To be honest, when I started hearing about the book Dark Emu, I was skeptical about the claims of Aboriginal agriculture, and I still am. However, even though I am Aboriginal, that doesn’t mean I’m in a position to know that the claims in the book are wrong or right. I don’t know what every nation practiced, I can’t speak for other nations’ practices. I will leave it up to the nations that Pascoe writes about to make any necessary corrections. I never read the book, as it simply didn’t interest me. But I watched as it captured the popular imagination of many people, and generated discussion about Aboriginal culture – which I think is a welcome thing.
But there are a few things about the Bruce Pascoe saga that make me suspicious that it has been a coordinated propaganda campaign running with the constitutional assimilation project. Maybe you want to call me a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but if you stop and consider what is at stake in the battle for sovereignty – conspiracy is to be expected, including coordinated propaganda campaigns. I think Bruce Pascoe sits at the center of such a campaign.
Questioning Pascoe’s identity
Firstly the initial attacks on his identity by concerned Australians. I stumbled on a very creepy website a year or two ago where someone named Jan Holland went through Pascoe’s family tree combing for evidence that he has no Aboriginal ancestry. Stalking someone’s family records like that and publishing them presumably without their consent is creepy. It makes me uncomfortable that light-skinned Aboriginal people can be targets of random weirdos going through their family records. But the main problem I have with this questioning of his identity is this;
We – Aboriginal people, as a polity – should have the prerogative to choose whether or not someone belongs to our community, regardless of whether they can prove ancestry. The descent requirement has been imposed on us.
As an example to illustrate – suppose I were to go and pursue German citizenship because I now meet Germany’s requirements having lived here long enough. The decision to include me in the German polity is between the German community, their criteria they have chosen, and myself. So – on the basis that I do not have any German ancestry – are you going to complain to the German government that I shouldn’t be eligible for citizenship? Expecting all members of the Aboriginal polity to have proven ancestry is like telling the Germans they are only allowed to naturalise people who can prove already existing German ancestry. There is a double standard when it comes to colonised peoples to determine who belongs to their polity. Ancestry and blood quantum requirements are imposed and designed to eliminate us.
I don’t care if Bruce Pascoe has not a drop of Aboriginal blood – it is the choice of the Aboriginal people to include or not include him in their polity (in conjunction with Pascoe’s own self-identification), and to include ancestry or any other requirements they choose. It is certainly none of concerned Australians‘ business.
I suspect these concerned Australians are in cohorts with the colonial elite, they knew all along Pascoe has no proven blood ties and they arranged him the accolades and awards to build him, put him in the spotlight so they could publicly tear him down. They constructed an artificial narrative about a scourge of fake light-skinned Aborigines taking money from the “real” Aborigines in remote communities. They also helped cement in people’s minds the legitimacy of the imposed ancestry criteria that denies us the prerogative to freely decide who belongs to our polity.
False dichotomy
A book “debunking” Dark Emu has come out called “Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate“.
False dichotomy is propoganda 101 – throw nuance out the window and present two narrow categories, herd everyone into two camps, and set them to battle each other.
While I haven’t read Dark Emu, I have read “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann. This book demonstrates there is something other than agriculture and hunter gathering – a nuance that is not fully appreciated by a Eurocentric worldview. There is some hunting and there is some gathering, but it is not purely opportunistic; it involves extensive land management practices that are not concentrated on designated plots of land. I don’t even know if there is an English word for this concept. Even before I read this book, I knew that Aboriginal people practiced this kind of concept.
One irony about the Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers book is that it accuses Pascoe of adopting a Eurocentric world view for labelling Aboriginal practices as “agriculture” – yet the title of the book does the same by implying an equally Eurocentric label of hunter-gatherer.
Josephine Cashman has primed this hunter-gatherer label with her little redneck army and her people on the ground™ over the last few years like it was pre-planned from the start. Marcia Langton played the opposite side by talking up Pascoe’s book and working on getting it in school curriculums. Concern trolls are now “outraged” because Dark Emu content is in curriculums and the children are being fed left-wing lies. Sounds like we have been setup for an ideological war.
So – I am curious – what is the agenda behind labelling us either way? Colonialism itself can no longer be justified on the basis of technological superiority, so there must be some other agenda. There are possible clues in the criticism of Dark Emu.
Spiritual vs Material rights
(Sutton) was “disappointed” that in attempting to describe Aboriginal land use, Pascoe ignored the importance of spiritual tradition and ritual.
…..
In contrast to the picture conveyed by Dark Emu, the greater part of Aboriginal traditional methods of reproducing plant and animal species was not through physical cultivation or conservation but through spiritual propagation,” Sutton writes. “This included speaking to the spirits of ancestors at resource sites, carrying out ‘increase rituals’ at special species-related sites, singing resource species songs in ceremonies, maintaining rich systems of totems for various species that were found in the countries of the totem-holders, and handling food resources with reverence … A secularised notion of Aboriginal cultivation, devoid of spiritual dimensions, did not exist in Australia before conquest.”
HAS DARK EMU BEEN DEBUNKED? PETER SUTTON AND KERYN WALSHE TAKE AIM IN NEW BOOK
I think a wider political agenda behind this manufactured debate is to emphasise Aboriginal attachment with the land in the spiritual dimension, but minimise the material connection. The groundwork has been set in the Uluru Statement which asserts sovereignty as a purely spiritual notion.
They are trying to build a narrative that pre-invasion Aborigines had only superficial material interests in the land – as if our ancestors were breatharians living on metaphysical energy waves and didn’t need material/physical sustenance from the land.
The land can’t have been materially stolen if it was never possessed by Aboriginal people in a material way.
Of the two Eurocentric labels – farmer and hunter-gatherer – the hunter-gather label fits the spiritual-only possessor narrative well. The farmer has an active material interest in the land – the farmer directly and very visibly makes an impact on the land. The hunter-gatherer in contrast – has a passive material interest – and with a bit of clever sophistry this can be framed as a purely spiritual interest.
We need to be dissociated from our material interest in the land for the Uluru Statement to be successfully pulled off. This is the agenda behind labelling us as hunter-gatherers.
Let me put this in another way – Aboriginal land rights/interests are merely spiritual, cultural rights. We have no right to build homes, or make a living or profit off our land – these rights are reserved for settlers. This is what is meant by “sovereignty is a spiritual notion”.
Divide and conquer
It’s very clever the way they have divided the two sides up.
In the blue corner we have the materialist/Pascoe the identity-fraud/leftists/light-skinned city Aborigines.
In the red corner we have the spiritual/experienced academics/the right/and the real Aborigines on the ground™.
Side by side – you can see what side is being set-up to win.
When looking at how this is playing out – it would not surprise me if Dark Emu is riddled with factual errors and Pascoe has no Aboriginal blood. The propaganda machine is gearing up to paint “City” or “east-coast” Aboriginal people as out-of-touch both spiritually and factually – supporting pseudoscience. “East-coast” Aboriginal people have a powerful voice – they could derail constitutional assimilation, and they need to be neutralised. This campaign is designed to discredit them through association with Pascoe who is being slowly revealed to be a fraud.
As for the “real”, “remote” Aboriginal people – they are much easier to control by using them in the same way people like Josephine Cashman and Peter Sutton do. Cashman and Sutton do not stand in their own authority, but use their people “on the ground” or “The Old People” (yes – they actually use these phrases) as their crutch to give them legitimacy.
Cashman is Aboriginal, she speaks her own mind (which I highly respect, and I often agree with her) – but she also speaks and re-interprets for a small posse of Aboriginal women from regional communities rather than simply giving them a direct platform. This is not correct cultural protocol – but white Australians don’t know that. Sutton is not Aboriginal at all. Both continually emphasize having spent a lot of time with ‘authentic’ Aborigines.
By careful emphasis on selective accounts from people “on the ground“, the colonial powers can control our narrative to the Australian people. They can also pit the east-coast and the “real” Aboriginal people against each other – which will divide us up nicely in preparation for when the time comes to decide who is indigenous and who is not.
Image by Manfred Richter from Pixabay
