Indigenous People and Settler Self Government: Introduction

The urge to write history is prompted by some passion, some sense of possibility or danger. The passion driving this set of essays is the recognition that the political rights that many people enjoy today were gained historically at the expense of others, especially the Indigenous peoples of the lands they inhabit. It is not only the United States that we can describe, as Jodi A. Byrd does, as a “fledgling nation that pursued happiness through the acquisition of indigenous lands.” ¹ This is the condition of settler colonialism itself, and almost as foundational is the habit of settlers and their descendants of forgetting that the condition of their own political freedoms was the destruction of the independent sovereignty of the prior, indigenous, occupants of the lands they now so confidently proclaim their own. The challenge for historians is to undo this settler narrative, so deeply embedded in the cultures of modern nation states from the US to Australia. Accordingly, each essay in this collection explores in a particular way what the connections were between settler gains and Indigenous losses of political rights and freedoms in Britain’s settler colonies.² Several also consider the consequences for political institutions in the present, and the collection ends with John Keane’s reflections on the issues these histories raise for a modern politics of restorative justice.

Most of these essays focus on settler-Indigenous engagements and political histories in Australia, though the collection begins with Zoë Laidlaw’s discussion of Thomas Hodgkin’s thoughts about self-government in Liberia, and the other essays work in a comparative spirit, invoking New Zealand, Britain, and the United States in particular.³ All five, implicitly or explicitly, critique current Australian (and other) historiographies which tend to narrate histories of self-government, democracy, and eventually national independence in isolation from recognition of what these developments meant for Indigenous peoples. In one historiographical corner, political histories report in a generally positive spirit the achievement of self-government, representative democracy, and nationhood; in these narratives, the main protagonists are colonists and British imperial authorities, each internally divided by class and political ideology. In another corner, historians and Indigenous activists draw attention to the destructive effects on Indigenous peoples of a continuing and rapacious settler desire for land. Rather than uplifting accounts of the growth of political rights, these historians and activists tell tragic stories of land seizure, destruction of societies, polities and culture, population loss, and the exercise of racially-based power and control over the survivors. Whether Australian political history is seen as a narrative of growth to political maturity within the context of Empire, or as a more nationalistic story of resistance to British control and the early development of democracy, it tends to set aside Aboriginal-settler interactions as a particular sphere of policy and practice. The two histories rarely intersect, as Mark McKenna and Marilyn Lake in this collection both note.

Yet these two processes—settler self-government and Indigenous subjection—cannot be analytically separated in this way. The gains of some were predicated on the losses of others, and in important ways settler-Indigenous interactions were constitutive of the political system as a whole.

Drawing out the nature and history of these connections and interactions is, however, a complex matter. As so many historians recognise, our knowledge of Indigenous political responses to settler colonialism is limited, partly by the nature of the surviving sources, and partly by a failure to ask sufficiently pointed questions of the sources we have. This is especially true for the study of the Australian colonies, where an understanding of Indigenous perspectives has proved especially elusive. As Rachel Standfield and John Keane indicate here, we know very little about Indigenous polities and politics, not only as they might have been before colonisation, but also as they were during the bloody process of dispossession and thereafter. It is not only our knowledge of Indigenous politics that is lacking; we also know little about the impact of Indigenous-settler relations on the nature and development of settler politics and political institutions. How did the process of displacing and replacing Indigenous peoples affect...