The Uluru Statement focuses on grievance and struggle, not reconciliation.
Commentary
Several months ago, The Australian newspaper broke the news of the “White Hands on Black Art” scandal where Indigenous artists allege studio staff regularly meddled with their artworks.
Evidence included a video of a white Aboriginal art centre manager painting on the canvas of what was meant to be the work of an acclaimed Indigenous artist.
The scandal is a metaphor for the proposed change to the Australian Constitution to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. My work with Aboriginal people, and my academic research on their faith and culture, led me to wonder if something similar to the “White Hands on Black Art” scandal is happening.
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8/14/2023
Does The Voice campaign embrace traditional Aboriginal values, or does it reflect values that are not Aboriginal?
Australia’s Aboriginal people have a deep-seated commitment to forgiveness, reconciliation, and unity. Instead of such virtues, the Uluru Statement, which called for The Voice, and its accompanying dialogue documents seem to emphasise grievance, division, resistance, and struggle.
Indeed, one of the contributors to the Referendum Council did say that “reconciliation is a waste of time and money.” Another argued that prohibitions against racial discrimination should only be “for First peoples … versus other cultures of 50 years.”
To Whom Does the Land Belong?
The 26-page Uluru Statement contains sections on invasion, resistance, mourning, and activism, but does not give the same attention to reconciliation (pdf).
The statement raises pressing issues of poverty, dispossession, and marginalisation. These injustices are serious and must be addressed by all Australians.
However, some of the ways of rectifying those injustices seem to come from divisive left-wing ideologies rather than traditional Aboriginal values.
The constitutional change would create a two-class Australia, in which one group will forever have an unequal right to a voice.
That envisaged inequality leads to serious questions. Who belongs in Australia? Does this land only belong to Aboriginal people? Should only one group of Australians enjoy certain rights that are denied to others?
The Uluru Statement and its supporting documents imply that non-Indigenous people don’t belong to Australia as much as Indigenous people.
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Warlpiri/Celtic woman, spoke to this question in her maiden speech to the Australian Senate.
Instead of division and race discrimination, she said that “Our nation is not simply black and white. We are rich with the contribution of Australians of many backgrounds, 30 percent of who were born overseas—and this is one of our greatest strengths as a nation.
“My elders taught me that any child who is conceived in our country holds within them the baby spirit of the creator ancestor from the land. In other words, Australian children of all backgrounds belong to this land. This is what I know true reconciliation to mean.”
Senator Nampijinpa Price called for Australians to “stop feeding into a narrative that promotes racial divide, a narrative that claims to try to stamp out racism but applies racism in doing so and encourages a racist overreaction.”
Foreign Values?
The Uluru Statement also contains a section on sovereignty and Terra nullius that raises further concerns.
The Uluru statement refers to, “a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”
This text is almost identical to the opinion of Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya, senior president of the Supreme Court of Zaire.
Cited by Lebanese jurist Fouad Ammoun during the 1975 proceedings of the International Court of Justice (pdf), it speaks of, “a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the man who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”
This statement found its way through the Mabo judgement and into the Uluru Statement. The Uluru Statement does not acknowledge its source.
At one level, this appears to be plagiarism. At a deeper level, it raises the question of whether the Uluru Statement reflects genuine Aboriginal values, or whether it reflects African values articulated by a Lebanese jurist.
The Uluru Statement and the dialogues that led to it speak of the genuine hurt and extreme suffering of Australia’s Aboriginal people.
However, The Voice in its current form,
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