Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism

Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World

Z. Laidlaw, Z. Laidlaw, Kenneth A. Loparo, Z. Laidlaw, Alan Lester

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137452368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so.

1

Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century

Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw

Beernbarmin

In 1854, William Westgarth was sent by the Government of Victoria to investigate the causes of the Eureka Revolt, an armed rebellion by gold prospectors resisting governmental regulation and taxation. As he approached the goldfields along the Loddon Valley, Westgarth came across a community that he had not expected to encounter. Establishing camp one evening, he ‘met … with a man of [the Djadja Wurrung] tribe who spoke English well’. He ‘had been trained here [and] had afterwards settled in the neighbourhood … [he] had married a wife of his own people, built himself a hut … and lived somewhat like ourselves, by his daily labour’. This man demonstrated the resilience of Aboriginal people in the face of an overwhelming invasion, first of pastoralists and then of prospectors over the previous two decades. His presence surprised Westgarth, who had assumed that Aboriginal people had effectively disappeared from the landscape of the Victorian goldfields. The Djadja Wurrung man was called Beernbarmin, and he went on to inform the commissioner

of many interesting particulars of his countrymen. He remembered when the first white man came to this part of the country, about seventeen or eighteen years ago … He was, at the time, a young boy of about eight years of age, and his tribe numbered, according to his estimate, more than 500 of all ages; they were now, he said, reduced to about sixty. He spoke of some great assemblage of black tribes that was shortly to take place in this vicinity at which he expected 600 or 700 Aborigines – the gatherings from far and wide.¹

Beernbarmin led the intrigued commissioner to the Franklinford Aboriginal reserve, a place ostensibly managed by Edward Stone Parker, former Assistant Protector of Aborigines. There he saw a number of small houses around which the Aboriginal occupants were cultivating smallholdings. He also toured a school for Aboriginal children. Westgarth described

about twenty boys … These receive some education, and are trained to labour. A piece of garden is appended to the buildings, and a small lot of hay had been collected together … in other respects the garden had run to waste …The teacher … had the countenance of a philanthropist, and of one who bestowed far more care upon the dirty little creatures around him than most of us would be inclined for.

The next day, Westgarth witnessed the corroboree that Beernbarmin had promised, held on the site that had been used for such a purpose by the Djadja Wurrung long before they had persuaded Parker to help them protect and manage it as the Franklinford Aboriginal reserve. The commissioner was struck by the apparent paradox of Beernbarmin engaging in the corroboree whilst living the life of a colonial smallholder, ‘somewhat like ourselves’. To him, Beernbarmin’s participation in a ritual for which Aboriginal people had travelled from far and wide displayed the restless mobility of his Aboriginal background, even though his own ‘unsettled bent has been decidedly put down’.

Following his encounter with Beernbarmin and the other reserve inhabitants, consisting of a handful of extended families, Westgarth ‘naturally reflected on the future prospects of these isolated creatures, whose kindred and tribes were rapidly disappearing from the world, leaving the survivors as an outcast remnant upon their native soil’.

However, Beernbarmin and the surviving Djadja Wurrung were neither so isolated nor so threatened with disappearance as Westgarth imagined. Like many other Indigenous peoples confronted with settler invasion, they had experienced trauma, depopulation and adaptation rather than passive extermination. The determined retention of access to land was often a vital component of Indigenous survival strategies within a settler world. As Beernbarmin himself told Westgarth, ‘for a time, at first, he did not like either Europeans or European customs’. But now, as his other moniker, Tommy Farmer, indicated, he ‘cultivated and sold produce’.² Telling his own later life story, Beernbarmin recalled requesting a piece of ground on the Protectorate reserve.³ He had cleared and fenced it, borrowed a plough from some of his friends and grown wheat and potatoes for about six years uninterrupted. He was able not only to support his family but also to sell surplus wheat to settlers in Castlemaine, where it was ground into flour.⁴ By the time of Westgarth’s visit, he was also selling produce to the gold diggings springing up only two miles away.⁵

Asked by the 1877 commissioners whether such Aboriginal farmers needed white supervision, Joseph Parker, Edward Stone’s son, replied: ‘No! Not at all … they did it themselves; disposed of the produce, invested the money received and bought and sold’.⁶ Most of the other Djadja Wurrung who had farmed alongside Beernbarmin died through disease or accident during the 1850s, but Beernbarmin and a few others were still clinging on in 1862, when members of the new Board for the Protection of the Aborigines voted 100 guineas for seed wheat, bullocks and gear ‘to enable these intelligent natives to cultivate and sow the land which is certainly their own’.⁷ Back in the 1840s, at the onset of a particularly rapid and devastating colonial invasion of the Port Phillip District (later Victoria), Parker had complained about the Djadja Wurrung elders’ resistance to his civilizing mission, but by the mid-1850s only those who had grown up utilizing aspects of the Christian agricultural practices that he proselytized were still occupying the site of the former Protectorate station, and they comprised the majority of the Djadja Wurrung who had survived the devastating spike in mortality during the intervening decade.⁸

While there has been a considerable literature of late on the British settler diaspora of the nineteenth century, its shaping of an Anglo-world encompassing the British settler colonies (later Dominions) and the USA, and its considerable role in proto-globalization, few scholars have attempted to look concertedly at its inception from the point of view of those like Beernbarmin, who were displaced and dispossessed by it, but who endured its effects and continued not only to claim but also to cultivate space in specific localities around the globe.⁹ Such communities are the main focus of this volume (see Map 1.1). Through contributions drawn from disparate parts of the British Empire and the USA, and from scholars including some whose ancestry traces back to Indigenous subjects, we try to conceive what colonialism looked like from such sites. We try to develop an often overlooked perspective on a globe networked in new ways through Empire.

As Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse have pointed out, individuals such as Beernbarmin/Tommy Farmer and his Indigenous smallholder counterparts were not necessarily being ‘strategic’, in the ways identified by postcolonial scholars, when they enunciated ‘Western’, Christian universalist ideas and performed ‘civilization’ through agriculture. What they expressed was what they really had become, even within the space of a single decade.¹⁰ Diverted through, or raised within, the broader configurations of Christianity, empire, and civilizational discourse, their identities and agency had become irrevocably mediated through them. There was no authentic and ‘pure’ Indigenous identity for them to express in a colonized world, just as there was no authentic and ‘pure’ British identity for colonial emigrants to express in settler societies either. Despite Westgarth’s surprise that Beernbarmin should both engage in corroboree and farm, the ‘Christian, agricultural indigeneity’ of the surviving Djadja Wurrung at Mount Franklin ‘was not a contradiction in terms but a coherent discursive framing of world, history and self’.¹¹

Map 1.1 Global location of sites discussed in the book

The generation and performance of new, Christian, agricultural identities by Indigenous peoples at sites akin to Franklinford in Britain’s settler colonies, and in the USA, however, never guaranteed integration into colonial society on equal terms. Like many other Indigenous groups utilizing the ‘humanitarian spaces’ of the mission, protectorate station or reserve to adapt to colonization in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, a few Aboriginal families including Beernbarmin’s, had successfully survived the transitions occasioned by pastoral invasion. But, also like Indigenous peoples in southern Africa and North America, adaptation was never a singular process in response to a single stimulus. In each of these cases small peasant communities, many but not all living on land held in trust by humanitarian paternalists, were disrupted anew by a mineral revolution following hard on the heels of the pastoral invasion.¹² To the effects of further land loss, judicial interference and unequal governmental support for white farmers must be added, in many cases, the tremendous impact of high adult and infant mortality. While the white population in Beernbarmin’s district, for instance, soared from 6,500 in 1851 to 200,000 ten years later, in roughly the same period, the Djadja Wurrung declined from around 142 to 38.¹³ Beernbarmin and the remaining Aboriginal people of Franklinford would be moved to the new reserve of Coranderrk, the subject of the next chapter in this volume, in 1864. There, as we will see, they would amalgamate with those of the other Kulin nations who sought to retain access to land of their own.

Perspectives from the reserve

This brief sketch of Beernbarmin’s and the Djadja Wurrung’s experiences in the 1850s serves to introduce a number of the overarching themes of this volume. Perhaps the most foundational of them is the analytical difficulty of encompassing the global scale of Indigenous dispossession and resilience in the face of the Anglo-world’s settler invasion, whilst simultaneously comprehending the local particularities of these processes in individual Indigenous communities.

Between 1815 and 1914, some 22.6 million British emigrants resettled in North America, Australasia and Southern Africa, areas amounting to some 32 per cent of the Earth’s land mass. These settlers rapidly accelerated the European appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ lands, waters and resources, a process that had begun in the late fifteenth century.¹⁴ The story of this British diaspora’s colonization has been told in a variety of ways, some celebratory, some condemnatory and others striving for neutrality.¹⁵ However, as we have suggested, few have tried to tell that story from the multiple ‘local’ perspectives of the Indigenous families and individuals who encountered dispossession first-hand, who sought to resist it, to accommodate themselves to it, and to survive on their land wherever they could.

When historians have attempted to tell the detailed stories of Indigenous communities who managed to cling to remnants of their land, they have tended to see them as exceptional instances, punctuating a national narrative of nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler expansion, whether it be that of the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. These particular and parochial stories are clearly relevant to the descendants of their main Indigenous actors, or to contemporary activists, but are not often taken to be the concern of those writing imperial or global history at large. The recent profusion of trans-national and networked historical approaches means that empires are less often viewed solely from their metropolitan heartlands – from London or Paris for instance – and are now routinely analysed as sets of complex exchanges and circuits. But the fact that empires contained small communities of Indigenous peoples struggling to maintain occupation of remote parcels of land, long after such peoples had, to all intents and purposes, been subjugated, assimilated or segregated, is still sometimes obscured in the writing of history at larger scales. In this book we argue that a shift of perspective, so as to view the British Empire and its US offshoot from such sites, reveals much about the generation of place, race, identity and everyday practices within processes of colonization, not just at the local scale, but also at the global.

These small-scale sites of Indigenous perseverance, we suggest, should be conceived as new social and spatial assemblages formed through the convergence of Indigenous and settler colonial networks and agents whose ideas, communications and sometimes bodies too, were mobile across much more expansive terrains. While self-evidently ‘local’, Indigenous communities were simultaneously ‘trans-local’, both before and after colonization, albeit in markedly different ways. In the new Anglo-colonial world of the nineteenth century, they were articulated not only by the governmental, settler, humanitarian, scientific, financial and other circuits of discussion and debate that constituted the extensive imperial networks through which colonizers communicated, but also by emerging Indigenous campaigning networks and circuits of solidarity.¹⁶

The analyses in this volume see these Indigenous sites as central rather than peripheral to the imperial world. They highlight the close relationship between racial categorization and land-holding (a theme that, as Mark McMillan and Cosima McRae’s final chapter shows, continues into the present). They draw attention to the persistent challenges that the ‘hybrid’ and yet ‘authentic’ identities that emerged at these sites presented, and still do present, to settler sovereignty. Finally, they are illustrative of the convergence of new forms of methodological enquiry transcending distinctions between imperial, political, local, Indigenous, family and biographical histories. Such methodological flexibility and integration would not have been possible in a single or jointly authored volume, and without the collaboration of authors, many of them Indigenous, whose own historiographical perspectives emanate from the various locations that the book ranges across. That collaboration seeks to highlight the fact that indigeneity has never been about stasis: connectedness to the land arises from the retention of some control over movement to, across and from it, rather than fixedness. It is about exercising influence over things that are mobile, over the combinations and juxtapositions of people, organisms, objects and ideas that constitute place. Indigeneity is never simply the result of staying put.

Although this book con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 2 Re-imagining Settler Sovereignty: The Call to Law at the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, Victoria 1881 (and Beyond)
• 3 Indigenous Land Loss, Justice and Race: Ann Bon and the Contradictions of Settler Humanitarianism
• 4 ‘On My Ground’: Indigenous Farmers at New Norcia 1860s–1900s
• 5 The Possession and Dispossession of the Kat River Settlement
• 6 Discourses of Land Use, Land Access and Land Rights at Farmerfield and Loeriesfontein in Nineteenth-century South Africa
• 7 Living on the Rivers’ Edge at the Taieri Native Reserve
• 8 Designing Dispossession: The Select Committee on the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fur-trade Governance, Indigenous Peoples and Settler Possibility
• 9 ‘They Would Not Give Up One Inch of It’: The Rise and Demise of St Peter’s Reserve, Manitoba
• 10 Site of Dispossession, Site of Persistence: The Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) at the Grand River Territory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• 11 Potawatomi Allotment in Kansas
• 12 Law, Identity and Dispossession – the Half-Caste Act of 1886 and Contemporary Legal Definitions of Indigeneity in Australia
• Bibliography
• Index