other words, for whom did SOCOG perceive the Festival of the Dreaming to exist? Further, this notion that Indigenous heritage is Australian heritage suggests out-and-out appropriation: if Indigenous culture is what makes Australia unique, then Indigenous culture is what Australia will sell.25 Yet to focus on


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what might or might not be SOCOG’s intentions with the Festival is no more rewarding than focusing on its motives with the inclusion of Aboriginal imagery into the Sydney Games logo; such questions are food for thought but ultimately they lead us back to talking about non-Indigenous institutions rather than the significance of Indigenous arts. Thus in looking at the Festival one should ask not just what SOCOG meant to achieve but rather how the Festival was produced, what room SOCOG made for Indigenous ways of doing things, and how the Festival performances spoke for lived Indigenous experience. First, SOCOG hired an Indigenous woman, Rhoda Roberts, as the Festival’s artistic director. While it would have looked ridiculous for SOCOG to select an artistic director who was not Indigenous, the effect of its choice is that the Festival was guided from a first-person experience of Aboriginality. Roberts’ vision of the Festival had no room for vague associations of Indigenous peoples and ochre-coloured boomerangs; rather, as she indicated with her choice of items included in the Festival of the Dreaming image (such as hessian bags, corrugated iron, and her grandfather’s exemption certificate or ‘dog tag’—Figure 6.2), she was interested in portraying the actual experiences of Indigenous peoples. Moreover, she saw her participation in the Festival (and thus, one assumes, the Festival itself) as a political act. At the National Press Club in Canberra, she said (Roberts 1997): Today, as a producer, I see my involvement in the Arts as an extension of my family’s political activism. The Festival of the Dreaming’s focus is on living Aboriginal culture, particularly in New South Wales. And our artists today express the tenacity and strength of the people who bore the brunt of colonisation.

Roberts initiated several programs that functioned as an integral part of the structure of the Festival, and that forced SOCOG, at least to some degree, to acquiesce to an Indigenous way of doing things. The most significant of these were the Gamarada Dignitaries program, and the development of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Protocol Manual (SOCOG 1997c). The Gamarada Dignitaries were

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Figure 6.2 The ‘Festival of the Dreaming’ image (courtesy of SOCOG)

‘elder statesmen and women representing many communities and language groups around the nation’ (SOCOG 1997c: 7). The Gamarada Dignitaries provided an Indigenous response to the highly formalised relations of the Olympic world, in which visiting Olympic dignitaries are feted by host cities. As Vic Simms, a Bidjigal Gamarada dignitary, commented, ‘We are not token Jackeys for the hierarchy . . . We are ambassadors of goodwill, whether it be to the drunk in Belmore Park or Juan Antonio Samaranch’26 (Jopson 1997b: 6). Gamarada Dignitaries were present at all major Festival events, VIP ceremonies and launches, and reinforced the sense that it was an Indigenous Festival conducted along Indigenous lines.


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The Manual, compiled by Roberts, is a seven-page document explaining the basic ‘ins and outs’ of conducting oneself with Australian Indigenous peoples (SOCOG 1997c). Like the Gamarada program, it mirrors, or perhaps more accurately is an extension of, the sort of protocol manuals that exist to guide behaviour in the larger Olympic realm. With sections such as appropriate terminology for Indigenous peoples, body language, and guides to correct behaviour in case of death or Sorry Business,27 it sets out the codes of conduct and sorts of issues that are important to Indigenous peoples, reminding the reader that Indigenous Australian cultures have their own protocols that must be recognised and respected and that cannot be subsumed by a larger ‘Australian’ way of doing things. It was very much Roberts’ plan that the Manual and the Gamarada Dignitaries Program would have a life past the Festival of the Dreaming itself, and would go on to put an Indigenous stamp on further Sydney Olympic events. A third aspect of inquiry into the Festival of the Dreaming is the programming itself, which in this chapter I have confined to performances. Enormously diverse, they included the epic Black Mary; an all-Black A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Bundjalung Godot; the boxing-play-in-a-tent Up the Ladder; the stilt-spirits Mimi; and the women’s solo pieces at the Opera House. Varied in theme, content and style, these performances raised between them many of the major issues facing contemporary Indigenous people. Further, the artists personalised the issues, making them more accessible to non-Indigenous audiences and thus facilitating greater understanding of their Indigenous perspective.28 Festival of the Dreaming performances also, to various degrees, reinterpreted history, showed off ‘black humour’, demonstrated the Aboriginal actors’ fluid ease with the Western classics, and occupied the sacrosanct spaces of non-Indigenous Australian high culture such as the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf. SOCOG sold 38 000 tickets to Festival of the Dreaming performances and gave away another 14 000.29 Many more people attended free public performances such as the Awakening Ceremony at the

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Opera House (10 000), and Baramada Rock, a rock concert held in Parramatta. Australians around the nation watched Festival of the Dreaming specials on the ABC and SBS. It will be difficult to measure the full impact of the Festival for some time to come, but there is certainly every reason to believe that it reached large numbers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Sydney residents, visitors, and television viewers throughout Australia.

CONCLUSION You know there has always been this grieving, Grieving for our Land, our families. Our cultures that have been denied us. But we have been taught to cry quietly Where only our eyes betray our tears. But now, we can no longer wait, I am scared my heart is hardening. I fear I can no longer grieve I am so full and know my capacity for grief. What can I do but . . . perform. These are my stories. These are my people’s stories, They need to be told.

These lines are spoken towards the end of The Seven Stages of Grieving, by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman (1996: 73), which was performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of the ‘Wimmin’s Business’ series. It was an Olympic Arts Festival event, and as such an excellent example of an artist taking advantage of a venue to express her version of the world. The Millennium Athlete logo was on the advertisement, but Mailman’s words are her own. Shortly after the launch of the Festival image, the Sydney Morning Herald (28 June 1997) enthused: ‘The setting is Sydney, the context


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contemporary, the significance unmistakably Australian. This is a festival that tackles the issue of national identity, imbues it with a whole new soundtrack and dispatches it on its way to 2000.’ The arts, like food, are considered the most palatable forms of culture, and it is possible that SOCOG perceived the Festival as a convenient way to include Aboriginality in the Olympics without making considered efforts in other areas, such as training, employment, and management.30 Further, the use of Aboriginal culture in images such as the Olympic logo suggests a certain ambivalence within SOCOG to the serious issue of cultural appropriation. Analyses that catalogue or probe these sorts of representations are therefore very important, for SOCOG’s use of Indigenous culture as a marketing tool must be publicised and challenged where need be. There are two reasons, however, why the Festival of the Dreaming stands in contrast to other representations of Indigenous culture within SOCOG such as the Millennium Athlete. First, it was under the direction of an Indigenous person. Rhoda Roberts’ independence from the sort of representations of Aboriginality put forward in other departments of SOCOG proved itself through elements as diverse as the Festival image, the Gamarada Dignitaries program, and the selection of the Festival performances. In other words, despite the awesome bureaucracy of SOCOG, Indigenous voices were able to come to the fore. And, in addition to the performances themselves, these voices were heard in newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, television interviews, and Festival specials on SBS and ABC television. The second reason that the Festival may assume a life and import that might be beyond any cultural appropriation by SOCOG is the power of one of its principal genres of artistic expression: performance. Cultural performances of Indigenous culture are important for all the reasons discussed above: they educate, inform, express diversity, provide role models, employ, and display a physical presence, a right to be somewhere. They also participate in an ideological discussion of Aboriginality and the role of Indigenous peoples in the wider Australian society. And, in the context of the Festival of the Dreaming, they present a direct refutation to the kind of cultural appropriation

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that grabs Aboriginal culture and holds it up as a sanitised ‘Australian’ artefact. The Festival of the Dreaming is taking place at a crucial time, one of a conflation of events, not the least of which are the Republican movement and the millennium change, which for non-Indigenous Australians in particular31 both create and signal a time of national selfabsorption. Notions of cultural identity and the ‘right’ way of being Australian and creating Australia’s future preoccupy many Australians. Anthropologists have a concept of ‘liminal time’, which usually refers to the quality of time in ritual and some genres of performance, in which the workaday aspects of social life are suspended so that processes of personal and social revelation and reinvention can take place; if one expands and dilutes that concept, one could argue that Australia as a whole is entering some very large-scale equivalent. In other words, by the conclusion of the Olympics and the Centenary of Federation there will be a new, or at least refined, sense of what it is to be Australian. Against this background, the long-term success and impact of the Festival of the Dreaming will be a measure of the strength and strategies of its Indigenous participants, the commitment of non-Indigenous Australians to listen to Indigenous voices—and to act on what they hear—and an indication of the power of performance to change the social world, act by act.


Image Not Available

Arnhem Land artist Paddy Fordham Wainburranga

7 Elite Art for Cultural Elites: Adding Value to Indigenous Arts HOWARD MORPHY

M

arketing Indigenous culture as art has to be seen as a moral act. Art is a value-creating process: it involves both the creation of new kinds of values in objects and the increase of their value in terms of exchange. The process of developing an understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal art by non-Aboriginal audiences has gone hand in hand with increasing its engagement with global art-worlds and markets. By writing about Aboriginal artefacts as art, art historians and anthropologists are inevitably, if in many cases unwillingly, part of the value-creation processes of the Western art market. In my own case, as well as writing about Aboriginal art, I have been an adviser to auction houses and private collectors, purchased collections of art for museums and art galleries and organised exhibitions that have been part of a process of value creation (Becker 1982). The process of value transformation is often summarised as moving art from ethnographic object to art object (Luhte 1993) and in terms of certain radical critiques is seen to result in the alienation of art from 129

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its producing societies (Brooke 1986). I think that these arguments oversimplify the processes involved and, in general, deny agency to Aboriginal people, who from the beginning have been far more engaged in the process than most theories allow. While there are significant differences between art in Aboriginal society and art in Western society, there is a danger in reducing the difference to a dualistic and essentialised opposition that fails to take account of areas of compatibility. Moreover, Aboriginal people have shown themselves to be adept in acting in different arenas in which the same objects can have very different meanings and values. The argument of this chapter is the result of a number of encounters with others, with art critics, museum curators and missionary craft advisers who have provoked me into taking an activist stance—people who put forward usually well-meaning arguments about Aboriginal art but which went entirely against what I was learning at Yirrkala. They included the art historian/critic who said that there was no individual creativity in Aboriginal art so it was not art (Morphy 1996a), the museum curator who said that selling art was not traditional so it was not authentic (Morphy and Elliott 1997: 6), and the missionary who said that it was wrong for certain individuals to be feted as artists as it contradicted the egalitarian ethos of Aboriginal society (Morphy 1991: 4). And as well as being provoked, I was being persuaded by Aboriginal people, who were not being asked by anyone what they thought were the relevant issues. People like Narritjin Maymurru, who had come to his own conclusions about the compatibility of Sally Price’s (1989) ‘civilised places’ like art galleries for exhibiting the bark paintings he produced long before they were accepted by the curators, and Wandjuk Marika, who never saw the protection of the copyright of Aboriginal artists being incompatible with clan-based systems of ownership. *** I will begin by drawing a distinction between a substantive or perhaps phenomenological perspective on art and a sociological perspective,

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since I consider that these reflect two significantly different ways in which the study of art has been approached. By ‘phenomenological perspective’ I mean one that attempts to incorporate the form of objects within the analytical process (one that is concerned with the kind of experience art works produce). By ‘sociological perspective’ I mean one that emphasises the social context of art and the relationship between art and social processes. Neither of these approaches is mutually exclusive, and both can be applied equally well to Aboriginal art and Euro-American art. I will then compare how art emerges or is defined in each case. The movement of Aboriginal art into the global category has until recently meant its forced engagement with a particular and narrow Western concept of art. The global category ‘art’ has been centred on Western art history and the global market has been biased towards Western categories. Phenomenological analyses of Aboriginal art emphasise the ways in which art mediates people’s experience of the world and enables them to see their lives as acting out the ancestral past (see, for example, Munn 1973; Morphy 1991). People live in a world of signs that continually reminds them of their ‘Dreamtime’ origins. Art is seen as part of ritual action, a form of behaviour linking the here and now with the religious dimension. Such studies have sometimes neglected the aesthetic aspects of art objects, focusing on them as symbolic forms replicated from some original Dreamtime1 template. Some analysts have concluded that there is no such thing as art in traditional Aboriginal society in the sense that art is understood in Western contexts. Aboriginal languages do not have a word that can be translated as art and the works that Europeans classify as art are all produced with other purposes in mind. Maynard (1975: 55–7 as condensed by Layton 1992: 12) provides a classic statement of such a position: The European model of art and artists cannot be found anywhere in Aboriginal Australia, and the production of objects which we call art are subordinated to the main purpose of the performance, almost always connected with religious belief. Aboriginal art is less concerned with the creation of original forms than European art.

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Sociological analyses have an overlapping focus but have tended to emphasise more the embeddedness of art in social relations. In general, such studies will begin from the viewpoint that Aboriginal art is primarily associated with the religious life and that it provides the focal point of much ritual. Central to the functioning of Aboriginal art are two factors: (1) art is an important component of a system of restricted religious knowledge (Morphy 1991; Keen 1994); (2) art is integral to the political life of Aboriginal societies, and is typically the property of corporate clan groups (Morphy 1991). These arguments are often further simplified and presented in the form of theoretical statements such as ‘the value of Aboriginal art is the product of its secrecy’ and the Durkheimean ‘Aboriginal art is the focal point of clan unity’. Functionalist and Marxist models portrayed Aboriginal societies as clan-based and gerontocratic. Elders hold positions of authority supported by their control of esoteric knowledge, including designs and ‘art’ objects (the classic formulation of this position is that by Bern 1979a). This enables them to maintain their position as clan leaders and gives them the authority to impose social control, which in turn brings certain advantages to them in terms of marriage and ritual authority. The corporate nature of art, the fact that it is the property of social groups, is complementary to this, and means, in turn, that rights are dispersed among all members of the clan, who exercise their rights differentially on the basis of age and sex. Art in these models is symbolic capital (cf. Bourdieu 1984) created in the form of esoteric knowledge. While such analyses provide some insight into the relationship between art and society, they tend to provide less insight into the form of objects, and fail to demonstrate how form can be integrated within social process. Objects that I see as beautiful and meaningful products of years of training, condensing the aesthetic, emotional and intellectual sentiments of artists and viewers alike, are reduced to manipulated tokens of social process. A phenomenological perspective on Euro-Australian art, in contrast to the perspective on Aboriginal art, is likely to emphasise the individual nature of the creative process, the emotional, affective, and aesthetic experience of the visual form, and the connection between


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art-practice and a particular view of art history as a trajectory of forms in time. Recent Western art-practice has been dominated by the ideology of modernism with its emphasis on changing sequences of form and individual inspiration, placing an emphasis on the personal identity of the artist. Modern art is seen as the culmination of a chain of connection stretching back to the Renaissance and Classical civilisation—from ancient Egypt to Australia via Athens. This view comes out clearly in a letter that Brett Whiteley wrote to Lloyd Rees, shortly before the latter’s death (Hawley 1988: 30): I know Lloyd that I will continue to be influenced by you until the day I too, come up to, giving in, and to giving over, and I know someone will pick up something of what I have done, and carry the mantle on into the 2000s, whatever shape and form that will take: so the profound thread, that leads its way back to Leonardo and on through the Millennium to Egypt, that wonderful line, the most precious club in the world, that occasionally gets new members and bids farewell to those whose innings of dreamings, are done.

Brett Whiteley’s comments are an excellent example of a view of art-practice that emphasises formal continuities over time and disregards the social and cultural contexts of the works produced. It implies an essentialised autonomous aesthetically motivated formal progression. It subordinates art to a particular definition that in fact has a relatively short history in the West, let alone elsewhere. This particular Western art-world emphasises form and universalises aesthetic judgments. Often the language of art criticism seems highly subjective; it almost takes on the form of a secret language in which esoteric knowledge about aspects of formal and stylistic sequences, knowledge of the canon of great works and familiarity with the characteristics or conventions of the avant garde, give people the authority to make judgments about the value of artworks (see Becker 1982). Recent sociological theories of Western art seem to be fuelled in part by a reaction to the subjective and selective basis of these

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judgments (in particular Bourdieu 1984). They tended to position art in relationship to the maintenance and reproduction of class-based capitalist societies. The art market is seen to serve the interests of the elite. Art is both a form of investment and a means of separating different sectors of society. Knowledge about art or simply the capacity for good taste is part of the symbolic capital of members of some social classes that differentiates them from others. Thus Svasek (1996: 20) wrote: ‘artists and theoreticians participating in the international art scene use a distinct discourse for which they need and produce specific art historical knowledge.’ Value as an abstract property can often be directly converted into monetary value. The value of such knowledge is hierarchically ordered, such that the upper class’s taste for fine art is reflected in the relatively greater value of the class of objects they desire. To an extent, value is the product of pre-existing inequalities in society and factors of supply and demand—goods that the affluent compete for are liable to increase in value exponentially relative to those of other groups. Works are added to the category of elite art all the time, but they are added in such a way that the goods remain limited in number and relatively scarce. As so many people are trying to produce objects that are desired by the elite, one of the requirements is that members of the elite and their advisers and agents and other people involved in the process of creating value in fine art should be able to draw fine (or perhaps refined) discriminations that differentiate the really great works of art from those that almost make it. Knowledge about art creates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion based on subjective knowledge that is accessible only to those in the know. Knowledge of the criteria of the art market, knowledge of the taste of the elite enables people to operate in the art market. But the members of the class itself always retain the advantage because it is ultimately they who have the resources to separate themselves from others by the possession of objects that only they can afford. They maintain this position by competing among themselves for the same set of scarce objects. The effect of art history, and of criticism and taste, is to support the values of the ruling elite. The state is strongly implicated in this


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process because it supports the values of the elite through public galleries which enable the masses to experience the pleasures of fine art purchased through taxes or donated to avoid taxes. Art history and the art institutions thereby help to maintain the value of the upper class’s investment in fine art. The analysis of the Western art-world in terms of the function of distinction—the role of taste in the reproduction of class difference— bears an uncanny resemblance to functionalist anthropological analyses of the role of art and artefact in ritual. In both cases we are dealing with symbolic capital, and in neither case do the theoretical frameworks adopted require any attention to be paid to the form of the objects concerned. They could equally be concerned with black boxes labelled respectively ‘sacred object’ or ‘Brancusi’s bird’. The sociological analysis of Western art in terms of the maintenance of class is probably as far removed from the motivations of practising Western artists as the interpretation of Aboriginal art in terms of maintaining clan unity is to Aboriginal artists. When Aboriginal artists say that they hope that the sale of their art to Europeans will broaden understandings, they are thinking of the more phenomenological aspects of art that can be summarised as the Dreaming, though they are also concerned to get across the idea that art is owned. While taste (the criterion for judging value in art) is undoubtedly integrated within the process of the reproduction of capitalist society, it also has a complex and relatively autonomous history. The motivations of artists are not reducible to the institutional contexts in which they work, and which are often set up in radical opposition to them. Nor is the institutional context reducible to the motivations of the producers of art. The art market tries to incorporate works created for many different reasons within its frame, and indeed it is happy to include works that are fundamentally critical of the capitalist system as long as they sell! Art markets and the institutions that support them provide a forum in which an enormous diversity of ideas associated with art can be expressed. Those ideas can change over time without there being major changes in the structure of the capitalist system that markets art.

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Theories about how art is incorporated in social process ought to take account of the meaning of art to its producers and consumers, and the structure within which artists operate must be seen as having an effect on what they produce and how they view it. Analyses of the art market often lack conviction because they fail to reflect the expressed motivation of the producers and consumers. The marketing of Aboriginal art involves its movement from one context of production and consumption to another. Historically, there has been great resistance to this movement. The resistance has come less from Aboriginal artists than from Western practitioners, theoreticians, art dealers and analysts. For long, Aboriginal art was squeezed between the values of the art market and the radical critique of the art market, neither of which was willing to give Aboriginal art a place. The problem lay in part in the perceived phenomenological difference that I have outlined between art in Aboriginal Australia and art in the West. I will give two examples of how the polarised opposition between Aboriginal art and Western art has been used at times to prevent the inclusion of Aboriginal art within the category of contemporary art. These examples represent the two provocations outlined at the beginning of this chapter. 1 What Aboriginal people produce is not art since art is the selfconscious production of objects for aesthetic contemplation. What Aborigines produce are ritual objects which, though of interest in themselves, should be placed in ethnographic museums not in art galleries. This was the standard response to Aboriginal art until the 1980s, with occasional exceptions. It is the origin of what is often referred to as the anthropological or ethnographic approach to art, but it is as much a consequence of art-historical attitudes to Aboriginal art and culture. Curators of art would not have it in their institutions, but ethnographers would. 2 Aboriginal art only exists as such when integrated within the framework of Aboriginal society. As soon as it is bought and sold on a global market it is destroyed. It becomes something else, losing the


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value it has in its Indigenous context. This was very much the view from ethnography museums until the 1960s and 1970s, and complements the art-historical position. It manifests itself in a number of different ways. One is that objects should not be exhibited for their aesthetic value alone since that encourages them to be viewed in Western terms. A second is that the market in ‘primitive’ art is a bad thing since it values objects as something that they are not: items in a Western-derived art category. It may also make them more expensive and remove them from the province of ethnography museums, which are generally less well endowed than art galleries. This viewpoint explains in part the reluctance, until recently, of the ethnographic museums to buy objects that had been made for sale.

These two positions are relevant because they reflect the idea that there is some absolute division in art practice between Aboriginal society and the West. It is also of major interest to Aboriginal artists since the value associated with works that are accepted into the category of contemporary fine art is much greater than works that do not fit the category. The general line of argument might be characterised as follows: ‘Art in Aboriginal society is not a commodity to be bought and sold; it represents enormous symbolic value and its sale will have a negative consequence on Aboriginal society, resulting in its devaluation. The individualistic nature of the Western category of art contradicts the corporate nature of art in Aboriginal society.’ This critique is given an edge because the Western art-world itself is often closely identified with the culture of the elite ruling class; it is therefore symbolic of the structure and excesses of capitalism. Those who work to add value to Aboriginal artefacts by transforming them into art are thus involved in a dangerous game that on the one hand challenges the categories of the Western art market and on the other threatens the fabric of Aboriginal society. In the interests of the artists they aim to gain the highest price for their works, and the high price almost inevitably involves incorporation within the value-creating processes of the Western art market; it involves dealers

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and auction houses, galleries in New York and Sydney, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. It involves promoting heavily a relatively small number of artists to a small number of wealthy clients. The most radical critique of this process might be that the objects are doubly alienated, alienated from Aboriginal society and appropriated by the dominant class of the society that has invaded Aboriginal land, brought death and disease, and interfered with every aspect of their lives. Is it possible to develop an analysis that will make participants in the process feel better about what they are doing? Or is there an alternative to taking part in this process? There are, of course, many alternatives. I will begin with one adopted by the missionary craftadviser when I was first at Yirrkala, in northeastern Arnhem Land, since it reflects the views of people who were then important mediators in the trade of art. It contains two propositions that are related to each other (Morphy 1991). The first proposition is that the industry should be less concerned with producing artworks for national audiences and more concerned with spreading knowledge of Aboriginal art among Australians as a whole. The craft-adviser’s agenda was that every house in Australia should have a piece of Aboriginal art. The second proposition put forward was that all artists should be paid the same. The basis for this was both pragmatic and ideological, though it is hard to separate the two. Pragmatically, the objective was to provide work for the maximum number of people through art and craft production. For this to be possible, product value had to be shared, and producers of high-value work had to subsidise producers of lowervalue work. The ideological, or perhaps sociological, justification for this was the egalitarian nature of Aboriginal society; it was said that people would be jealous if some people were paid more than others, and that in any case the money would have been redistributed. This position is faulty because it denies the agency of Aboriginal artists, it accepts a particular characterisation of the difference between Aboriginal and Euro-Australian society, and it fails to acknowledge the dynamics of the situation and allow for the process of change. Interestingly enough, it also represents an almost Marxist utopian


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world in which all people receive the same reward for their labour and everyone has the same symbolic artefact above their mantlepiece (Svasek’s 1996 study of Czech art provides an excellent ethnographic analysis of a Soviet art world). The core of the problem with the missionary’s position, as with the other two positions outlined earlier, lies in the absolute separation that is implied between European or Euro-Australian society and Aboriginal society or any other Indigenous society. It is part of a process of categorising Aboriginal people as ‘Other’, without reference to the realities of social process or to the motivations of the Indigenous peoples themselves. The creation of art objects is seen to be a conjuring act in which objects are taken out of one box and fitted into another without reference to the original maker. Jacques Maquet (1986) has labelled this ‘art by metamorphosis’ in contradistinction to ‘art by intention’. He wanted to highlight the fact that art that fitted into the old category of ‘primitive art’ was created not by the producers but by the consumers: the auction houses and artists of Paris and New York. The process involved the selection of certain objects that had a function in African or Native American society and their incorporation into the category of ‘fine art’. Implicit in Maquet’s analysis is the concept of art as an object set aside for aesthetic contemplation to be bought and sold on the market primarily because of the valuation of its aesthetic and art-historical significance. Implicit also is the idea that Indigenous arts are included according to different criteria from art produced in the European tradition and hence they belong to a separate category in perpetuity. I have long been unhappy with this concept of ‘art by metamorphosis’ because it is based on the assumption that the global concept of African art or Aboriginal art is a Western invention (Greer 1997). While Indigenous art was to an extent constrained through the primitivist lens through which it was viewed, the intentions of the producers were not always as far removed from the perception of the purchasers as is implied by the notion of ‘art by metamorphosis’. Many of the objects that were traded across boundaries, objects such as Kuba textiles, were part of extensive trading systems in which the intention

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was to produce something that the market required and to which people responded. The objects that were traded were often problematic, posed questions, and forced the development of categories that were not always pre-existing parts of the recipient culture. While concepts like fetish or totemic object were inadequate and tended to be over-used to the point of becoming meaningless, they were part of a process of widening European conceptions of the world, and Indigenous peoples were often consciously trying to get their ideas across and to affect global understanding. The concept of ‘art by metamorphosis’ is problematic on several grounds: first, it accepts a limited and time-based Western concept of art that fails to acknowledge the diversity even of Western art-practice; second, it fails to recognise the complexity of Western art process, in particular by failing to acknowledge the distinction between Western art-practice and the market in art; third, it fails to acknowledge that metamorphosis is a much more general part of the process in EuroAmerican art; and finally, it denies the agency of Indigenous peoples. For most of this century, art objects have been defined as objects of aesthetic contemplation in relation to a modernist aesthetic. However, there have been many very different conceptions of what art is in the European tradition—art as divine revelation, as scientific practice, as aesthetic object, as cultural critique, to name but a few. And modernism itself has contained many different ideologies as to what constitutes art. At different periods, non-European artefacts have been accepted or rejected on very different grounds, including the extent to which they fit with the ideologies or aesthetics of the time. Freed from the hegemonic structure of Western art history, quite different relationships can be seen between the motivated production of artefacts across space and time. At the time of the First Fleet, European art was still very much in its scientific representational mode (Smith 1985). It is quite possible to argue that there is a much closer relationship between some forms of Aboriginal art and some forms of modern conceptual art or landscape art or performance art than any of these share with early modernism or with Renaissance painting.


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Sand sculptures might be a case in point, explaining their popularity as Aboriginal art events in global contexts. Related to the existence of differences over time in the definition of art practice is the changing status of different categories of objects in relation to the Western category of fine art. ‘Art by metamorphosis’ is a normal part of the process of Euro-American art. The longstanding tension between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ and the occasional movement of works from one category to another are examples of the process; the decades-long resistance to the acceptance of photography as art is another example. Resistance and persuasion are part of the way in which the art-world works. The process can involve the active agency of living artists trying to get the status of a certain medium changed, or it can be the work of dealers and collectors trying to gain retrospective inclusion of works into the art category. Non-European art in this context is analogous to folk art or medieval art, both of which change category. In the case of many European artworks, the process involves as great a change of functional category as has been the case with Aboriginal art. Musical instruments, church furniture, silver tableware—all get converted over time, often for different reasons. Once they join the category of art object the chances are that they will remain in it long after the criteria have changed: when realism or expressionism is no longer fashionable, when technique is no longer at a premium, when art can no longer simply be found. All become part of what is essentially a ragbag category of objects that have gained admission to the category of ‘fine art’. Once they are there, then the sociological and institutional theories of art go a long way to explaining why they remain, though it is also necessary to take into account their changing meaning and significance to art practitioners. It could be argued, then, that the process of metamorphosis is one that is common in the process of art, and that it goes hand in hand with a process of persuasion that can involve all of the many different players in the art game, from artists to art historians, from dealers to auction houses. The agendas of the persuaders can be both conservative and radical, aimed at increasing the values of the goods of the

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elite, or challenging existing conventional assumptions about the ‘nature’ of art. Both are equally part of the process of transformation. However, it could be argued that, with Aboriginal art and other Indigenous arts, we are dealing with a special case, because the artists themselves are not involved in that process of transformation. This argument, of course, would apply equally to almost every aspect of the life of people who have been subject to invasion. But I would argue that it is no more than that. Art is not an arena into which Aboriginal people have been unwillingly dragged; rather it is an arena that Aboriginal people who have been unwillingly colonised have turned to as a means of asserting their rights and autonomy in the transformed postcolonial context. Aboriginal people have been involved in a discourse over art with outsiders long before European invasion. Externally, there have been generations of interaction with eastern Indonesians and Papua New Guineans and, within Australia, art objects have been used in exchanges. From first contact, there is evidence of Aboriginal people trying to persuade Europeans of the value of their ritual performances and their manufactured objects. From the nineteenth century we are being made aware of an increasing number of Aboriginal artists. William Barak and Tommy McRae were involved in discourse over art with Europeans, and, in Arnhem Land, from the beginning of colonisation, Aboriginal people were involved in trade in art with Europeans. Clearly, at first contact, they were not as informed about EuroAmerican conceptions of art as they subsequently became. But many people early became aware of the value that art held in European society, and later became determined to gain recognition of their own art in wider contexts. Aboriginal people, far from being passive victims in this process, were active agents. Initially, very few people took up the argument on their behalf, and the Western art-world resisted at many different levels. But eventually others became involved in the process of persuasion, and Aboriginal art began to gain more widespread recognition as contemporary fine art. The transformation of William Barak’s and


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Tommy McRae’s paintings into fine art (one in which Andrew Sayers and Carol Cooper have been involved; see Sayers 1994), and the reevaluation of Albert Namatjira’s work (Hardy et al. 1992) are not going against the conception that the artists had of what they were producing, but catching up with them! The process of acceptance happens as part of a process of transformation and metamorphosis, not only in the Aboriginal artefact, but in the ongoing Euro-American category of ‘art’. The ideology of that art-world, masked by its secret language, is that its essential criteria never change; the reality is that change is continuous and that there are an infinite number of bases for the inclusion of works in the category. I would argue, in this case, that the position of Aboriginal artists again has more in common with practising artists elsewhere than is often acknowledged. The artists’ own conception of their practice runs counter to the values of other sectors of the art-world. In cross-cultural contexts, art and artists are involved in processes of value exchange that are often acts of persuasion. While persuasion involves the activation of social processes that are deeply embedded within the structure of a particular society, it also involves conceptual change. It is vital to combine phenomenological studies of art with sociological ones in order to understand what motivates the process of persuasion, how the process is accomplished, and what is achieved through it. Indigenous Australians are well aware of the persuasive power of art.

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Multicultural group Drum Drum performing at sunset

8 Cultural Tourism in an Interconnected World: Tensions and Aspirations in Latin America PENNY DRANSART

I

n this chapter I explore some of the aspirations and tensions that arise as people in the Andes sell their own craftwork to tourists. The particular focus in this chapter is on textiles, which are convenient items for tourists to carry in their luggage but which, in the form of clothing, signal conceptualisations of identity on the part of the wearer. Bearing in mind that items that cross cultural boundaries may also serve purposes other than their makers originally intended, the use of Andean textiles as wall-hangings in the homes of Western tourists signals that different cultural perceptions are entwined with notions of value. Sylvia Kleinert recognised that although relationships between native sellers and tourist purchasers have been characterised as unequal within a capitalist framework of buying and selling, from another perspective tourism can be seen to provide native peoples with an outlet 145

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for their ‘vigorous and vital vernacular traditions’ (Kleinert 1997: 111). The problem remains, however, for the seller to attract a reasonable price for their work without recourse to elaborate marketing strategies. James Clifford has noted that objects that are drawn into a Western ‘art-culture system’ will be regarded as either artefacts or fine art, and that craft items may be considered marginal to the high-status fine-art category until a shift occurs in the prevailing perceptions of what constitutes ‘art’ in Western-dominated art markets (Clifford 1988: 222–6; Morphy this volume, Chapter 7). Aboriginal acrylic paintings have achieved the esteem and status they deserve in a fine-art market. The work of art critics has been useful in promoting the art of non-Western artists, but Fred Myers has summarised its ambivalent effects by pointing to the fact that by advocating certain trends, art critics actually exclude other aspects of art and reduce its diversity (Myers 1995: 79). He also recognised that the art market requires objects that are ‘original’, ‘authentic’ and ‘different’ in order to maintain high prices that are clearly beyond the bounds of commodities of popular culture. This latter category includes the often smaller and more quickly made items that tourists acquire in their travels. The problem remains for those people who wish to sell work that involves a substantial input of labour and a high degree of what ‘we’ in the West tend to regard as artistry, such as many of the textiles considered here. It has been suggested that although flags and military uniforms are required in modern nation-states, ‘cloth as a medium of political power’ has been losing its status under capitalism (Schneider and Weiner 1989: 11, 16). By contrast, in Andean communities textiles and clothing have long held a pivotal role in establishing the social identity of the wearer and the cultural achievements of the weaver. In attempting to sell their weavings to tourists, Andean women are hoping to generate an income for something at which they excel. Myers (1995) has emphasised the importance of the notion of authenticity in Western-dominated art markets. Authenticity is also a concern that has been expressed to me by members of one particular Aymara community, Isluga, in the Andes of northern Chile, where I

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have been doing fieldwork since 1986. The experiences of people in Isluga are set against a broader Latin American context in this chapter. My concern is to examine some interrelated issues that are important for Aymara weavers who are attempting to sell their products in Chile. I contrast the results of my study with that by Karen Tice (1995) of the Cuna of Panama, whose embroideries have achieved a better worldwide recognition, and who have retained some degree of control over the marketing process. Malcolm Crick (1988: 66, 41) has reminded us that ‘cultural authenticity’ is, in a general sense, a ‘staged’ process and that in most parts of the world tourism has been preceded by centuries of intercultural contact between non-Western and Western societies. Crick’s approach is to show how international tourism has been represented in the social science literature, and to blur the distinction between tourists and anthropologists. In contrast, Errington and Gewertz (1989) examined differences in the notions of authenticity held by tourists, travellers and anthropologists in a particular social field (in their case, Chambri in Papua New Guinea) in order to produce a politically informed understanding of the negotiations that take place between local people and visitors to that social field. They stressed the importance of what an anthropological perspective can offer to ‘place their lives [the people of Chambri] and ours in socio-historical, cultural and systemic context’ (Errington and Gewertz 1989: 46).

TEXTILES

IN AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD

It is worth pausing, therefore, to consider the historical background before proceeding to examine the present-day production of textiles in the Andes. ‘Globalisation’ is a modern term for what has been occurring for at least 500 years in Latin America and the Caribbean, starting with the invasion by Europeans of lands owned by native American peoples. The interconnectedness of the Andes with the rest of the world has been given material expression in a variety of forms. Notable among Andean craftwork produced during the colonial period

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are tapestries made by a weaving technique already known to Andean weavers at the time of the European invasion. The designs of tapestries were altered to incorporate motifs introduced from Europe and Asia, including Christian motifs such as dogs representing the guardian animal of the Dominican Order, and Chinese visual influences derived from sources that were introduced to the Andes via another Spanish colony of the period, the Philippines (Stone-Miller 1994: Plates 66–70). Tapestries of the colonial period present bestiaries in which Eurasianinspired rampant lions and Chinese horned mythical beasts accompany Andean llamas. Another, more recent artistic expression of interconnectedness takes the form of pile rugs or hangings that are produced in Lirima, northern Chile, and Oruro, Bolivia, for sale to non-native purchasers. In this case the technique is not indigenous, but the imagery of the Oruro rugs is inspired by prehispanic rock paintings (Figure 8.1). The use of prehispanic imagery that is not part of the current visual imagery

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Figure 8.1 A pile rug of alpaca fibre woven for the tourist market, Oruro, Bolivia (Photo: P. Dransart)


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employed within native Andean communities caters for aesthetic tastes not necessarily of the spinners and weavers of these products but of outside purchasers. The notion of ‘Spanish thread on Indian looms’ has been employed to refer to the material expression that connects concepts and techniques in textile production (Berdan and Barber 1988). It will be assessed with reference to the aims and aspirations of Isluga weavers.

TRAFFIC

IN TEXTILES

A specialised form of tourism has preceded the hostellers and backpackers who are now reaching isolated parts of the Andes. George Bankes (1995: 1) saw the origins of modern tourism in North American and European travellers such as George Squier, a US commissioner who toured the coastal and Andean regions of Peru in the 1860s, collecting antiquities on the way. Specialist collectors of Andean textiles who have made their collections accessible to the public through exhibitions and publications include Wasserman and Hill (1981), Adelson and Tracht (1983) and Siegal (1991). These collectors have travelled extensively in the Andes, buying old ethnographic textiles from owners in remote communities. In the biography Siegal provided as part of an exhibition catalogue, he described how he began by collecting Cuna mola (appliqué) in Panama in the early 1970s, then moved to Bolivia. With his associates, he used La Paz in Bolivia as his base while travelling ‘from one village to another buying what was available while attempting to learn as much as possible about this incredible and little known art form’ (Siegal 1991: 19). The shawls, dresses and ponchos that comprise the collection were displayed to the public in the guise of rectangular wall-hangings. Given the predominantly abstract designs, they were obviously intended to be regarded as the equivalent of contemporary non-figurative paintings. These collectors presumably went to the Andes in the wake of the introduction of long-distance air travel in the 1950s. Bankes (1995: 7) observed that the proliferation of cheap fares that came with the jumbo

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jets in the 1970s permitted younger, less wealthy travellers to reach lands previously considered to be distant. He added that restrictions on baggage size and weight encouraged tourists to collect fragments of antiquities and small items of tourist art. The removal of prehispanic antiquities from the country in which they were found is forbidden by national laws enacted by the various Andean countries. In the case of ethnographic items, the situation is less clearly defined. Nevertheless, representatives of the Aymara community of Coroma, Bolivia, requested that some cases be taken to court in the United States and Canada. These cases demonstrate that some dealers in textiles have used devious means to acquire cultural property. In Coroma, ancient garments are venerated for their links with the ancestors who founded the ten lineage-based social groups that constitute the community, and, as described by Susan Lobo, they are publicly worn by community members on All Saints’ Day, when it is said that ‘the ancestors dance again’ (Lobo 1991: 40–1). It was observed that, beginning in 1978, foreign commercial dealers often visited the festival in order to photograph the people wearing the ancient garments, and they sought to acquire the textiles with the assistance of hired Bolivian intermediaries. Since the community authorities had not sanctioned the sale of textiles by individuals, Lobo stressed that this was theft, because communal ownership is recognised in Bolivian law (Lobo 1991: 41). Coroma textiles were found in the United States and Canada, and officials in both countries confiscated them (Lobo 1991: 43; Bergman 1996). Eric Bergman reported that in 1992 fortynine textiles were repatriated by the US authorities to then President Zamora of Bolivia, on behalf of the people of Coroma. Many other textiles, however, were returned to the dealer because of difficulties in demonstrating that they were acquired illicitly (Bergman 1996). It has been argued that the presence of these textiles within the community is important for maintaining respect among Coromeños for the past, and that the return of the textiles has renewed an interest among younger people for their culture (Bergman 1996). There are implications for maintaining the vigour of an artistic tradition if all the older examples of the art-forms in question are removed from the community.


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PRODUCTION

In many Latin American countries, weaving or embroidery are skills practised often, but not exclusively, by girls and women, who have risen to the challenges of producing vibrant and technically accomplished work despite the pervasiveness of Western goods. Textile production may range from making items for personal use, some of which are sold or exchanged, to making items for sale on the international market (Tice 1995: 63–4). These products may be marketed as commodities in order to enhance the independence of the makers within their own economies. Not everyone, however, has the same access to markets to sell their wares. In some markets hand-made items jostle with factory-produced goods. Such goods may also be termed artisanal because they are made in limited quantities rather than being mass-produced, and they are designed to look ‘ethnic’ in style. In Peru, many such goods bear the labels ‘Made in Ecuador’, but vendors in Lima craft markets insist that they are really made in Peru. They explain that such items are also sold in Ecuador, where they are given the appearance of local products. In the 1970s and 1980s some analysts adopted an approach to the production of craft that focused on the concept of dependency. They argued that households in rural communities were forced to turn to the production and sale of crafts to supplement their incomes when their agricultural production failed to provide an adequate living because householders were thought to have access to insufficient land (Tice 1995: 9). Dependency theory demonstrated the inequalities between industrialised and developing countries. However, Karen Tice (1995: 9) commented that such a theory did not address issues of class, gender or ethnicity, nor did it investigate how local communities were interconnected with the larger political economy. The governments of some Latin American countries, particularly Mexico, Panama and Peru, have lent active support to the promotion and export of artesanía in order to ameliorate rural under-employment.1 This support has been criticised in Peru for improving the income of

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intermediaries rather than that of the people who actually produce the artesanía (Elizabeth Bauch, cited by Tice 1995: 11). Similarly, in Panama a department of a government organisation dedicated to tourism was set up to promote local artisans, but it was inhibited in its aim because of expectations that it should be self-supporting through the sale of handicrafts. Tice (1995: 67) observed that the department ‘functions primarily as an intermediary’. Mexico is particularly noted for promoting itself by means of spectacular exhibitions as part of wide-ranging projects of sponsorship, global business and diplomacy. That artesanía should be given prominence along with the artistic expression of imperial societies of the prehispanic past is a real compliment to the skills and achievements of the peasant producers of artesanía, and it helps to break down elitist barriers between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ that still persist in the West. But it has been noted that Mexico’s advertisement of the expression of its nationhood as a work of art is an advertiser’s conceit that refers to ‘the invented nature of nationality and to the role of culture’ (Wallis 1991: 86). Brian Wallis urged us to ask questions: Whose version of the national culture is being presented? What is not shown and why? In Chile, the promotion of artesanía has not received such a degree of support from the state. Locally, initiatives such as that undertaken by Dr Horacio Larraín of the University of Antofagasta have adopted a pragmatic approach. Larraín stressed the need to incorporate native artisans in the academic enterprise of disseminating information about the artesanía of Chile; as a first step in the process he organised a conference that was run alongside a craft fair (Larraín 1988).2 However, for native craft-workers in northern Chile, the support given for selling artesanía is somewhat intermittent. A craft village was established in Arica, Chile’s most northerly city. Its buildings were modelled on the church and houses of Parinacota, an Aymara village in the highlands of Arica. When I visited the fair in 1989, the only Aymara craft-worker to sell her work there told me that although the craft village was based on an Aymara model, all the other occupants of the units were nonAymara. They were in fact Chileans of European descent from the more populous regions of central Chile. The presence of an Aymara


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person in an apparently ethnic context gave the village a ‘local colour’, but the Aymara see it as a borrowing that is detrimental to their own attempts to sell their authentic Aymara artesanía.

C U LT U R A L

TOURISM AND ETHNIC TOURISM

In many parts of the world, tourists are potential purchasers of craft products. Karen Tice made a study of Panama, a country where Cuna women are local producers who have retained a degree of control over the making and selling of embroidered mola, even though their work is marketed throughout the world. However, Tice stressed (1995: 56–7) that mola commercialisation results in an unequal distribution of resources, and that it is vulnerable to collapses in the tourist trade (1995: 68–9, 72). In contrast, Isluga people produce weavings primarily for their own use, though they also make incidental sales to outsiders. Their products have not yet achieved a recognisability that is part of the appeal of mola in a worldwide market. Isluga weavers fully recognise that cultural tourism is a potential source of income for their handiwork, but have not been able to realise this potential fully. As Morphy points out in Chapter 7, this is not an area into which people such as Islugueños are dragged; there are benefits which some of them clearly identify and actively seek. Another aspect of tourism is that the people themselves may form part of the attractions for tourists. Non-Western people may be seen as a ‘resource’, whose ethnicity is a defining factor in what Valene L. Smith called ‘indigenous tourism’; Smith (1996: 287) encapsulated the phenomenon in four interrelated elements that she termed the ‘four Hs’: heritage, history, habitat and handicrafts. Jorge Flores Ochoa (1996: 12) has referred to the same phenomenon as ‘ethnic tourism’; he characterised this as focusing on ethnic customs, an additional focus to the older historical and cultural themes in tourism. Habitat may constitute an important part of the allure for tourists. Smith has pointed out that large tracts of ‘wilderness’ exert a great

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deal of fascination for travellers (1996: 289). In the Americas, the habitats of native peoples are also becoming a marketable resource. In South America, such lands are often perceived to be marginal in Western perceptions.3 The high-altitude terrain of Isluga is bounded by a spectacular chain of volcanic peaks on the east and by the valleys of the precordillera on the west. This land, with its sparse vegetation, is regarded as marginal grazing land by outsiders; it is considered to be unproductive from an agronomer’s point of view, but from a traveller’s perspective it is a romantic ‘wilderness’. The Aymara, in contrast, have other ways of perceiving and utilising their pasture lands as places for human activity (Dransart 1996). However, the low population density and magnificent landscape is one of the reasons that increasing numbers of tours are being organised through the Chilean highlands. For the tour operators, the Andes of far northern Chile contain all four of Smith’s interrelated elements. The Aymara people are drawn into this web of tourist attractions. Their sometimes ‘exotic’ dress signals what Michael Taussig (1993: 185) has termed the ‘radical Alterity’ of Cuna women when he contrasted them with visitors from a Western milieu. As will be explained below, Isluga people are often reluctant to play this role for outsiders. They see tourists as possible purchasers of artesanía, but they tolerate the voyeurism afforded to tourists by the guided tours only up to a certain point. Guided tours on offer to tourists in the far north of Chile are often cheap, and they may well include one or two nights in hostel accommodation owned by the forestry corporation Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF). They promote a ‘safe’ self-image, offering facilities such as oxygen to assist travellers with severe cases of altitude sickness. The tour operators work from offices in the coastal cities of Arica and Iquique (Figure 8.2). Of the tourists who signed the visitors’ book for the years 1995 and 1996 in the CONAF hostel in Isluga, most declared themselves to be French, while the second most numerous nationality represented was Chilean (Marín Castro, pers. comm.). Other enterprises appeal more overtly to a spirit of adventure. It is somewhat alarming to see the title of ‘raid’ chosen for an expedition


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Figure 8.2 A shopfront in Arica, Chile, of a tour operator offering guided tours to the highlands of Chile. The designs are taken from pre-Inkaic textiles (Photo: P. Dransart)

through the Andes that was featured in La Estrella, a Sunday newspaper published in Iquique (Anon. 1996). The term ‘raid’ is a borrowing from English into Spanish, and it retains the militaristic notion of a rapid incursion of limited duration into unknown or enemy territory (Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado 1996: 849). It was explained in the La Estrella feature that the raidistas (‘raiders’, rather than turistas, ‘tourists’) would follow the tracks of the ancient Inka road from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, to Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, and to Machu Picchu and Cusco in Peru. Participants had to provide their own fourwheel-drive vehicle. They also had to bring ‘a spirit of adventure’ and a sense of team spirit to the enterprise, which was claimed to be the highest raid in the world, and the longest in Chile. The image selected for the cover of the Sunday supplement in which the feature appeared was a picture of the church in Islug Marka, the ceremonial and ritual centre of Isluga (Figure 8.3).

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Figure 8.3 The church of Isluga, designed to entice tourists to participate in a ‘raid’ through the Andes. Cover of the Sunday supplement in La Estrella, Iquique, 11 August 1996

LOCALS

AND TOURISTS

Anthropological writings on tourism often focus on the motivations of the tourists. Such studies concentrate on the character of tourism from the perspective of the tourist rather than from that of local inhabitants


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(Crick 1988: 41). In Valene Smith’s definition, a tourist is ‘a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change’ (cited by Graburn 1983: 11). Graburn argued that tourists do not constitute a homogeneous category, nor is tourism a monolithic or a static phenomenon; he explored relationships between tourism and ritual, play and pilgrimage. The theme of mystic tourism in Cusco, Peru, has been taken up by Jorge Flores Ochoa (1996). Some tour guides in Cusco (at the heart of the Inka empire in prehispanic times) are designing packages to appeal to seekers of a new-age mysticism. They are exploiting native Quechua and Aymara vocabularies of spiritual beliefs and terms, but in Flores Ochoa’s analysis they are presenting the terminology in an inauthentic fashion. Quechua and Aymara spiritual experience, he wrote, has been enslaved within a capitalist global economy (Flores Ochoa 1996: 25–6). But what do Aymara people themselves think of tourists? In Isluga, outsiders are termed q’ara, which means poor or bare, naked. In discussing the relationships of another Aymara people, the Laymi of Bolivia, with outsiders, Olivia Harris mentioned that the Laymi relegate the latter ‘to the status of undressed and thus not fully cultural’ (Harris 1980: 86). In other words, non-Aymara people are considered to be lacking in Aymara culture. However, when Aymara speakers in Isluga translate the term into Spanish, they use the word gringo/a. They do not generally distinguish people born in Chile from other people born in non-Latin American countries. I observed that the Aymara usage of the term gringo/a persisted throughout the 1980s, but in the 1990s more tourists started to travel through Isluga territory and Islugueños started to substitute the word turista (‘tourist’) where previously they had referred to gringos. All non-Aymara travellers in the area are now likely to be termed ‘tourists’, whether or not they are Chilean. This does not mean that non-Aymara people are excluded from entering into fictive kin relationships with Islugueños. Compadrazgo or spiritual affinity may be established between non-Aymara godparents and Isluga children. But there is a spatial grounding to such relationships, because non-Aymara people come from outside Isluga.

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Non-Aymara Chileans perceive Isluga as a dark, forbidding territory beyond the fringes of civilisation. In the coastal cities it is popularly believed that human existence at such high altitudes as Isluga is a health hazard. As pastoralists, Islugueños are used to traversing between the coastal cities, the agricultural communities of the precordillera, and their own communities in the highlands.4 Another term that Islugueños may use is that of ‘people like us’ and ‘people not like us’. It is in the agricultural villages of the precordillera where the two different communities share the same geographical space. In Isluga, pastoralists own their own communal pasture grounds and they inherit corrals for horticulture. One of my Isluga friends described the social landscape to me in January 1997 by saying that in the upper valleys ‘people like us’ maintain control over their land, but at lower altitudes they serve as peons (day labourers) to ‘people not like us’. Islugueños have accurate perceptions of non-Aymara people, in which tourists are characterised by the transience of their visits, unlike the non-Aymara residents of the lower valleys and coastal cities. Tourists are unaware of the gulf between the two communities, which is further complicated as Aymara people from the highlands migrate to the cities more or less permanently. Tourists cut through the social geography, but the brevity of their visits has an impact on the possibilities afforded to Isluga people for selling their artesanía on home ground. Tourists seldom spend more than one night in a village in Isluga, and sales are only made opportunistically. But it is to these people that Islugueños want to sell their textiles.

ISLUGA

AND GLOBAL MARKETS

Since the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, the area that eventually became rural northern Chile has remained relatively underdeveloped. One of the results of this, alluded to above, is the persistent migration to the towns of the precordillera and to coastal cities. This underdevelopment is combined with an attitude that Juan Van Kessel


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(1980) regarded as a form of ‘de facto apartheid’ on the part of city Chileans towards the Aymara. Within this wider historical trajectory, Isluga appears to have been particularly marginalised. Formerly it constituted the southernmost part of Peruvian national territory in the Tarapaca region. In 1879 the area was occupied by Chilean troops, and it remained under Chilean administration following a proposed plebiscite in 1929, when Tacna was returned to Peru. With the improvement of roads through the area in the 1970s and the establishment of a free-trade zone in Iquique in the mid-1970s, Isluga has become connected to an active commercial network between Chile and Bolivia, which is now a landlocked country. A period of military rule in Chile came to an end in 1989. Towards the end of the dictatorship, increasing numbers of foreign tourists included Chile on their itinerary of Latin American countries, and this trend has continued. Chilean state infrastructure is represented in Isluga at Colchane, which is near the Chile–Bolivia border. Colchane was formerly little more than a hamlet of three Aymara families, but it now has a police station and immigration control point, a health post, municipality and a secondary school for boarders. In addition, the Catholic Church has built a large, modern church. There are now restaurants run by local people, and on my last visit, early in 1997, a telephone centre was being constructed. Colchane is at the southernmost part of Isluga, and it is a nodal point through which Bolivian commercial travellers and tourists must pass. A fortnightly market is held on Saturdays near Colchane. There is a Bolivian market on that side of the border, and a Chilean market on the Chilean side. Over the years the Chilean market has withered and it now sells little more than fruit from the south of Chile and secondhand clothing from North America. Much of this is destined for the wholesale market in Bolivia, but local purchasers can buy small amounts of fruit, vegetables and clothing. Fortunately the Bolivian market has retained its predominantly small-scale character. This is where Islugueños buy most of their clothing. The women obtain the red shawls that they have made a part of their Aymara identity, and

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also lathe-turned wooden spindle-whorls, brightly coloured synthetic yarns, needles and pins. Handicrafts are not usually offered for sale at the stalls. Occasionally Bolivian Aymara women try to sell clothing made from handspun and hand-loomed fabric known as bayeta. NonAymara Chileans despise such products as only being suitable for foreign tourists, and they favour instead cheap factory garments of synthetic fibres, which are flooding into the area from Southeast Asia through the free-trade zone in Iquique. The fortnightly market on the border has not yet been developed as a vehicle for selling artesanía to tourists. The buses conveying tourists from Bolivia to Chile only stop long enough to pass through the border controls. On arriving in the coastal cities, tourists then have the opportunity to take one of the guided tours to the highlands.

ISLUGA

TEXTILES

Weaving is a source of pride within Isluga because it is the product of a living tradition that has changed over the decades, from one generation of weavers to the next (Dransart 1988). The mainstay of the economy is the herding of llamas, alpacas and sheep. All of these animals produce fleece that is useful for weaving and plaiting. Thus herding activities imply more than just subsistence to Islugueños, as herding is a way of life that confers a cultural identity. With the fleece produced by their herd animals, Isluga women weave garments, blankets and bags using the Andean four-stake loom, while men plait ropes and slings; men also knit (a European introduction into the Andes). Traditionally, Isluga textiles have been characterised by their formal, abstract appearance and their striped colour schemes (Figure 8.4).5 In this they resemble the textiles of Coroma, though different colour schemes are favoured in the two areas (Lobo 1991: 41). Weaving is of enormous importance to Isluga people, and good weavers receive much acclaim. In fact, girls may express a wish to discontinue their schooling beyond the obligatory age of twelve in order ‘to herd and weave’.


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Figure 8.4 A blanket woven in 1996 by Soria Mamani Challapa, Isluga, Chile (Photo: P. Dransart)

An interesting aspect of women’s weaving is their reluctance to adopt European techniques. Their menfolk traditionally used a European treadle loom to weave bayeta yardage, and when this type of weaving fell into disuse, in more recent years they have turned to knitting caps and jumpers for themselves. Women are more committed to maintaining continuity in textile production, and they produce surplus items that they then hope to sell. They make few concessions to purchasers of their products. One of the most significant changes is in the case of a type of bag, termed wayaqa, which is used for storing food. For Aymara use it does not have a carrying handle; instead a cord attached to one side of the bag is wrapped tightly round the opening to close it. If Isluga women wish to sell such bags, they weave a strap handle so that Westerners may use them as shoulder bags. Small bags designed for women’s own use for carrying ritually important coca leaves do not have a handle either. These little pouches, wistalla, have the top turned

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down to stop the contents from falling out. These Aymara bags are much more like pre-Inka bags known from archaeological sites than Inka-style bags, which curiously are equipped with the shoulder straps that would have conformed to modern European usage. The concept of ‘Spanish thread on Indian looms’ is a graphic metaphor that demonstrates the connectedness of different traditions. Isluga women continue to use the four-stake loom, which looks little more than a collection of rods and stakes until the parts are held together by the warp thread. Much of their weaving exploits the natural colours of alpaca and llama fleece, which they spin from their own animals. Different qualities of yarn are produced for different needs; yarn with loose tension is designed for the weft, or for the coarse warp of soft blankets known as chusi (Figure 8.5), while yarn with tight tension is employed in weaving most other types of cloth. In short, both the raw fleece and the yarns encompass a world of Isluga values that express specific cultural practices, the ideological aspects of herding animals, and the aesthetic values of the people who herd and weave (Dransart 1995: 239). Yet Isluga women also buy synthetic yarns from the Bolivian market to extend the range of colours in their weaving. At first they used aniline dyes to dye yarn spun from sheep fleece, but now they tend to prefer brightly hued synthetic yarns (Dransart 1988: 47). Synthetic yarns available in the Bolivian market are designed to be knitted, not woven. In order to use them as warp threads, Isluga women must first overply such yarns using the traditional drop spindle. This gives the yarn the tension that is necessary to produce warp-faced cloth on the Andean four-stake loom. Thus foreign yarns are incorporated into the weavings along with Aymara yarns to express an Aymara aesthetic in the form of traditional garments, bags and blankets. These are the products that Isluga women are attempting to sell to passing tourists. They also may sell items through a craft fair held before Christmas in the capital of Chile, Santiago, which is a considerable distance from Isluga. Weavers are finding that gaining access to tourists and maintaining some control over the sale of their work is not easy.


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Figure 8.5 Chusi blanket woven in 1995 by Soria Mamani Challapa, Isluga, Chile (Photo: P. Dransart)

The contrasts and similarities between women’s commercialisation of their handicraft by the Cuna of Panama and the Islugueños of Chile are clear. Karen Tice demonstrated that, for Cuna women, the wearing of mola is an important symbol of their right to self-determination, and this is the outcome of historical circumstances in which they were forced to wear Western clothes before a revolt by the Cuna people in 1925 (Tice 1995: 61–2).6 Isluga women, in contrast, have been wearing an ancient style of Andean dress of a type similar to that worn by Inka women (Dransart 1992: 146), with accessories such as the coca pouch that are pre-Inkaic in character. With the large quantities of Westernstyle garments flooding into the Andes, they are no longer so keen to wear their traditional clothing. In the 1980s I observed women wearing their Isluga identity daily, but in the late 1990s it is rare that a woman should don such garments unless it is for certain festivals. They object to presenting their ethnic ‘otherness’ to the tourist gaze, and, apart from children, women of all ages particularly object to being photographed.

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In the process of globalisation, Cuna women have developed a nontraditional form of appliqué embroidery (mola) to form the garments that express their ethnic identity. Tice’s study showed that they do not, however, maintain their identity through making traditional clothing for sale. Although there are problems in marketing mola panels to tourists in a consistent, reliable manner, they have achieved worldwide recognition for their work. In contrast, Isluga women retain their commitment to weaving according to Andean forms and standards, but they still aspire to achieving worldwide visibility. Whereas old Aymara weavings have been targeted by specialist collectors as ‘fine art’, the loom products of contemporary Isluga women are more often than not perceived to be craft items. Paradoxically, Islugueños do not charge much for selling heirloom textiles to outsiders, as the owners of heirlooms do not have to account for the costs of making the object. In other words, they value their time and labour in making an object as much as the finished item itself. The ability of Islugueños to promote their work to outsiders, some of whom may be more open to buying their work than others, may well prove to depend on the Islugueños developing their skills in distinguishing which visitors to their territory are most likely to purchase contemporary textiles. In an interconnected world there is also a role for anthropologists and art historians to contribute towards enhancing knowledge of the work of native peoples, such as the Aymara of Isluga, among tourists. As Morphy points out in Chapter 7, the process of developing an understanding and appreciation of such art acts alongside its engagement with global art worlds and markets. The increased awareness and appreciation that can result from studies that place people’s lives in a socio-historical and cultural context may form the basis for a social climate that is conducive to local economic empowerment in this arena.


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Dance workshop in performance

9 Past and Future Pathways: Innu Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-first Century STEPHEN LORING

AND

DANIEL ASHINI

A

t the end of the twentieth century of the Christian calendar, the world has become an itinerant landscape, an interconnected world wherein people traverse great distances, even continents and oceans, with an ease unimaginable 50 years ago. We find it ironic that the descendants of some of history’s greatest vagabonds, the pioneering populations out of Asia that reached the Australian continent more than 40 000 years ago, and North and South America about 15 000 years ago, have, as a legacy of Western colonial perceptions, come to be thought of as cultural fossils, frozen in time as it were, near the origins of our human heritage and history. The Innu (the Montagnais-Naskapi) are the Indigenous Indian people of northeasternmost Canada (Figure 9.1). Today they comprise some 16 000 people living in widely scattered villages in central Labrador and along the north shore of the St Lawrence River. Before the establishment of residential communities in the later half of this century, the Innu lived as small cooperative bands pursuing a hunting167

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Figure 9.1 Map of Nitassinan and the Quebec–Labrador peninsula, with places mentioned in the text. Cartography by Daniel Chase, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

fishing subsistence lifestyle from seasonally occupied camps scattered throughout the interior of Nitassinan (the Quebec–Labrador peninsula). The Innu have always respected great travellers. One of the few ways individuals had to acquire prestige was by feats of rapid journeying (Leacock and Rothschild 1994: 204–5; Henriksen 1973: 21–4). Hunters and their families traversed epic distances in their search for food while their shamans followed trails to the world of the animal masters. The Innu trails, some more tangible than others, criss-cross all of Nitassinan. In this chapter we focus on the role of archaeology in contemporary Innu society, exploring how trails leading back to the past are anchored in the present and lead to the future. For the Innu, the past has always

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been the purview of elders whose knowledge of resources and placenames have filled the vast expanse of Nitassinan with stories and history. Yet for younger Innu growing up in village communities, access to the land and to the past has been restricted. We examine the way we have come to think about our perceptions of Innu history and how the past (in its local context) has been and can be used to shape Innu identity and their participation in a contemporary world forum. In the last 50 years, encouraged by federal and provincial authorities, the coercion of the oblate priest, and by their own concerns for economic and medical assistance, the Innu have gravitated towards village life (Henriksen 1973; Mailhot 1997). At first, village life seemed attractive; the benefits in education and health services were substantial. But village life exacted a terrible toll in social and economic upheavals, which have traumatised communities. The loss of self-determination coupled with the emergence of a welfare-dependent society divorced a generation of Innu young people from the spiritual and subsistence bonds that had previously defined social relationships and land use. Massive hydro-electric development and military use of their homeland as a low-level flying range for NATO armed forces have severely compromised the integrity of traditional Innu lands—lands for which they have never received compensation, nor for that matter even been allowed a voice in the decision-making process (Mailhot 1987; Wadden 1991). The announcement of the ‘discovery’ of a tremendous mineral deposit (nickel–copper–cobalt) at Emish (Voisey’s Bay) in 1994 resulted in an explosive rush to stake mineral claims throughout nearly the whole of traditional Innu and Inuit lands (Ashini 1995; Lowe 1998). The grand scale of industrial development and the accompanying infrastructure (roads, company towns, airfields and ports) threatens to overwhelm Innu access to and control of their land. Speaking at a conference on Aboriginal People and Mining in November 1995, Peter Penashue, president of the Innu Nation, summed up the Innu position (Penashue 1995): Innu have never recognized the jurisdictions that now claim us. We have never signed a treaty, nor ceded a square inch of our land.

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In the past these things were not necessary, as it was possible for Innu and akenishau people [‘Whites’] to share the land and its resources. But today, we are being forced to deal with governments, companies and individuals who are trying to push us aside in their rush to claim this land as their own for industrial development.

Throughout the North, it has been less than 50 years since economic, political and technological developments have enabled business and government to radically develop the lands and resources. Development, contingent on resolution of land claims, has always taken place in a crisis atmosphere hardly conducive to thoughtful consideration of future consequences; examples include the struggle between Hydro-Quebec and the Cree, which resulted in the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975 (McCutcheon 1991), and in Alaska in 1971 with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act paving the way for development of Alaska’s oil resources (Arnold 1978). In challenging Canadian government and private corporation policies that have sought to ignore, bypass, and circumvent legitimate Innu claims to their land, the Innu have undertaken extraordinary measures including civil protest to publicise and give voice to their concerns. With such formidable corporate and government opposition arrayed against them, the Innu have turned to the court of world opinion to find allies in the public sector who might be mobilised to direct pressure against such pro-development forces. In this climate of confrontation, young Innu leaders have aggressively sought ways to convey the Innu perspective and position to the world. Through journalism, film, public policy forums, and now increasingly through the World Wide Web, the Innu have sought to bring their struggle to a larger audience.1 Central to the discussions between the Innu and the government has been the question of Innu identity and the role that perceptions of the past play in structuring identity.


INNU

171

IDENTITY

On the one hand, Innu identity is a moot question. In Utshimassit (Davis Inlet) and in Sheshatshiu (the principal Innu communities in Labrador), the Innu know who they are: ‘We are The People.’ There are kinship and obligation networks that extend across the Quebec–Labrador peninsula. There are placenames (stories and history) that saturate the featureless mazes of water and taiga covering the interior of the country that Jacques Cartier called ‘the land that God gave Cain’ (Cartier 1598; Biggar 1926). Stories and spiritual beliefs link places to peoples and the past to the present. Intimate knowledge of the land is a basic tenet of Innu identity. There is evidence from oral history (Innu Nation 1992, 1993), exploration and anthropological narratives (Cabot 1920; Leacock and Rothschild 1994; Tanner 1944), and archaeology (Loring 1992) that the Innu have long possessed social strategies that have facilitated vast networks of exchange. One aspect of the Innu respect for travellers is that detailed information gained through interregional social interaction provided a crucial hedge against lapses in local resource availability. Although band territorial maps figure significantly in mid-century ethnographic studies of the Innu (Speck 1931, 1935), they are essentially the construct of anthropologists and are based on the distribution of Hudson Bay Company trading posts. The Innu observed no boundaries to their travel in Nitassinan. Arguably, this has been the case for at least the last 8000 years, ever since the Innu ancestors, called the Maritime Archaic Indians by archaeologists, first entered the country after the glacial retreat. Travel has always been a corollary of information, a means to acquire and obtain knowledge about resources, knowledge that was passed down by the elders. There are two factors that make this question, Who are the Innu?, more germane. First, the elders are dying, and with them goes a knowledge and a language and a spiritual/moral philosophy that is at the core of Innu identity. The Innu Nation and the Innu Cultural Centre, and a small cadre of allied professionals (anthropologists, historians, linguists) have been seeking ways to preserve some fragments of this

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worldview. Second, the encroachment of national and provincial policies have set their agenda on Innu land: rivers have been dammed, NATO airforces fly low, and now a huge scheme of industrial mining development threatens native hegemony over the land and its resources. Hence the Innu, along with the other native peoples in Labrador, the Inuit and Metis, are forced to negotiate for settlement of land claims. Part of the peculiar workings of Western logic, as it pertains to land ownership and usufruct rights, has to do with matters of land tenure and use through time. Not relying exclusively on the word of natives who have lived there for generations, courts and governing bodies have turned to archaeology to provide ‘hard’ evidence of past land use and determination of people’s identities through time. In Labrador, as throughout much of the circumpolar north, the continuity between extant land-based hunting and fishing communities and their ethnohistoric predecessors is particularly strong. Unlike some Native American groups elsewhere, northern communities remain land-based, and dependent on subsistence strategies. Their ideologies feature a special reverence for elders and an equally strong respect for the animals hunted. In the cycle of northern life, of life in the bush, the past is all about; it is an integral feature of the present, not a distant abstraction. For the Innu, the past is mainly constructed from stories and memories; the tangible remains of former times (the stone tools, hearths and tent-rings so dear to archaeologists) serve mostly a mnemonic function. There is a cyclical aspect of northern worlds, derived from the seasonal round of movements in anticipation of the availability of prey species, which lacks the linear approach of archaeological and government administrative logic.

THE INNU

OF ETHNOHISTORY

The official correspondence of nineteenth-century Hudson Bay Company officials stationed in northern Labrador consistently laments the stubbornness of the Indians, their ‘tiresome independence’ (Cooke 1979). For many years, the Innu’s fierce passion for their land and for


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their caribou-hunting way of life effectively resisted Company endeavours to incorporate them into their economic hegemony. The Innu were the quintessential northern hunters of caribou. Lords of the wilderness, ‘princes and princesses of ragged fame’ (McKenzie 1960), unshackled by community, economic, or ecclesiastical bonds, they wandered at will across the uncharted wastelands, popping up at the Hudson Bay posts on Ungava one year and at the Quebec North Shore the next. Labrador attracted a lot of attention in the early part of this century, in part because of some notorious lost explorers, one of whom starved to death trying to find the Innu at their autumn caribou hunting grounds (Davidson and Rugge 1988). Boas referred to it as a ‘northern marginal area’ where he thought was to be found ‘the older type of Algonquin culture’, a region of cultural stasis and stagnation (Boas 1910: 529–32). Frank Speck, ever one ready to disregard evidence of culture change for the surviving vestiges of ‘traditional’ culture, revered the Innu as the ‘Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula’ (Speck 1935). Planning to spend the winter of 1927–28 with them, William Duncan Strong (Anon. 1928: 173) described them as ‘the most primitive of extant peoples . . . reported to be surly and untrustworthy and disinclined to welcome white intruders’. The linking of the pejorative term ‘Naskapi’ with primitives has a long tenure in Labrador. In her review of ethnohistorical documents, Mailhot (1986) convincingly demonstrated how Europeans have consistently used the term ‘Naskapi’ for the Indian groups in the Quebec–Labrador peninsula who were not tied by commercial and ecclesiastical constraints to coastal communities under the auspices of colonial authorities. Here are the ‘good Indians’, the Montagnais villagers; beyond the horizon stand the ‘Naskapi’ with their incorrigible wandering and their heathen ways.

THE INNU

ACCORDING TO ARCHAEOLOGY

To the Western science of archaeology, Labrador remained essentially terra incognita before research launched by William Fitzhugh in the

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late 1960s. Fitzhugh (1972, 1978) provided the basic prehistoric cultural sequence for the region, revealing a complex history of alternating and sometimes overlapping Indian and Inuit cultures extending back approximately 8000 years. The prehistoric sequence of Indian occupations was divided into three broad cultural patterns based on chronology, distinct subsistence strategies, stone-tool traditions, rawmaterial preferences and interregional cultural relationships. Building on this framework and adopting a direct-historical approach, Loring (1988, 1992) focused on the late prehistoric–early historic period of Indian occupations to reveal the archaeological remains of the ‘Innu ancestors’. This archaeological research reflects the dynamism of Innu culture, which has repeatedly had to adjust to the challenges posed by competition for their resource base by non-Innu peoples. These included Paleo-eskimo Dorset people, Vikings (Innu arrowheads have been found in Greenland), expanding Neo-eskimo populations responding to the presence of European whalers in the Strait of Belle Isle, and eventually the full spectrum of colonial powers exploiting the resources and seeking domination over formerly sovereign Labrador. Archaeological research results pertaining to Innu ancestors can be characterised in three ways (Fitzhugh 1978; Loring 1988, 1992). First of all, archaeology independently confirms what the Innu knew: that the Innu and ‘Innu ancestors’ enjoyed a long tenure in Labrador stretching back at least 2000 years and possibly much earlier; that the Innu had a long history of inter-ethnic confrontation (with Dorset and Thule Eskimos, with the Inuit people of Labrador, and with Europeans including eleventh-century Norse and sixteenth-century Basque, French and English fishers before sustained contact with Europeans in the eighteenth century); and that respect for animals has always been an integral feature of Innu culture. Second, archaeology has contributed to an elaboration of Innu perceptions in that pre-contact Innu populations participated in a dynamic sphere of cultural interaction with trade and communication networks throughout the Maritime Provinces and the Far Northeast. Finally, archaeology offers perceptions of Innu history not generally recognised by the Innu. Specifically, archaeology critiques ethnohistorical accounts of the tenure of the


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specialised caribou-hunting adaptation (Loring 1997) in that fieldwork has failed to find any indication of a sustained caribou-hunting adaptation before the eighteenth century (Samson 1975, 1978, 1983). Rather, it is suggested that this adaptation, which was observed in the interior during the nineteenth century, resulted from the displacement of the Innu from the coast and from coastal resources by expanding Neoeskimo populations, coupled with a cyclical upswing in the size of the George River caribou herd. It should be noted that this conclusion is at variance with Innu beliefs about the supremacy of caribou in their construction of their past identity.

THE INNU

A C C O R D I N G T O T H E M S E LV E S

Innu perceptions of their heritage and the land are predicated on the realisation that it is their land and always has been. Western expressions of land ownership and tenure, mired in a materialist-legal paradigm, do not do justice to Innu spiritual values and philosophy, which are rooted to their relationship to the land. To the Innu, their land, the ‘country’ (Vincent and Mailhot 1983: 21, quoted by Armitage 1990: 120) is ‘the root of the culture. It is here that the world-view and the philosophical concepts which are part of the [Innu] intellectual culture, were formulated. [It is] by living in this land [that] people learned to define themselves and to define their relationship with others’. Their knowledge of the land is intimate and expansive. This land has never been ceded; Innu title stems from first occupancy. The Innu perspective of land is based on the belief of reciprocity that is partially conveyed through the Innu-aimun word kanauenitam, which Armitage (1990: 119) has interpreted as ‘equivalent to the concept of stewardship; it is used to convey the idea of taking care of something, or watching over it, preserving or conserving it’. If the land is cared for, the land will provide. Offend the land, offend the things that live on the land, and the spirit masters that influence the coming and going of the animals will send their wards elsewhere. Some elders believe that the decline in the caribou herds that occurred after about

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1915 can be directly attributed to the careless handling of caribou bones and antlers (Leacock and Rothschild 1994: 116).2 For many Innu, hunting is a holy occupation. Although the Innu have a long and close association to the Catholic Church that dates back to the seventeenth century, some continue to incorporate traditional beliefs pertinent to the land and to hunting, beliefs and behaviours that are only learned in the countryside. ‘The Innu need the land and the animals in order to be religious; without it they have no outlet for their religious expression, no food for this form of symbolic thought and practice’ (Armitage 1990: 125). A central tenet of the Innu philosophy is the concept of ‘respect’ (Henriksen 1977: 8): ‘a hunter does not kill an animal against its will, but with its consent . . . as long as the animals and their spiritual masters are not offended, they will continue to live in peace with each other and with nature.’ Innu hunters believed that game animals would give themselves to respectful hunters. The intentions of the animals could be discerned by dreaming and divination. In the old days, shamans would seek spiritual guidance and knowledge from the shaking tent (kushapatshikan). Isolated within a caribou-skin lodge that had been tightly staked to the ground and sealed, the shaman would enter a trance in order to commune with the spirit world. Onlookers often heard strange sounds and observed the tent to move in strange gyrations as the shaman conversed with spiritual entities. While many of the Innu spiritual beliefs pertaining to their relationships between animals, the animal masters (the guardian spirits that look after the animals), and human beings are intensely personal and private, respect for the animals is apparent in communal activities as well. Innu hunters (male and female) have responsibilities to their community to share the proceeds of the hunt. Just as the animals give themselves to worthy hunters, hunters must share the game they capture with the rest of the camp, especially with the elders. The relationship between sharing and ritual is epitomised by the mokoshan (the ‘eat-all’ feast) in which a successful hunt culminates (Henriksen 1973). The vitality of Innu culture is not always evident from the visible elements of modern community life. Many of the core values of Innu


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culture are not apparent in the villages, divorced as these are from the land and the relationships between individuals, groups and the land that are experienced in the country. In the country, placenames and stories evoke narratives and mythology to create a richly textured landscape overlaid with meaning and history. In the country the Innu are competent, self-reliant and independent; they walk in the footsteps of their ancestors. Life in the village is different. It is only relatively recently that the Innu have been lured to and compelled to dwell in permanent villages. There are few paths to follow. Government services, subsidies, schooling and health services, regardless of how well intentioned, have proved a tragic failure. Many Innu young people, denied the knowledge and opportunities of their forefathers, have lost their self-esteem and are made to feel that their culture, their traditions and history are outmoded. A devastating example of the tragedy of village life that comes as a consequence of the loss of self-esteem and self-determination was played out in Utshimassit between 1992 and 1993.

THE ‘TRAGEDY’

OF

U T S H I M A S S I T (D AV I S I N L E T )

On 14 February 1992, six children died in a tragic house fire in Utshimassit. With no fire-fighting equipment in the community, people were powerless to fight the fire or save the children. The community was traumatised by the fire. After years of chronic unemployment, government neglect and inadequate social services, all of which served to erode Innu control over their lives and their destiny, it seemed that a nadir had been reached. One year later, on the anniversary of the tragedy, a native constable forced his way into an abandoned trailer where six children had joined in a suicide pact. They had filled plastic bags with gasoline in order to inhale the fumes. Two of the children were unconscious. Heroic measures were initiated to save the children, and overnight the community was transfixed by world media spotlights. Davis Inlet,

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which had previously languished in quiet ignominy, was suddenly catapulted into the Canadian consciousness. The international press was not long in sniffing out the sordid story, elevating Davis Inlet to the status of an international embarrassment. Davis Inlet had become a bizarre media event. The images of village poverty and squalor, carefully selected for their most sensational graphic quality, were flashed across television screens and in the print media. The journalists created a lurid picture of the community that was nearly completely devoid of any historical or cultural perspective. The journalists’ video and photography sought out village poverty and dished it out as so much pornography for the titillation of distant voyeurs. The list of tragedies to befall Utshimassit are familiar ones in communities throughout the North when confronted with the loss of traditional subsistence activities and land use (Shkilnyk 1985; Young 1992; Tester and Kulchyski 1994). The social disruption, community disintegration and despair that characterised the recent history of Davis Inlet has its roots in the policy of Canadian federal and provincial government intervention. Innu leaders recognised that the source of the community’s problems lay in material and spiritual poverty summarised by Peter Penashue: ‘For kids growing-up there is no self-esteem, no pride in our culture’ (Scott 1993).3 Having lost the trail left by their ancestors, Innu educators and community leaders have grappled with the question of how to instil pride in Innu history and accomplishments and an awareness of Innu values in the face of tragedy and village poverty.

‘C O M M U N I T Y

ARCHAEOLOGY’ AND THE

INNU

With few exceptions, the practice of archaeology (especially in the North) has not paid much attention to the concerns and interests of the native communities that were in the vicinity of ‘digs’. Archaeological research was done by visitors from the South, who took the results of their work south and produced a product—a literature—that was directed at academic audiences in the South. Sustained archaeological


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interest in Labrador follows by a decade the advent of village life. Despite the potential of ethno-archaeological research and insights gained from oral traditions, archaeologists at first ignored native interests as they sought to construct their vision of the past. For the Innu, the past has a continuity not inherently recognised by archaeologists. It is the purview of community elders whose knowledge, conveyed in stories and songs, in a language no archaeologist has yet endeavoured to learn, is a priceless and ever-diminishing library. Today, with the dominance of village life over life in the country, and education more in the hands of city-born, university-trained teachers instead of elders, Innu young people are exposed to little, if any, material pertinent to their history. A school curriculum that presents Canadian history as beginning with the voyages of Cartier and Cabot is an insult to First Nations communities and directly contributes to the lost of self-esteem and pride in the accomplishments of their forebears. The Innu fear the loss of their culture, their land and their language. In the past five years or so, an increased interest in archaeology among Innu leaders has grown with an increased recognition of the potential role that archaeology could play in land-claim negotiations. This convergence of archaeology and the politicisation of the Innu is arguably the most interesting and dynamic aspect of archaeology in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador today. It confronts the postcolonial assumption that the ‘expertise’ of an academically trained ‘scientist’, supported by materialist ‘evidence’ in the form of ancient stone tools and radiocarbon dates, has more validity than the testimony of Innu elders with their legacy of oral traditions, history and personal experiences. A recent initiative by the Innu Nation, Innu Resource Centre and the Smithsonian Institution sought to address the interest and needs of the Innu community in exploring their ancient land tenure. The research did not so much seek a concordance of the past as to empower people with the relevance and authority that control of the past conveys, especially in light of the usurpation of Innu control over their land by government. It recognises that the labels used by archaeologists

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are offensive to some Innu and that archaeological logic is a Western ‘scientific’ paradigm that, while valid, should not seek to continue imperialistic, colonialistic attitudes at variance with local knowledge, thoughts and beliefs.

T H E P AT H W AY S P R O J E C T Ironically, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington is an important repository for the study of Innu history and culture materials, with collections dating back to 1881. Smithsonian archaeologists have figured significantly in unravelling the prehistory of the peninsula. During the summer of 1993, consultation between the Innu Cultural Centre in Sheshatshiu and the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian led to an experimental research project in Labrador. In addition to contributing to the knowledge of former Innu lifestyles, the Pathways Project sought to provide training for a generation of land managers able to articulate Innu needs with government bureaucracies and administration, and to instil in young people knowledge about the past accomplishments of the Innu and foster Innu pride. An essential feature of Pathways was the integration of instruction on Labrador and Innu prehistory and training about archaeology with the knowledge, wisdom and skills of participating elders. The Pathways Project was the first archaeological research in Nitassinan to receive an excavation permit from the Innu Nation, this in addition to the permit issued by the government of Newfoundland– Labrador, Division of Historic Resources. By issuing their own permits, Innu policy-makers signalled to the profession and to government that they expected to be both an integral component of land-use decisionmaking processes and actively involved in the construction of their history. The Pathways Project was based out of the Innu community of Sheshatshiu near the head of Hamilton Inlet. The project commenced the first week of September 1993 with three weeks of classroom training in archaeological methods and theory and Labrador prehistory. Elders from the community, who were intimate with the


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country targeted for fieldwork, were invited to the classroom and spent afternoons with maps spread out over the floor talking with the students about past journeys, placenames, the availability of fish and game, and features of the land. With the conclusion of the classroom instruction, the team prepared to go into the country. Eventually everybody was loaded into a pair of boats, and we proceeded out across Grand Lake to the mouth of the Naskaupi River some 70 kilometres away. Approximately 20 kilometres up the river, at an embayment just below the first long set of rapids, was the old Innu camping place at Amitshuakant (FlCf-1 in the national alpha-numeric archaeological site registration system of Canada). This camping place marked the beginning of an ancient Innu portage route that led to Seal Lake, whence the Innu used to travel on to now flooded Michikamau and from there north to Ungava, west to Hudson Bay, and south to the Quebec North Shore (Figure 9.2). Although unmarked on any printed atlas, Amitshuakant was a major crossroads for the Innu in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a point from which families departed to the furthest corners of Nitassinan. The team spent a month in the country at Amitshuakant before the onset of autumnal snows and freezing temperatures brought an end to the digging season. Excavations focused on a pair of tent structures and adjacent activity areas from which were recovered a wide array of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artefacts, including hunting and fishing paraphernalia, tobacco-related products, knives, cookware, medicine containers, molasses jugs, combs, beads and coins. But the time at Amitshuakant was not entirely an exercise in showing how visiting archaeologists practise their profession. It was an opportunity to incorporate Innu values and perspectives into a construction of history, and an opportunity to expose Innu young people to the realities of life in the bush. We were accompanied by Louis and Marie Penashue and their infant grandson. In the evening, everyone had the opportunity to accompany the Penashues while they attended to their nets and snares, hunted for moose and bear, and prepared food. Later, as autumn nights lengthened, everyone gathered in tents to listen

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Image Not Available

Figure 9.2 An Innu hunter and his daughter on the portage trail that begins at Amitshuakant, 1921. (Photo: William Brooks Cabot, Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, 1921–24)

to stories about the old days, about starvation times, and of extraordinary journeys by snowshoe and canoe. One night, in response to a question, Mr Penashue began an account of a time when, as a young man, he and his family had come across the trail to Amitshuakant in desperate circumstances: ‘In the old days, everybody lived in nutshimit [“the country”] and everything was fine, except for starvation. The food would run out and that is when the problems started.’ His harrowing account of a mid-winter journey with the life of his family dependent on his finding food said far more about the essence of Innu life than all the scattered artefacts we had recovered. At the conclusion of the field season, the team returned to Sheshatshiu where an inventory was made of the collection and a dis-


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play and presentation to the community was prepared by the project participants (Figure 9.3). Subsequently Loring (n.d.) prepared for publication a descriptive report on the excavation. Initiatives like the Pathways Project promise an exciting future for archaeology in three ways: by liberating it from the exclusive confines of the academy, and thereby creating a product that has meaning for both anthropologists and for the host communities; by celebrating a multivocal past that addresses social and political agendas; and by embracing both humanist and scientific perspectives. It also signalled the advent of Innu community activism pertaining to archaeology and other heritage issues. The following year saw Innu leaders directly involved in the preliminary negotiations and in the environmental (and heritage!) assessments mandated by plans to move the community of Davis Inlet to a new location in Sango Bay. Students trained during

Image Not Available

Figure 9.3 Innu students at Pathways training program at Amitshuakant, Nitassinan, 1993. Left to right, back to front: Dominic Rich, Sylvester Antuan, Dominic Penunsi, Edwina Jack, Richard Abraham, Kathleen Penashue, Richard Nuna, Edmund Benuen. (Photo: Stephen Loring)

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the Pathways Project were among those hired to participate in the archaeological survey of the area proposed for construction of the new settlement.

THE

ARCHAEOLOGY OF A DROWNED LAND

In 1966, planning began with the aim of developing the hydro-electric potential of the interior of Labrador by diverting the waters of the Grand Falls on the upper Churchill River. By far the largest hydroelectric project of its day, the resulting Churchill Falls project drastically altered the drainage patterns of the interior of Labrador. Dam and dyke construction between 1969 and 1972 resulted in the diverting of the headwaters of rivers used intensively by Innu families on their way to traditional camping places along the shores of Lake Michikamau. Michikamau, the largest lake in the Labrador interior, which served as a rendezvous for Innu families scattered across the whole of northern Quebec and Labrador, was itself completely drowned under the rising waters of the Smallwood Reservoir. This massive hydro-electric development was completed before any federal legislation with mandatory requirements for assessment of potential environmental and cultural impacts. As a consequence, no consideration was given to the loss of traditional Innu use of the region or to the effects on old Innu burial places, sacred sites and places of spiritual and mythological significance. All were inundated. Before dam construction, a narrow stretch of boulder-strewn rapids connected Lake Michikamats (Mishikamiss) to the northern end of Michikamau. From Michikamiss it was a short portage through low muskeg ground to a lake at the headwaters of the George River. The Michikamau–Michikamiss–George River trail was a major travel route for the Innu throughout the nineteenth century as small Innu bands journeyed between the Hudson Bay Company posts in the Labrador interior, Quebec North Shore, Hamilton Inlet, and Ungava Bay. An intrepid explorer, Mina Hubbard, with a small party, passed through here in 1905 on her way to become the first non-Innu to descend the


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George River (Hubbard 1908; Davidson and Rugge 1988). Hubbard described in some detail the natural beauty of the lake region she traversed and the remains of recently abandoned Innu camping places and burial grounds. A desire to augment testimony by Innu elders, and to determine if there were any surviving traces of historic and prehistoric land use of the region, prompted Innu leaders to embark upon a small-scale research initiative in the northern area of the Smallwood Reservoir adjacent to the drowned shoreline of Michikamiss in August 1995. The Michikamiss survey represents the first archaeological research initiated and sponsored by the Innu Nation. The research team was led by Daniel Ashini, then director of Innu Rights and Environment.4 Diminished amounts of snow cover during the preceding several winters had resulted in an unexpectedly low reservoir level. In fact the shoreline exposed by the low water very closely approximated the original lake shores before reservoir construction. The fluctuating levels had created a ‘dead zone’, a band of drowned forest vegetation that formed a tangled maze of logs and stumps between the shore and the living forest as much as 100 metres wide. Since most historical sites were located close to the edge of the lake, the low water levels greatly facilitated our finding historic and prehistoric sites, all of which were situated beneath normal reservoir water levels. Nearly everywhere the team surveyed, traces of prehistoric sites (dating to c. 3500 to 2500 BP) and historic nineteenth- and twentiethcentury camping places were encountered (Figure 9.4) testifying to the long tenure of this region by Innu families and their ancestors (Loring, McCaffrey, Armitage and Ashini n.d.). At the base of a prominent esker, Dominic Pokune picked up a few small fragments of weathered bone which he puzzled over. They were not caribou, not bear. Climbing up the exposed face of the esker, he found a human skull in situ, the last portion of a skeleton remaining after all else had tumbled into the reservoir. When she passed by this knoll in 1905, Mina Hubbard had remarked on the presence of a small Innu cemetery containing a number of carefully tended graves (Hubbard 1908: 127). Erosion produced by the fluctuating water levels had resulted in the

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Image Not Available

Figure 9.4 Charles Pokune searches for caribou from top of ‘Signal Hill’ where, more than a hundred years ago, Innu hunters had built a low rock structure, possibly a windbreak or blind or a cache. The view is the west-southwest over the northern end of Michikamiss. An ancient Innu travel route from central Nitassinan to the George River is situated at the base of the hill. (Photo: Stephen Loring)

complete destruction of this burial ground. The survey team carefully gathered and reburied the exposed human remains on the hillside behind the knoll. The Michikamiss Survey provided further evidence for the pervasiveness of land use by the immediate ancestors of community residents in Utshimassit and Sheshatshiu. In the interior of Nitassinan their campsites, caches, burial places and trails are everywhere! The recovery of prehistoric assemblages attributable to late prehistoric Indian cultures (c. 1000 to 1200 BP) and even earlier ‘Intermediate Period’ cultures (c. 3500 to 2500 BP) testify to the extraordinary legacy of Innu ancestral title to land. The survey also signalled the concern of Innu leaders for the consequences of the economic development of lands and resources that had long been used by the Innu people but


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for which they have never received compensation or any consideration. At the time of the reservoir construction, Innu families returned to summer fishing camps to find them completely inundated, all their cached supplies and equipment destroyed, with never an apology or evidence of concern from government. The Michikamiss research observed and documented the extent of the environmental devastation wrought by the hydro-electric development. The growing concern of the Innu that they should participate as active players in matters pertaining to the ecology and history of their land is evidenced by their support of and participation in archaeological research. With the announcement of the Voisey’s Bay mineral strike in 1994, and its potential for economic development of the region, the state of negotiations with the region’s Indigenous peoples has attracted world attention. Economic development on a scale that dwarfs even the scope of the Smallwood Reservoir hydro-electric development is in the offing. Once again, the Innu are challenged for the possession of their traditional lands. After more than a decade of land-claim negotiations, federal and provincial authorities have yet to make a meaningful commitment to settlement. The spectre of massive industrial development of traditional Innu and Inuit lands will most likely force some sort of conclusion. The future of the Innu is linked to their past and to the land that has always been theirs. The future of the past in Nitassinan will include participation by Innu in all aspects of archaeological work as part of federally mandated environmental assessments and land-claim resolution.

CONCLUSION Indigenous peoples worldwide have had few options to resist successfully the political and economic forces arrayed against them over issues of land use and development. One of the few avenues available to them is public opinion. Geographically isolated and marginalised by mainstream society, Indigenous peoples frequently lack the financial and political resources to advance their claims. They have had to

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overcome tremendous difficulties to gain access to media attention. Over the last fifteen years, the Innu, in order to get a forum to air their grievances and advance the land-claim process, have waged a series of highly visible protest actions and taken their grievances to the world court at the Hague (Wadden 1991). With the publicity attending the incidents at Davis Inlet, Innu leaders became increasingly concerned with the validity of the image of Innu society and history that was being constructed by the media. One strategy to assert an Innu voice was the move by the Innu Nation to construct a site on the World Wide Web in order to provide information to public and private interest groups, including government agencies and Innu support groups worldwide. A significant portion of the Innu Web site is devoted to matters pertaining to Innu heritage. Rooted in a postcolonial scientific paradigm, the akaneshau (Whites), archaeologists in particular, have constructed their own perspective of Innu culture and origins. It is a perspective that has for the most part ignored or devalued Innu elders’ testimony. In the current climate of intense socio-political intrigue and confrontation—threatened by massive industrial development of their traditional homelands as a consequence of recent mineral discoveries—Innu now demand a voice in the construction of their heritage through archaeological and environmental impact assessment research, and through the World Wide Web. By such means the Innu take an active role in the construction and maintenance of their identity at the community level and their recognition at both national and international forums. The most obvious political aspect of archaeology in Nitassinan is its potential to contribute to land-claim negotiations. Demonstrating past land use has been an important feature of recent land-claim negotiations throughout the North, and archaeologists have compiled land-use and cultural chronological position papers in support of landclaim litigation (see, for example, McGhee 1976; Fitzhugh 1977; Jordan 1977). Archaeology serves as an adjunct to Innu Nation land-use documentation derived from oral traditions and mapping of former hunting camps and travel routes in providing a greater time-depth to Innu land tenure. While it is not surprising that the materialist logic


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of scientific archaeology is acceptable to government, it is disturbing when the testimony of elders whose intimate knowledge of the land and its history is not. Denied title to their land, are the Innu now to be denied their history? Archaeologists have been trained to interpret their data and observations in certain ways. The same was true for the Innu growing up in the country. Both systems of knowledge seek to explain past land use and behaviours. Yet there is no permanence to the past, no history of facts frozen in time, immutable and inflexible. The interpretation of the past is transitory and predicated on new discoveries and interpretations as well as changes in social and political initiatives and perspectives. To the degree that the past has been and can be manipulated to tell any number of stories, it is important that the descendants of the ancestors be invited to tell the story and that the rest of the world should listen. Across the circumpolar north, native groups are becoming empowered with the means to control research conducted on their land, and it is readily apparent that archaeology will have to adjust to these new conditions. Many northern peoples are interested in their distant past, yet their concerns are for the present as well, for elevating the destructive situations that can result in tragedies like that at Davis Inlet. To the degree that archaeology addresses these concerns, it may yet flourish in the North, but it will no longer be the exclusive province of southern academics. The receipt of an archaeology permit from the Innu Nation includes stipulations about hiring Innu students, making all research results available in a timely fashion to Innu authorities and Innu communities, and concludes with the request that archaeologists ‘be respectful of Innu culture and moral values’. Should anything less be expected?

Notes

1 Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples 1 The convention of using upper case for Indigenous is being used increasingly by Indigenous peoples to emphasise their existence as nationstates. We have followed this convention. 2 There is increasing understanding, by the researchers, research agencies, and the researched, of the impacts of research on Indigenous peoples, as evinced by the acceptance by researchers of ‘codes of research ethics’, the imposition by funding bodies of strict ethical guidelines, and the use by both researched and researchers of formal contractual arrangements to control research and use of the results of research (see, for example, Ward 1998).

2 Resources of Hope 1 Some Maori activists objected to the lack of contextualisation of the negative portrayal of Maori in the film, specifically the legacy of colonial policy that has been particularly destructive to family life. For example, in her essay ‘Repositioning Maori representation: Contextualising Once Were Warriors’, Leonie Pihama wrote (1996: 191–2): ‘The issues raised within the movie are not read in light of the wider context and experiences of colonisation and the impact of that upon Maori people. It is particularly interesting that criticism of Once Were Warriors was virtually silenced through the construction of what I refer to as “protection” discourses. 190

Notes

2

3

4

5

6

7

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These discourses presented criticism of the film as the ramblings of the politically correct or those wanting to sweep the issues under the mat, and therefore protected the movie from accusation that it perpetuated negative stereotypes.’ Obamsawim is continuing to produce films based on that event, two of which—My Name is Kahentilosta (1995) and Spudwrench—Kahnewake Man (1997a)—had their US and world premieres, respectively, at the 1997 Native American Film and Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. In the post-screening discussion, Obamsawim (1997b) remarked: ‘The best gun to have during the crisis at Oka was the camera. It is so important for us to document these images. Oka was a turning point in terms of native/government relations. It won’t be like it was before. Now people will protest. It’s up to us from the inside to be sure it’s documented. The outside world won’t do it for you. These events are covered by the press but they don’t know what’s going on. Some of our history has to get on the screen—that’s the most powerful place to be.’ This term was created by Arjun Appadurai (1990) as one of five ‘scapes’ of interaction that account for the current global cultural economy, in this case created by new media technologies and the images created with them. This communication came to me from Harald Prins, a colleague who works on Native American issues at the University of Kansas, who received it from someone in Hawaii. The book went into its second printing within a year and has been quoted favourably by Bill Clinton. During a visit to the Ford Foundation to discuss media policy with some officers of the foundation, it was clear that Barber’s book was being read as a kind of handbook for policymakers. The Center for Media, Culture, and History is an interdisciplinary centre at New York University that sponsors fellowships, conferences, seminars and screenings. It was established in 1992 with the support of a Rockefeller Humanities Center grant, as well as money from the UN Environmental Program to establish fellowships for people working on diaspora, Third World and Indigenous media. In the spring of 1995 Loretta Todd was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow and Sandy Osawa was a UN Media Fellow. I have been directing the Center, along with my associate Barbara Abrash, for the last five years. Some younger film-makers have established themselves in more mainstream venues, such as Maori independent film-maker Lee Tamahori, who has been working for Hollywood, and Aboriginal photographer and film-maker Tracey Moffat, who opened a major exhibition at the Dia Arts Center in New York City in 1997.

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3 From Clan Symbol to Ethnic Emblem 1 In deference to Aboriginal insistence that the names of these cults should not be spoken in public, I refer to them by their first letters.

4 Cyberspace Smoke Signals 1 Wannabes or wanabis is a generally derogatory term used by Indigenous peoples for those who want to be (hence, ‘wannabe’) Indigenous but are not. 2 Bulletin boards generally were set up as independent places for discussions or posting of announcements before the Internet became widely available. Users would use their modems to ‘dial up’ the bulletin board. Once the Internet and e-mail became popular, listservs largely replaced bulletin boards. On a listserv, users ‘subscribe’ to the list, usually a specialised topic of discussion. Users ‘post’ a comment, observation or opinion which is e-mailed to all subscribers for their consideration and/or response. Bulletin boards and listservs are asynchronous devices, that is, users post a message to which users may reply at different times. Some listservs, as with those of the NativeNet structure, used ‘threaded’ posts, that is, discussion around a specific topic or thread is kept together on the system, often archived for later viewing or research. Chat rooms are generally set up on the World Wide Web, and they may be asynchronous or synchronous, where a user’s comments are posted at once for response by other users who may be logged on at the same time. Many are threaded, but most are not. This technology is also changing with voice and video being added to the system. 3 This room is accessible by telnet to whip.isca.uiowa.edu. Log in as guest or if you wish an ID, apply for it following instructions. Hit J, then type 177 to go to the room. Once there, you will be directed to the room information or you can type ‘I’ and it will appear. 4 To ‘flame’ or ‘to be flamed’ in computer jargon is the online equivalent of yelling or screaming at someone with whom you disagree vehemently. 5 Meta-indexes are Web sites containing very large numbers of links to other sites. Topic, geographic area or other criteria, often with descriptions of sites or the categories used, usually accompany the Web links. Index sites collect and categorise smaller numbers of Web links, usually with little additional information. One might suggest that the term should be ‘meta-indices’, but ‘meta-indexes’ is the standard usage on the Web.

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5 History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures 1 Robinson’s account of 12 November 1830 (Plomley 1966: 272) states that there were 200 dogs in the Straits: ‘It was a singular sight to see the women return from the bird rookeries with their numerous dogs, most of them of a very large kind. I counted upwards of forty and was told there were fifty dogs there on this island, and at Woody Island there was ten, besides the herd of dogs the women have taken with them to Flinders I cannot suppose there can be less than 200 dogs in these straits, all of a large description. Most of these islands are infested with wild dogs. These dogs ought to be destroyed. From these men the natives have obtained a great many dogs. The natives have stole them when the boats have come to shore, and many instances have been of their purchasing a woman for a dog (the women are fond of their dogs, which they claim as their own, one woman from Woody Island wanted much to bring her Muckerreo dog in the boat).’ Also, Robinson (Plomley 1966: 570) counted 100 dogs with the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes at the Great Lakes on 31 December 1831. In fact there were so many dogs in Tasmania by 1830 that the Legislative Council unsuccessfully tried to pass a Dog Registration Act to apply to all dogs over six months (The Tasmanian Statutes: George IV #3 of 13 March 1830). But they only managed to pass the Impounding of Animals Act. The Colonial Times (18 December 1829) sardonically and revealingly queried the viability of enforcing a universal Dog Tax in Van Diemen’s Land: ‘Is the best mode of curing any evil connection with dogs that of legalizing it by a tax? If, however, a Dog Tax we are to have, we only wish its strong advocates may have the first appointments of Collectors; (of course at salaries within the compass of the revenue so raised;) they might perhaps do other good service in their collection visits to the Aboriginal part of His Majesty’s Van Diemen’s Land subjects’. This Dog Tax would surely have proved impossible to implement because the majority of dog-holders were Aboriginal people opposed to any colonial endeavours and, in fact, engaged in war against the Europeans. These dogs were considered to be an extension of their holders’ personality and by 19 June 1832 (Plomley 1966: 618) the Nine-ne people of Port Davey were cutting off the tails of their dogs as a distinguishing feature, and dogs were also quickly being incorporated into the belief systems and mythologies of my people. Robinson noted on 13 July 1834 that ‘the chief’s dog will not hunt; he is sure to return to the camp they say. His original master is dead and he has made him lazy, that he is a dead man’s dog’ (Plomley 1966: 900). Dances were invented that represented dogs, and a story circulated, recorded by Robinson, that ‘the natives near to Macquarie Harbour have a fierce dog that will seize a man

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4

5 6

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if he has on any clothes. They say I must therefore go without clothes’ (3 July 1832: Plomley 1966: 626). On 2 November 1830, Robinson remarked that he had ‘hoped to have found the natives by their dogs, but the tact these people have in quieting their dogs is truly surprising; they (in the Surrey Hills) had thirty dogs and we never heard the least noise of them until we approached them’ (Plomley 1966: 264). Tasmania is one inevitable disclaimer to the argument—we Tasmanians experienced at least 8000 years of isolation! (Robson 1983: 11). Durham also stated that ‘To play the role of the purified and uncontaminated “original Indian” is alien both to his memories and to his goals’ (Camnitzer 1989: 8). Further cultural insult exists in the ‘creator’s’ decision to base the ‘fertile family’ on Truganini and Woorrady, who although eventually ‘married’ in the eyes of G.A. Robinson, never had children together. Truganini remained childless, probably medically due to her long-term mistreatment by sealers and whalers. Truganini and King Billy (William Lanney) were also regarded as being ‘married’ in the imagination of the Tasmanian public, decades after Woorrady’s death—singularly due to Truganini and William Lanney being the last two ‘official’ survivors of the ‘race’. Arthur was Lieutenant-Governor from 13 May 1824 to 30 October 1836. Also Robinson (7 July 1831: Plomley 1966: 374): ‘The natives like the animals of the forest feed during the night as well as the day’; (1 July 1831: Plomley 1966: 368): ‘The people during the night lay rolled up like porcupines’. Peron, in 1802 (Bonwick 1884: 15), called an Aboriginal woman who approached his group a ‘fair one of the forest’. In 1835 Dutterau made plaster relief portraits of unnamed Aborigines to ‘collect’ the expressions of emotional states of Tasmanian Aborigines including cheerfulness, anger, surprise, suspicion, attention and incredulity. In 1860 Robert Dowling painted in London A Group of Natives of Tasmania (Art Gallery of South Australia) with thirteen Aborigines tightly grouped and relaxed in kangaroo skins, under a wilderness sunset (without any dogs!), at a time when Western clothing and confinement to Bass Strait or Oyster Cove was government policy. John Glover painted from his home ‘Patterdale’ in Northern Tasmania The Bath of Diana, Van Diemen’s Land in 1837 (National Gallery of Australia), which shows a group of lakeside Aborigines in an atmospheric yet tranquil primordial bathing scene. In this evocative setting one bathing Diana is centred between two figures (the only two with shadows out of nine people); one is holding a spear upwards, the other gesturing her out towards the centre of the calm (?) waters where a huge, fracturing monolith awaits.

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6 Indigenous Presence in the Sydney Games 1 The Republican debate recently moved into a new phase and Australians voted on this issue on 6 November 1999. The result was in the negative. 2 The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation has declared that the ‘primary focus of the reconciliation process has been on attitudinal change and in raising awareness of key issues which are central to achieving reconciliation and bringing about greater co-operation and communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians’ (ATSIC 1999). The Council organised a ‘Reconciliation Convention’ in Melbourne (26–28 May 1997), at which were discussed ongoing issues of native title, funding for Indigenous issues, Indigenous health and so on. That the Convention, and indeed the whole reconciliation process, was troubled was clear when rows of delegates literally turned their back on the Prime Minister’s qualified apology for earlier government policies that were responsible for Indigenous children being forcibly taken from their parents. 3 The Native Title debate is the most obvious manifestation of troubled race relations. 4 There are numerous sources of information about the continuing socioeconomic disadvantages experienced by Indigenous people in Australia. Two of the most comprehensive examples are the 1991 Royal Commission Report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the 1997 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. For briefer examples of Indigenous health issues see, for example, newspaper articles by Cleanness (1998) and Diapason (1998). 5 This is not to say that Indigenous peoples are incapable of cultural appropriation themselves; it is the same sort of issue if one Indigenous person or group ‘borrows’ the cultural property of another without permission and/or consultation. 6 These sorts of images arguably are open to a whole range of interpretations, not just those presented by Jakubowicz. For example, it may well be that an advertisement image of an Aboriginal person against a ‘traditional’ landscape acts to educate non-Indigenous people about Indigenous presence therein—and thus persuade them as to the logic and/or desirability of Indigenous land rights. 7 A case in point is Olympic merchandise, which will of course have the Olympic logo plastered all over it. It is set to fetch a fortune, with Olympic Games T-shirts at $39.95, Olympic pants at $190 and Olympic coffee mugs at $14.95. It would be a good thing if some of the profits on this merchandise were returned in some way to Indigenous peoples whose culture has contributed to the look of the merchandise.

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8 The author, Marlo Morgan, has prevaricated as to whether her ‘kidnapping’ by the ‘Real People’ of Australia actually occurred, but certainly in the preface of my copy of the book she insists it really happened. 9 One cannot always refer to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the same breath, for they are separate events with distinct charters, and many Olympic Organising Committees chose to maintain a high degree of separation between them. However, while there is a distinct Sydney Paralympic Games Organising Committee (SPOC), it has an ‘Operational Partnership’ with SOCOG, and SOCOG manages certain program areas on SPOC’s behalf. The ‘para’ in ‘Paralympic’ refers to ‘parallel’. The Paralympic Games will run from 18 to 29 October 2000. 10 For better or for worse, I am a ‘Pioneer Volunteer’. One cannot get anywhere near the inside of SOCOG without undergoing some version of a training course that gives one a background in the Olympic movement, the history of Sydney’s bid, and the tasks ahead of SOCOG (this includes employees, though they undergo a different orientation). During this training, SOCOG also attempts to instil a certain amount of Olympic spirit into the volunteers. 11 Another question worth pursuing is how the logo is ‘read’ by those who lack information on SOCOG’s intentions and Indigenous responses. Most people with whom I spoke said that it looked ‘fun’ and ‘dynamic’; a few thought it looked like a chicken and couldn’t see the ‘running man’ in it at all. 12 All of the information regarding the design process for the Sydney Games logo was given to me by SOCOG and has been checked and confirmed by staff at SOCOG. But as so many parties were involved in the development of the logo, time constraints prevented me from speaking to all of them. My apologies here, therefore, if any significant aspects of the development of the Millennium Athlete have been left out. 13 Michael Bryce designed the visual identity for the Sydney bid. 14 However, Fink and Perkins (1997: 60) have pointed out that there is also some unintentional irony at work with the choice: ‘The boomerang is a brilliant invention of aerodynamic technology, but it is also a weapon, a symbol of Aboriginal resistance to invasion.’ 15 SOCOG’s actual charter: ‘We have been given the honour of staging the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney in the Year 2000. It is an honour which we recognise as carrying with it great responsibilities . . . to the athletes and the youth of the world, to the international Olympic movement, to those who are our partners and to all Australia. We pledge to carry out our task with a profound awareness of what is at stake, dynamically, unselfishly, and with a level of enthusiasm that will guarantee success. Just as our athletes strive for excellence, so do we. Just as they

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19 20

21

22

23

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carry with them the honour of their country, so do we. Our vision is to stand together in September 2000 as the world celebrates the glory of the Games of The New Millennium: The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games’ (SOCOG n.d.). Craig Hassal, general manager of the Olympic Arts Festivals, at the launch of the Festival of the Dreaming visual identity, 23 June 1997. My bachelor’s degree is in theatre studies and I have worked professionally as a theatre administrator in Canada. Indigenous athletes also reach many people through their participation in sport, of course; I’m sure many Australians are familiar with the image of Cathy Freeman running with the Aboriginal flag around her shoulders after winning gold at the 1994 Commonwealth Games (she carried both the Australian and the Aboriginal flag after winning the Women’s 400 metres at the World Track and Field Championships in 1997 in Athens). See Godwell (1997) for an elaboration of this topic. The National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association is the pre-eminent Indigenous dance college in Sydney. Darren Godwell (1997) has suggested that the arts, that is, ‘paint’n and danc’n’, provide rather a stereotypical—and thus not very helpful—model for Indigenous success. He argues that the arts, like sport, present a nonthreatening avenue for achievement in the mainstream but do not open up avenues for Indigenous participation and advancement in other fields. I think Godwell makes an excellent point here, but I would counter it with the proposition that the arts are still helpful in terms of role-modelling success, for it is not just the actors or dancers who are visible but the characters they portray. Thus, for example, in her autobiographical piece White Baptist Abba Fan, Deborah Cheetham shows herself a successful actress/opera singer—and as a Koori lesbian who has been able to negotiate being separated from her mother as a child. For example, a dance that might be appropriate in one performance context is permissible, whereas if the context shifts, it might not be, and the student/dancer must be responsible for knowing which is which. Although it is an Indigenous company, Bangarra itself has on occasion been accused of cultural appropriation. But they employ cultural consultants to try to avoid this, and are extremely sensitive to this issue. This is an issue faced by Indigenous artists working in other media (for example, painting) as well. All of the performers/artists with whom I spoke acknowledged the political import of their work as expressions of a larger ‘Aboriginal/Indigenous experience’ and were more or less resigned to this fact (if uneasy about being seen as presuming to speak for others). While in this chapter I am interested in the social and political impact made by these artists, I do not wish to encourage this as an exclusive

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25

26 27

28

29

30

31


interpretation of their efforts and/or to reduce complex personal works to a mono-dimensional political interpretation. For example, interviews with: Rhoda Roberts, ‘Demanding to be heard’, SMH, 27 May 1997: 3; Kevin Smith, ‘Duck dreaming in fairyland’, SMH, 20 August 1997: 17; Leah Purcell and Deborah Cheetham, ‘The School of hard knocks’, SMH, 16 September 1997: 15; Deborah Cheetham, ‘What are the chances?’, Sydney Star Observer, 18 September 1997: 13; Lydia Miller, ‘One nation or 301 nations?’, SMH, 9 August 1997: Spectrum 15. In this line of reasoning is also the criticism that the Festival encouraged the commodification of Indigenous arts for consumption by nonIndigenous audiences at the expense of ‘grassroots’ productions of Indigenous arts for Indigenous audiences. I think this is an excellent point and must be borne in mind; but I would also add that many Indigenous people certainly came to the ‘high’ art productions as well, so any point about exclusion does not ring wholly true. Juan Antonio Samaranch is the president of the IOC. This actually became relevant when a relative of a cast member of one of the Festival productions died; SOCOG accepted that the cast member in question had to return home, the production was cancelled and prebooked seats were refunded. Of course performances can be seen to work two ways; that is, some argue that they objectify and commodify Indigenous culture for popular consumption more than they perform to audiences the subjective experience of Indigenity. People who received free tickets included critics, the Gamarada dignitaries, Indigenous community groups, Indigenous Land Councils and some SOCOG staff. Indeed, it is striking that of the staff at SOCOG to date, the only Indigenous members are in specifically Indigenous interest areas: the Festival of the Dreaming and Aboriginal Affairs. Where are the Indigenous Board Members, where are the Indigenous staff in technology, marketing, Olympic Family, and so on? I make a qualification between Indigenous and non-Indigenous attitudes towards the millennium change because, as one Aboriginal informant said to me, ‘What’s another thousand years?’. In other words, I’m not sure that the ticking over of the millennium has quite the romance and resonance for Indigenous Australians who have, after all, been in Australia for at least 40 000 years.

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7 Elite Art for Cultural Elites 1 For a defence of the use of the term ‘Dreamtime’ cf. ‘Dreaming’, see Morphy (1996b).

8 Cultural Tourism in an Interconnected World 1 Artesanía refers to the work of an artisan, who is defined as a person who practises an art or manual work (Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado 1996: 109). This Spanish term is somewhat broader than the more restricted English term ‘craft’. 2 I am grateful to Dr Larraín for inviting me to participate in the 1988 conference in Antofagasta (Dransart 1988), and for encouraging me to think about problems involved in distributing textile products in northern Chile. 3 For a study of the historical marginalisation of pastoralists in the Andes, see Flores Ochoa (1982). 4 In the past they travelled with llama caravans, but now they are more likely to use trucks. Whereas virtually all families formerly had a llama caravan, relatively few own a truck in working condition. 5 For different perspectives on the symbolism of stripe sequences in Aymara textiles, see Cereceda (1978); Dransart (1988: 44, 1995: 238); Arnold (1997: 118–23). 6 There is a difference between the apparently ‘exotic’ quality of Cuna women’s clothing and Cuna men’s dress (Western-style trousers, shirts, ties, and felt hats). But men’s clothing can have its own Cuna significance, especially in a ritual context (Taussig 1993: 189). This constitutes another facet of globalisation, in which objects of Western manufacture are invested with local meanings in different parts of the world. However, Taussig’s analysis of gender relations between Cuna men and women, in which the latter are held to be subservient to the former precisely through their sewing activities, is not supported by Tice (1995), who demonstrates a more fluid set of gender relations among the Cuna that includes omekits (‘women-like men’), who may also sew mola.

9 Past and Future Pathways 1 The Innu Nation sponsors its own Web site: http://www.innu.ca 2 As a corollary to this event it is worth noting that journalists and visitors to the Innu community at Utshimassit interpret the presence of caribou bones tossed on the roofs of houses as evidence of moral decline. In doing

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so they have failed to recognise the constraints placed on Innu village dwellers striving to maintain traditional practices concerning the proper way to dispose of caribou remains, in particular that they must not be defiled by dogs. 3 An Innu account of the tragic events at Utshimassit, the history leading up to it, and community resolve to confront and seek solutions to their problems is available from the Innu Nation (1992, 1993). 4 The Smallwood Reservoir Land Use Reconnaissance party (22–30 August 1995) included Daniel Ashini and Peter Armitage from the Innu Nation, archaeologists Stephen Loring (Smithsonian Institution) and Moira McCaffrey (McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal), and Dominic Pokune. Dominic’s son Charlie joined us for the last few days of fieldwork.

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Vail, Pegi (1997) Producing America, unpublished MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York Van Kessel, Juan J.M.M. (1980) Holocausto al Progreso: Los Aymarás de Tarapacá, Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, Amsterdam Venbrux, Eric (1995) A Death in the Tiwi Islands, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Vincent, Sylvie and Jose Mailhot (1983) ‘Montagnais land tenure’, The Indian and Inuit Supporter III: 16–27 Wadden, Marie (1991) Nitassinan, the Innu Struggle to Reclaim their Homeland, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver Wallis, Brian (1991) ‘Selling nations’, Art in America 9: 85–91 Ward, Graeme K. (1998) ‘Ethical Australian archaeology’, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Newsletter 17(3): 23–30 Warner, W. Lloyd (1937) A Black Civilisation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Wasserman, Tamara E. and Jonathan S. Hill (1981) Bolivian Indian Textiles: Traditional designs and costume, Dover Publications, New York Watchman, Alan (1997) ‘Paleolithic marks: archaeometric perspectives’, in M. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann and N. Jablonski, eds, Beyond Art: Pleistocene image and symbol, Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, pp. 19–36 West, Margaret (1995) Rainbow, Sugarbag and Moon, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin Wiessner, Polly (1983) ‘Style and information in Kalahari San projectile points’, American Antiquity 48: 253–76

220


Wilson, Robert and Wimal Dissanayake, eds (1996) Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Duke University Press, Durham Wolf, Eric R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, University of California Press, Berkeley Wortham, Erica (1996) Indigenous media in Mexico: reconfiguring the Mexican national imaginary, unpublished paper delivered at the 1996 AAA meetings for invited session: ‘Beyond Representation: Visual Anthropology and the Fourth World’, copy held at Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University, New York Yothu Yindi (1999) Yothu Yindi on the Web, online: http://www.YothuYindi.com (accessed August 1999) Young, Oran R. (1992) Arctic Politics: Conflict and cooperation in the circumpolar north, University Press of New England, Hanover Zarroli, Jim (1997) ‘New Telecom ventures’, National Public Radio, Washington DC (Morning Edition Report, 2 July) Zimmerman, Larry J. and Brian L. Molyneaux (1996) Native North America, Little, Brown, New York

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), 18, 31–2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Protocol Manual, 121–3 Aboriginal Educative Consultative Group, 116 Aboriginal Film and Video Arts Alliance, Canada, 39, 43, 45 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, 61 Aborigines, Australian see Australians, Indigenous Abrash, Barbara, 41 activists see cultural activists Adelson, Laurie, 149 Ainu people, 24 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), 170 Alawa people, 10, 61 America OnLine (AOL), 73–4 American Indian: A multimedia encyclopedia, The, CD-ROM, 77 American Indian people see Innu people/Nation; Native Americans American Indian Studies bulletin board, 74 American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, 77 Amitshuakant, Canada, 181, 182

ancestors/travelling heroes, Indigenous Australian, 54–7, 60, 63, 64 Andean weavers/textiles, Chapter 8; see also textiles, Latin American Anderson, William, 99 animals, relationship with/attitude to, 175–6, 199n; see also dogs and cats Appadurai, Arjun, 92, 191n Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution, 180 Arica, Chile, 152, 155 Armitage, Peter, 175, 199n Arnold, John, 23 art, Indigenous, 10, 14, 23, 60–1, 62–6 Australian see Australian Indigenous art/artists and colonisation, 62–6, 100–1 concept of art by metamorphosis, 139–41 Indigenous identity in, 10 Latin American see textiles, Latin American perceived value of, 134–5, 136–8, 139 perspectives on Indigenous and Western, Chapter 7 221

222


and tourist markets/cultural tourism see art market; tourism, cultural/Indigenous see also cultural/intellectual property; performing arts; by name of artist art market, 129, 134–8, 146; see also tourism, cultural/Indigenous artesanía, Latin American craftwork, 151–3, 160–4, 198n Arthur, George, 99 Assinboine people, USA, 78 Association on American Indian Affairs, 44 Attwood, Bain, 23, 111 Australian Broadcasting Corporation Indigenous Programs Unit, 31, 32, 45 Australian Film Commission, 45 Australian Indigenous art/artists, 23, 57, 60–1, 62–6, Chapter 7 bark paintings, 64–5 cult/clan, 57 and Dreamtime/ritual, 131, 132, 135 marketing, 129, 136 perceived value of, 134–5, 136–8 rock paintings, 60–1, 63 Western perceptions of, 129, 130, 132, 136–41, 142–3 see also tourism, cultural/Indigenous; by name of artist Australian Indigenous media see media, Indigenous Australians, Indigenous, 8, 18, Chapters 5, 6 and 7 and colonisation, 58–66 community/clan identity, 52, 53, 57 creation period, 54–5, 56, 57, 64 ethnic/cultural identity, 8, 59, 62 funeral rituals/death, 56–7

government attitudes to, 58–9 and land rights/Native Title debate, 58, 59–60, 110, 195n presented in advertising, 111–12 religious cults, 57, 60–1 and the Sydney Olympic Games, Chapter 6 in Tasmania, Chapter 5 travelling heroes/ancestors, 54–5, 56, 57, 60, 63 see also Indigenous people authenticity, notion/ideal of, 9–10, 93, 94, 146–7 Awakening Ceremony, performance, 123–4 Aymara people/weavers (Latin America), 10, 146–7, 152–3, 160–4 and tourists, 154, 157–8 Baker, Penny, 116 Bancroft, Bronwyn, 116 Bangarra Dance Theatre, 113–14, 119, 197n Bankes, George, 149–50 Barak, William, 142–3 Baramada Rock, rock concert, 124 Barber, Ben, 37, 39, 45–6 Bardon, Geoff, 63 Barinja, Lin Onus, 6, 65–6 bark paintings, Aboriginal, 64–5; see also Australian Indigenous art/artists Barth, Friedrich, 71 belief systems/spirituality, Indigenous, 5, 10, 106; see also cultural/intellectual property; cultures, Indigenous Belindo, John, 17 Benbow, Fanny, 101 Bennett, Tony, 29 Bergman, Eric, 150 Bern, John, 57 Berndt, Catherine, 64

Index

Berndt, Ronald, 64 Bhabha, Homi, 104 Bibliography of Native North Americans, CD-ROM, 77 Black Mary, performance, 123 Black Wolf’s Shadow (BWS), 74, 75–6 Blue Snake (Don Rapp), 73–4 Blundell, Valda, 29 Boas, Franz, 173 Bock, Thomas, 101 Boehm, Christopher, 50, 51 Bonwick, James, 99–100 BRACS television project, 39–40 Bryce, Michael, 116 Buck, Betsy, 79 bulletin boards, 74–6; see also Internet; World Wide Web/Web sites Bulunbun, John, 65–6 Bundjalung people, 120, 123 Burke, Marie, 59 Canada, Indigenous media of, 41–2, 43, 45; see also Innu people/ Nation Cartier, Jacques, 171 cats and dogs, 91, 92, 193n CD-ROMs and Native American communications, 70, 76–9, 85 Center for the Documentation of Endangered Languages (CDEL), 77–8 Center for Media, Culture and History, 41 Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), 32, 45 Certeau, Michel de, 95 Challapa, Soria Mamani, 161, 163 Chaloupka, George, 60 Chile, 10, Chapter 8 Arica craft village, 152

223

Chilean weavers/textiles Chapter 8; see also textiles, Latin American Chippewa people, 44 Clifford, James, 93, 146 Colchane, Chile, 159 colonisation/colonialism, 1, 2, 3, 18 Australian Indigenous art, 62–6 and ethnic identity, 6 and Indigenous Australians, 58–66, 90–1 naming/renaming, 95, 96–7 Columbia Broadcasting System, 76 Columbus Day, 94 Comeagain, Steve, 116, 117 communication technologies, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8–9 and Indigenous knowledge systems, 15–19 and Indigenous media, 6, 36–40, 41–3, Chapter 4 communication, traditional forms of, 17–18, 70 community/social identity see identity, Indigenous connectedness see Indigenous people, contact/connectedness with other cultures/regions Cooper, Carol, 143 Coroma cultural property, 150 Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF), 154 Costner, Kevin, 30, 76 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, 194n craftwork, Latin American, Chapter 8; see also textiles, Latin American creativity in Indigenous Australian art/legend, 50, 51, 53–7 Crick, Malcolm, 147 Cubitt, Sean, 37 Cullen, Max, 120 cults, Indigenous Australian religious, 57, 60–1

224


cultural activists, 28–31, 34, 35, 39 and counter-publics, 40–4 Cultural Imperialism, 36, 38 cultural/intellectual property, 10, 11–21, 22, 119 illegal removal of, 150 and the Internet, 15–19 see also art, Indigenous; cultures, Indigenous; textiles, Latin American cultural tourism see tourism cultures, Indigenous borrowing from/appropriation of, 10, 106, 111, 115, 125, 195n ‘marketing’, 2–3, 12, 13–15, 112–13, 129 see also art, Indigenous; identity, Indigenous; tourism, cultural/Indigenous Cuna people (Panama) clothing of, 199n embroideries/mola, 147, 149, 153, 163, 164 Dakota Language Homepage, Web site, 79 dance 196n, 197n; see also performing arts, Indigenous Dances With Wolves, film, 30 Davis Inlet/Utshimassit community, 183–4 ‘tragedy’ of 177–8, 188, 199n de Nebrija, Antonia, 96 death/funeral rituals, 56–7 and treatment of human remains, 84, 185–6 Dill, Jordan, 84 Dissanayake, Wimal, 39, 45 dogs and cats, 91, 92, 193n Dorn, Ronald I., 62 Dorset (Eskimo) people, 8 Dowling, Robert, 101, 194n Dragovich, Deirdre, 62

Ducks Bay School, 80 Dunbar, Robin, 51 Durham, Jimmie, 10, 94, 193n Dutterau, Benjamin, 101, 194n England, mythology about, 90, 91 English language see language, English/Western Enoch, Wesley, 124 Ernabella Video and Television (EVTV), 32, 45 Errington, Frederick, 147 Eskimo groups, 7–8 ethnic tourism, 153–5; see also tourism cultural/Indigenous ethnicity/ethnic identity, 4–7; see also Australians, Indigenous, ethnic/cultural identity; identity, Indigenous; Native Americans, ethnicity Farnell, Brenda, 78, 79 Festival of the Dreaming, 113, 117–26, 198n Film and Video Festival of the National Museum of the American Indian, 32 film/video, Indigenous, 29–30, 35, 37–8, 41–4, 45 Fink, Hannah, 109, 111 firearms, 92 Fisher, Jean, 94 Fitzhugh, William, 173–4 500 Nations, CD-ROM, 76 Flett, Trevor, 116 Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, 72, 79 Fraser, Nancy, 41 Freeman, Cathy, 196n Friendly Mission, The, journal, 91–2 Gamarada Dignitaries program, 121–2, 125, 198n

Index

Garmardi, Arnhem Land, 65–6 Gates, Bill, 36 George, Dan, 41–2 Gewertz, Deborah B., 147 Giese, Paula, 18, 79–80, 81, 82 Gillen, Francis James, 61 globalisation and Indigenous identity, 4–7 and Indigenous media, 36–40 and Indigenous people, Chapter 1 and Indigenous Tasmanians, 91, 92, 101–2, 104–5 and Latin American textiles, 147–9 Glover, John, 101, 194n Godwell, Darren, 197n Graburn, Nelson H.H., 157 Greenblatt, Stephen, 96 guns, 92 Gurinji stockmen’s strike, 61 Hall, Colin Michael, 111 Hanson, Pauline, 45 Harris, Olivia, 157 Harstock, Nancy, 101 Haskovec, Ivan, 52 Hebdige, Dick, 37 Hill, Jonathan S., 149 Historical and Statistical Information, CD-ROM, 77 Hoover, John, 80 Hopewellian Interaction Sphere, 69 Hubbard, Mina, 184–5 Hudson Bay Company trading posts, 171, 172, 184 human remains, treatment of, 84, 185–6 hunter-gatherer social groups, 50–3 hybridity, notion of, 92–4, 103 Iban people, Indonesia, 10

225

identity, Indigenous, 4–7, 8, 19, 50, 59, 62, 70–1, 94, 126, 163–4, 170, 171–2 in art see art, Indigenous community/clan, 50–3 and the Sydney Olympic Games, Chapter 6 see also authenticity, notion/ideal of; ethnicity/ethnic identity; hybridity, notion of; purity, notion of Indigenous Igloolik Isuma Productions, 29 Imagining Indians, film, 30 In the Heart of Big Mountain, film, 44 Indian Country Today, newspaper, 84 Indian Question: The history of the Native American Indians, The, CD-ROM, 77 Indigenous activists see cultural activists Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, documentary, xv Indigenous people contact/connectedness with other cultures/regions, 7–10, 27, 50, 69–70, 147–9, 171 knowledge systems of, 11–24 notions of time/history, 21–2 numbers of, 2 trading networks, 12–13, 69–70 and travel, 9 see also identity, Indigenous Indonesia, 10 Industry, Telecommunications and Commerce project (USA), 81 Innu Cultural Centre, 171, 180 Innu people/Nation, 7–8, 20–1, Chapter 9 archaeology of, 173–5

226


and community archaeology, 20–1, 168, 178–89 ethnohistory, 172–3 history, 169 and Hudson Bay Company trading posts, 171, 172, 184 identity, 170, 171–2 land rights/claims, 169–70, 172, 179, 187, 188 and Michikamiss survey, 185–7 Pathways Project, 180–9 perceptions of themselves, 175–7 perspective of land and animals, 175–6, 199n and Smallwood Reservoir hydroelectric development, 184–7 and Utshimassit/Davis Inlet tragedy, 177–8, 188 Web site, 188, 199n Innu Resource Centre, 179 Innu Rights and Environment, 185 Internet, the, 2, 4, 30, 104 chat rooms, 72, 73 and Indigenous cultural/intellectual property, 15–19 see also World Wide Web/Web sites Inuit Broadcast Corporation (IBC), 40 Inuit people, 8, 29, 40 Iroquois Nation, 27–8 Isluga, 155, 156, 158–60 textiles, 160–4 Isluga people/weavers (Latin America), 146–7, 153, 160–4 and tourists, 153–4, 157–8 Jakubowicz, Andrew, 111, 195n James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), 170 Japan, 6–7

Kahn, Joel, 5 Kahnesetake, film, 29–30 Kalafatic, Carol, 41 Kalimantan, Indonesia, 10 Katchoo, 74, 75 Kayapo Indian community, Brazil, 33–4 Kessel, Juan Van, 158–9 Kimber, Richard G., 63 Kleinert, Sylvia, 145 Knauft, Bruce M., 50, 51 knowledge systems, Indigenous, 11–24 Kratz, Corrine, 118 !Kung people (Africa), 51, 52, 53 Kungarakany people (Australia), 59 Kunuk, Zacharias, 29 La Estrella, newspaper, 155 Labrador see Innu people/Nation Land Council of New South Wales, 116 land, Indigenous links to, 22, 175–6 land rights Acts, 61–2, 170 land rights/claims, 5, 43, 58, 59–60, 61–2, 169–70, 172, 179, 187, 188 Langton, Marcia, 111 language, English/Western, 90, 91, 93, 94–5, 96–7 languages/dialects, 52, 70, 71, 94, 96, 104, 131 restoration of endangered, 77–8, 79 Larrain, Horacio, 152, 198n Latin American textiles see textiles, Latin American Lattas, Andrew, 111 Letters and Notes, CD-ROM, 77 Lewis, Darrell, 60 Lighting the Seventh Fire, film, 44 Line in the Sand, A, Web site, 84 listservs, 71–2 Lobo, Susan, 150

Index

Loring, Stephen, 174, 183, 199n Luritja people, Arnhem Land, 65, 66 McAfee, John, 83 McGuinness, Val, 59 McLuhan, Marshall, 36 McRae, Tommy, 142–3 Mailhot, José, 173 Mailman, Deborah, 124 Makah people (North America), 43 Maoris, 29 mapping by colonisers, 95 Maquet, Jacques, 139 Marika, Wandjuk, 130 Marka, Islug, 155 marriage partners, exchange of, 57, 69 Martin, Glen, 73, 74 Masayesva Jr, Victor, 30 Massey, Doreen, 92, 101 Matthiessen, Peter, 84 Maybury-Lewis, David, 70 Maymurru, Narritjin, 64, 65, 130 Maynard, Lesley, 131 Mbuti people (Africa), 51 media, Indigenous, Chapter 2 Australian, 32, 37–8, 45 Canadian, 41–2 cooperatives, 39 and globalisation, 36–40 marginalisation of, 32–5 see also communication technologies; film/video, Indigenous Melville Island, 56 Mercer, Kobena, 94 Merlan, Francesca, 11 Metis community, Canada, 80 Meyers, Fred, 146 Michaels, Eric, 37, 57, 63 Michikamiss survey, 185–7 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, performance, 123

227

Miller, Toby, 38–9 Mimi, performance, 123 missionaries, 64, 138, 139 Mohawks, 29–30 Morgan, Marlo, 195n Morley, David, 92, 96, 104 Morphy, Howard, 56, 64, 153, 164 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 6–7 multiculturalism, USA, 35 multinational corporations, 2 Munn, Nancy, 57, 62 Murray District Aboriginal Association, 31 museums, 98, 101 Mutant Message Down Under, 111, 113 mythology about England, 90, 91 NAISDA (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association), 119, 196n Najombolmi, 52 Namatjira, Albert, 143 naming/renaming by colonisers, 95, 96–7 ‘Naskapi’, term, 173 NAT-EDU, 72 NAT-HLTH, 72 NATCHAT, 72 National Film Board of Canada, 32, 45 National Indian Youth Council, 43–4 National Indigenous Association of Australia, 39 Native American Community Alliance and Technology Project, 80 Native American Indian Resources, Web site, 79–80 Native Americans, 6, 27–8, 30, 34 communications societies, 42–3

228


and communications technology, 6, Chapter 4 ethnicity, 70–1 media-makers, 32, 40, 43–4 rights of, 43 see also Innu people/Nation Native Americans, The, CD-ROM, 76–7 Native Americans Producers Alliance, USA, 9, 43 Native Nations, Web site, 81 Native North America, Web site, 84 NATIVE-L, 72 NativeNet, 72 Navajo people, 44 Negroponte, Nicholas, 36 Nganji people, 61 Ngundalelah Godotgay (Waiting for Godot), performance, 120 Nicholls, Trevor, 65 Night Patrol, documentary film, 38 Nitassinan, Canada, 168, 171 and community archaeological research, 180–9 Nobbs, Margaret, 62 Northern Land Council (Australia), 18 Nunavut, video, 29 Obamsawim, Alanis, 29–30, 32, 191n Ochoa, Jorge Flores, 153 Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress, 81 Olympic Games see Sydney Olympic Games Once Were Warriors, film, 29 Oneida Nation, 81 oral traditions and power structure, 15–17 structure of, 15–16 Oruru (Bolivia) rugs, 148 Osawa, Sandy, 40, 43, 44, 45

Panama embroideries see Cuna people Panaramitee (art) tradition, 62–3 Papunya art/artists, 63, 64, 65 Parkin, David, 118 Parks, Douglas, 77 Pathways Project, 21, 180–9 Peltier, Leonard, 84 Penashue, Louis, 181, 182 Penashue, Marie, 181 Penashue, Peter, 169, 178 performing arts, Indigenous, 113, 117–26 Perkins, Hetti, 109, 111 Peron, Francois, 100 Pintupi people, 65, 66 Pitjantjatjara people, 52 Pokune, Charles, 186, 199n Pokune, Dominic, 185, 199n power structure of oral societies, 15–17 Price, Sally, 130 purity, notion of Indigenous, 93, 94; see also authenticity, notion/ideal of racism, 45 Raggett, Obed, 63 Rainbow Serpent cult, 60 Rapp, Don (Blue Snake), 73–4 Redford, Robert, 32 Rees, Lloyd, 133 religious cults see cults, Indigenous Australian religious research/researchers, Indigenous/non–Indigenous, 19–21; see also Innu people/Nation and community archaeology Resolution, vessel, 99 Rickard, Jolene, 27–8, 30, 33, 34, 40, 45, 46–7 Rigney, Daryle, 3

Index

Rigney, Lester, 19–20, 22 Roberts, Rhoda, 116, 120, 121–3, 125, 197n Robins, Kevin, 92, 96, 104 Robinson, George Augustus, 90, 91–2, 96–7, 100, 192–3n, 194n rock paintings, Australian, 52, 60–1, 63; see also Australian Indigenous art/artists Rodseth, Lars, 51 Rosenfeld, Andrée, 62 Roth, H. Ling, 100 Rowse, Tim, 20 Sahlins, Marshall, 42 Said, Edward, 93, 104 Sand to Celluloid, series, 45 Sandy, August, 59, 61 Saunders, Walter, 45 Sayers, Andrew, 143 Scott, Elizabeth, 20 Seven Stages of Grieving, The, performance, 124 Shawnee people (America), 74 Sheshatshiu community (Canada), 171, 180, 182–3, 186 Siegal, William, 149 Simms, Vic, 122 Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe Community College, 79 Skiri Pawnee language, 77 Smith, Claire, 46, 57 Smith, Mike, 63 Smith, Valene L., 153–4, 157 Smithsonian Institution, 21, 179, 180 Social Darwinism, 58 SOCOG see Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Indigenous Program Unit, 31, 45 Speck, Frank, 173 Spencer, W. Baldwin, 61, 64

229

spirituality/belief systems, Indigenous, 5, 10, 106 Squier, George, 149 stereotypes/stereotyping, xvi, 7, 9, 10, 11, 76, 84 Stewart, Susan, 102 Sting, singer, 34 Stokes, Geoffrey, 118 Strom, Karen, 81, 82 Strong, William Duncan, 173 Sullivan, Hillary, 52 Sundance Film Festival, 32 Svasek, Muruska, 134 Sydney Morning Herald, 124–5 Sydney Olympic Games, Chapter 6, 195n Indigenous representation of Aboriginal cultures, 110, 117–26 logo/Millennium Athlete image, 110, 114–17, 120, 121, 125, 195n, 196n mascots, 117 non-Indigenous representation of Aboriginal cultures, 110, 111–7, 125 Olympic Arts Festivals see Festival of the Dreaming Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), 110, 114–17, 120, 121, 125, 195–6n Syron, Gordon, 65 Tafler, David, 18 Tanami network, 38 Tasmania, Chapter 5 Western perspective of history of, 95, 97–101 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 98 Tasmanians, Indigenous, White perceptions of, 98–101 Taussig, Michael, 154 Te Manu Aute, New Zealand, 39

230


technology see communication technologies Tesunkenupas/Michael Two Horses Web site, 81–2 Texas A&M University, 72 textiles, Latin American, Chapter 8 collectors of, 149–50 production/promotion, 151–3, 160–4 traffic in, 149–50 see also Aymara people/weavers; Cuna people; Isluga Thule (Eskimo) people, 8 Tice, Karen, 147, 151, 153, 163, 164 Tiospa Zina Tribal School (America), 79 Tiwi islands people, 57, 60 Todd, Loretta, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45 Todorov, Tzvetan, 96 Tomlinson, John, 36, 38 tourism, cultural/Indigenous, 1–2, 12, 13–15, 64, 112, 149–50, 153–8 and ethnic tourism, 153–5 and local people, 156–8 Tracht, Arthur, 149 trading art objects, 139–40, 142 trading networks, 12–13, 69–70 Treadmill, painting, 65 Tribal Lands Conference (1989), 72 Tribal Voice Web site, 18, 83 Trigger, Bruce, 24 Truganini, 98, 194n Trujillo, Gary, 72 Tsing, Anna, 33 Turner, David, 49 Tuscarora (American) people, 46, 47 University of Iowa Student Computer Association, 74 Untitled: Landscape with rocks, painting, 65 Up the Ladder, performance, 123

Vancouver Indian Center, 42 Venbrux, Eric, 56, 57 Wallis, Brian, 152 Wanabi Tribal Home Page, Web site, 82 wannabes, 71, 72–3, 82–3, 192n Warlpiri Media Association (WMA), 32, 37–8 Warlpiri people, 57 Warner, W. Lloyd, 53, 55, 56 Wasserman, Tamara E., 149 weaving see textiles, Latin American Whiteley, Brett, 133 Wiessner, Polly, 52 Williams, Raymond, 45 Wilson, Robert, 39, 45 ‘Wimmin’s Business’, performance, 124 Wiyuta CD-ROM, 78 project, 79 Wolf, Eric, 101 women artists, 57 women and power structure, 16 women, Warlpiri, 57 women weavers, Isluga, 160–4 World Wide Web/Web sites, 70, 78–84, 85, 86, 104, 170, 188, 192n, 199n Wunawun, Jack, 65 Yam figure/ritual, 60 Yanktonai (American) language, 77 Yanktonai Lexicon, CD-ROM, 77 Yankunytjatjara people, 51, 52 Yirrkala, 130, 138 Yolngu people/artists, 10, 53, 56, 61, 64–5, 66 Yothu Yindi, 18, 114 Yuendumu, 37–8, 39, 45 Zapatista movement, 39

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