The impotent are pure: resonances between the USA’s and Australia’s approach to Indigenous policymaking

 

…you must not make the full show of this

till you may do it without controlment

Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, scene 3.

 

The New Yorker recently published a profile of the current Secretary for the Interior, Deb Haaland (link here).Haaland is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo (link here).

 

Haaland’s personal history is both interesting and inspiring, and the profile does a good job of fleshing this out. It is worth reading on this count alone.

 

However, I found the article even more insightful for its description of the policy history of the US Department of Interior, and the policy complexity and competing priorities involved in its administration. Issues such as the history of forced removals to boarding schools, punitive approaches (including imprisonment) to non-compliance with policy directives, litigation over the government’s mal-administration of billion-dollar trust funds set aside following treaties, and the ongoing trauma of such policies are explored and considered.

 

What struck me most while I was reading this were the parallels and resonance with both what has occurred, but more saliently, what may well occur in the future here in Australia in relation to Indigenous policy.

 

There are numerous themes in the profile which resonate to a lesser or greater extent. Without suggesting that there are not other more important conclusions relevant to Australian policy, I would pick out just two inter-related themes to highlight.

 

The profile makes crystal clear in numerous ways (both direct and indirect) that successful policy advocacy and influence is inherently political in both its formulation and execution. In my previous post discussing the recent Economic Inclusion Report I made mention of the Committee’s approach as being simultaneously ambitious and pragmatic. The theme of the necessity of strategic pragmatism also emanates from the Haaland profile. I am reminded of Gough Whitlam’s speech to the 1967 ALP Conference (link here) where he famously argued for internal reform of the ALP, and against reliance on the construction of ‘a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles.’ He went on to comment wryly and famously, ‘certainly the impotent are pure.’  

 

The second theme relevant to Australia that the Haaland profile highlights is the longstanding tactic of US Government, and the Department of Interior in particular, to co-opt Indigenous leaders and organisations. Co-option of Indigenous interests has a long history in Australia but is rarely analysed or discussed directly. So too is there a long history of Aboriginal people and organisations seeking to pro-actively engage with non-Indigenous actors to achieve their own aspirations and objectives. The anthropologist Bill Stanner, in his 1982 article on Aboriginal humour (link here), recounts the following story:

At a mission station which I know, a certain conflict was raging. The issue was between what the old Aborigines wanted to do, and what God wanted them to do. The matter was not at all clear to the Aborigines. They knew what they wanted. They were being told what God wanted. They thought there was something second-hand about the instructions. The questions turned on how their instructor knew what God wanted. Some said the clergyman just knew; others that he only said he knew; both these unreasonable theories failed to convince them. One man finally volunteered: ‘might-be him got telephone longa God’. I was appealed to. Did he or didn’t he? I said I did not know, but that I had always found the clergyman truthful. I also said that he had a lot of tea, sugar, flour and tobacco. This argument appealed to the Aborigines. One of them said: ‘That man, him good man, y’know. Him got plenty everything. Plenty tucker. Plenty wian [i.e. tobacco— the word also means human excrement]. Plenty mouth [i.e. words]. Might be him got plenty savvy-belong-himself [i.e. private knowledge or wisdom]’. I said that this might be so. I was then asked if I had a telephone. I said that I had; but it was only a small one. ‘You savvy belong God?’ I was asked. I said that I sometimes thought I heard a voice, a long way away. I was asked what the voice said. I replied that I could not quite make out the words. My inquisitor said: ‘that’s what blackfeller reckon’. I then said: ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ My friend said: ‘Today, tobacco. Sunday, God’. We both laughed.

 

The Haaland profile reminds us that so much policy can be understood as ongoing negotiation between mainstream institutions seeking to co-opt, and their interlocutors seeking to take advantage of what’s on offer while maintaining their own aspirations and perspectives. In game theoretic terms, the outcomes are never pre-determined. But for Indigenous interests engaged in such policy dynamics, without a well-constructed and effective strategic framework guiding their advocacy, the more powerful party in any given context is likely to win and the less powerful to lose.

 

30 April 2024