Aileen Moreton-Robinson - The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: White Possession and Indigenous Sovereignty Matters

I. Owning Property

1. I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society

2. The House That Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession

3. Bodies That Matter on the Beach

4. Writing Off Treaties: Possession in the U.S. Critical Whiteness Literature

II. Becoming Propertyless

5. Nullifying Native Title: A Possessive Investment in Whiteness

6. The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision

7. Leesas Story: White Possession in the Workplace

8. The Legacy of Cooks Choice

III. Being Property

9. Toward a New Research Agenda: Foucault, Whiteness, and Sovereignty

10. Writing Off Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty

11. Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of White Sovereignty

12. Virtuous Racial States: White Sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Afterword

Notes

Publication History

Index

Acknowledgments

As an Aboriginal girl growing up on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), the size of the world was hard to imagine, though glimpses of its magnitude were available in the collection of National Geographic magazines in the school library. The world now seems a great deal smaller, and I have been very fortunate to have met and worked with many wonderful people. I want to thank Deborah Madsen at the University of Geneva, who first encouraged me to consider publishing a collection of my work. Thanks especially to Robert Warrior at the University of Illinois for the kindness and generosity he extended to me in supporting my endeavors to make the book become a reality. His intellectual warrior-ship inspires and influences those of us fortunate enough to know him as a friend and a brother. I also would like to extend thanks to the following scholars for your friendship and collegiality: Sara Ahmed, Chris Andersen, Larissa Behrendt, Vince Diaz, Pat Dudgeon, Bronwyn Fredericks, Mishauana Goeman, David Theo Goldberg, Cheryl Harris, Daniel Heath-Justice, Brendan Hokowhitu, LeAnne Howe, Trish Lukas, Alissa Macoun, John Maynard, Mark McMillan, Toula Nicolacopoulos, Fiona Nicoll, Jacki Thompson Rand, Daryle Rigney, Lester Irabinna Rigney, Audra Simpson, David Singh, Kim TallBear, Jacki Troy, and George Vassilacopoulos. All of you, in one way or another, continue to shape and stretch my thinking in productive ways.

My appreciation and thanks extends to my staff at the Queensland University of Technology for your hard work and support, which made it easier to complete this book.

I am especially grateful to Jason Weidemann at the University of Minnesota Press for his magnanimous support and the reviewers for their generous and helpful comments.

I acknowledge my extended family, who are too numerous to mention, and honor the ancestors and elders of Quandamooka . To Paul and Angela Leitch, thank you for giving bucketloads of love and friendship to weather many a storm. I cannot thank enough the most important people who, every day, make my living and working possible. My love and thanks to my partner Ian, my children Rhiannon and Adam, and my grandchildren Mamindah, Grace, Lucy, and CharlieI am truly blessed.

Introduction

White Possession and Indigenous Sovereignty Matters

I T SEEMS APT TO BEGIN WITH A QUOTE from my recently departed Gami (uncle) because he was a humble, kind, and wise man. Gamis words succinctly encapsulate what I am striving to reveal in this book. While writing this introduction, race as a socially constructed phenomenon is busy doing its work within Australia, measuring Aboriginality by the shade of skin color. It is as though race travels back and forth in time to show us its indeterminacy, seductively enticing us to commit ourselves to its truths. We know not its origins, as a form of exclusion, though there is some consensus that the manifestation of race, conceptualized as having biological form, emerged in the seventeenth century, occurring simultaneously with the rise of liberal democracy. Indigenous peoples did not produce this history, but the conditions under which we live shape our experiences of how well race and state operate in tandem to condition each other. It takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions. The regulatory mechanisms of these nation-states are extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession, ranging from the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty to overregulated piecemeal concessions. However, as this book will reveal, it is not the only way the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty are operationalized, deployed, and affirmed. I use the concept possessive logics to denote a mode of rationalization, rather than a set of positions that produce a more or less inevitable answer, that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-states ownership, control, and domination. As such, white possessive logics are operationalized within discourses to circulate sets of meanings about ownership of the nation, as part of commonsense knowledge, decision making, and socially produced conventions.