Thanks for attending!Thank you for tuning in to the second webinar of our 2022 series, Critical Public Conversations: Undoing Australia on 18 May. This webinar titled ‘Decentring Settler Futures’, featured Dr Elizabeth Strakosch presenting on her collaborative work with Dr Alissa Macoun. This presentation explores the relationship between settler futurity (Tuck & Yang, 2012) and the violence produced by a settler order permanently invested in securing an inherently fragile claim to sovereign legitimacy. 139 people tuned in live on zoom from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the US, Japan, Singapore, and Canada. Feel free to re-watch and share the recording via the link above. Read on for Themes and Questions raised, as well as info on our next webinar on 15 June. Themes raisedLocating oneself Politically, psychologically, and institutionally, settlers are continually reinscribed into place as authoritative, (white) knowers. In academic spaces this involves a particular virtue position that is always available (to white women in particular) to testify to Indigenous suffering. This is fact, but stating it in itself often becomes a performance of the subject’s supposed transcendence of these dynamics. The question is, then, how to enact solidarity from a place of complicity? What does it mean to act in solidarity from this position without first spending all politics efforts trying to escape that complicity; without trying to reconfigure attempts to escape from complicity as solidarity? Political temporalities That is, the mobilisation of time a political technique. The claim to the future is one of colonialism’s foundational political techniques. Settler preoccupation with their own futures as legitimate, reconciled, innocent, virtuous, or on solid ground in this place, can work to defer demands to orient towards Indigenous sovereignty in this moment, on this day, and contribute to the material struggles that Indigenous peoples are engaged with right now. “Not Yet” vs. “Still Here” The constant settler deferral of political encounter is a recurrent theme in Indigenous policy. That Australia is “not yet” ready for that encounter. And yet, policy making – understood as the work to prepare us for that encounter – is always now and urgent. As Watson and other Indigenous scholars have observed, that future never arrives. It recedes over the horizon without losing its power to authorise violence and colonial action in the present. Yet this claim of “not yet” is met always with the reality of “still here”: Indigenous sovereignty is in the being (Watego, 2021). Indigenous Sovereignty “The myth of colonialism is that it carried with it and applied sovereignty. The truth is that state sovereignty was claimed and constituted through colonialism” (Watson, 2015, p. 5). “Indigenous sovereignties challenge the philosophical premises of state sovereignty as these different forms do not share the same ontology” (Moreton-Robinson, 2020, p. 258). “Indigenous sovereignties prevail within and apart from settler governance… Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld” (Simpson, 2014, p. 11) References
Some questions from the audienceThank you for your presentation, Elizabeth. Very thought-provoking. Q: How do we bring together focusing on ‘struggles not defined by us’ with funding mechanisms and expectations in academia? Since there is no comparison between western/Colonial Sovereignty and Indigenous Australian/First Australians Sovereignty, why is there always a comparison from the non-Indigenous people, especially in Settler Decoloniality? As a public servant, I must work and function in a fantasy, thinking there is a future with the so called successful little steps that are prized from Aboriginal efforts. How can I lead the path into the here and now? Next webinar!Black Stories Matter: the media, power and Aboriginal aspirations Wed, 15 June, 12:00 – 1:00 PM AEST Professor Heidi Norman, Emeritus Professor Andrew Jakubowicz, and Dr Archie Thomas
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