Raphael Lemkin in Remote Australia: The Logic of Cultural Genocide and Homelands

Abstract

In the 1970s, Aboriginal people in remote Australia took decisive steps to decentralize from government settlements and missions to live and make a living on their ancestral lands at places that have become known as homelands. Over time, this migration garnered some state support and saw the emergence of new facilitating institutions. But in the last decade homeland living has been discursively demeaned by politicians, and policies have been put in place to undermine the possibility of residing and making a livelihood in these smallest, most remote places mainly located on Indigenous-titled lands. As Indigenous territorial rights expand, the state looks to extinguish possibilities for current and future generations to utilize the land and its resources for livelihood. In this article, I draw on evidence from political discourse, policy documents and programme design and implementation to outline this state project to eliminate a contemporary lifeway. I provide ethnographic evidence from work with Kuninjku people in Arnhem Land that documents this destruction. I engage with the work of Raphael Lemkin to document and theorize the techniques being deployed in terms of the logic of cultural genocide. I end by asking what homelands people might do to push back and what role anthropologists might play in such a process.In the situation as it exists at present there is no means of providing for alleviation of the treatment of populations under occupation until the actual moment of liberation. It is then too late for remedies for after liberation they can at best obtain only reparation of damages but never restoration of those values which have been destroyed and which cannot be restored. (Lemkin 2008:94-5)

Unpaid care, welfare conditionality and expropriation

“…5 Settler colonialism is a foundational aspect of the Australian state, which as many First Nations scholars have shown, has come with the expropriation of First Nations land and labor (Moreton- Robinson, 2009;Watson, 2009). Settler colonialism continues today, and Australian social security has been an important driver in these processes; first through rations and indentured labor and slavery on pastoral leases, pearling ships and domestic spaces, continuing today with the use of welfare conditionality and mutual obligation to target subjectivities not aligned to the settler's ideals of the responsible wage earner worker (Altman, 2019;Cronin, 2007). Contemporary policies include the Community Development Program (CDP) (Altman, 2014(Altman, , 2019, income management like the Cashless Debit Card and Basics Card-described by First Nations people put on the card "like going back to the ration days" (Klein & Razi, 2018, p. 99;Gibson, 2012), as well as ParentsNext which, as described below, intensifies both racialized and gendered aspects of expropriation.…”

“…These processes of racial domination remain ongoing through oppressive state policies and institutional, legal and structural discrimination (Altman, 2014; Cronin, 2007). Mutual obligation has been critiqued as a contemporary form of elimination that aims to assimilate First Nations peoples through enforcing the uptake of norms which underpin liberal capitalist modes of being in the world (Altman, 2019). Mutual obligation specifically targets First Nations subjectivities that are viewed outside what is acceptable behavior (often related to people unemployment status), and behavioral conditions are placed on state benefits to change behaviors.…”

Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card

“…For example, income management places behavioural conditions on how people can spend their money, and work for the dole is conditional on people turning up to work like activities. Altman () has viewed these policies as a form of cultural genocide whereby these policies attempt to replace First Nations cultures and First Nations forms of resistance with individuals more conducive to capitalist logic and resource acquisition. Welfare, through conditionalities and levers, become a way to promote assimilation and catalyse elimination.…”

“…context, an extended analysis can be found in previous research by the author including Klein & Razi, 2017;2018).…”

Ka Moʻolelo o Ka Nuha: the safety zone at the Kamehameha Schools didn’t happen by accident

“…It is time now to examine our question fully grown, to recall and reveal the egg which we have incubated; how did the Kamehameha Schools engage with ka ʻimi ana i ka pono o Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian patriotism) during tumultuous times of the Hawaiian Kingdom. While “too often the genocide analytic is limited to direct physical killing” (Altman, 2018, p. 339), according to Raphael Lemkin (2008), genocide actually has two phases, “The destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group” and “the imposition of the national patterns of the oppressor” (p. 339) which appeared at the Kamehameha Schools as the suppression of Hawaiian patriotism and subsequent Americanization.…”