Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies

Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific

M. Brett, J. Havea, M. Brett, J. Havea

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137475473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology focuses on what postcolonial theologies look like in colonial contexts, particularly in dialogue with the First Nations Peoples in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The contributors have roots in the Asia-Pacific, but the struggles, theologies and concerns they address are shared across the seas.

POSTCOLONIAL PRACTICES

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“TERRA NULLIUS AMNESIACS”: A THEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PERSISTENCE OF COLONIZATION IN THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT AND THE BLOCKS TO REAL RECONCILIATION

Peter Lewis

Anthropologist Patrick Wolfe claims that “Invasion is a structure not an event.”¹ In Australia, the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples find the socioeconomic and legal-political structures that evolved from invasion to frame their lives. But for the vast majority of nonindigenous Australians such a notion runs contrary to their self-understanding as people of the “lucky country” and the “fair go.” The hidden nature of the privileges that derive from the structure(s) of invasion mean that for nonindigenous Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues are either removed from their daily existence to be of concern or are merely a source of guilt, confusion, and pity. What tends to be identified is that, as Richard Frankland suggests, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are a problem peoples, rather than peoples with a problem.²

Colonization is a persistent force, particularly when it is unrecognized by the colonizers. Nonindigenous people possess, and are possessed by, colonization. This possession (pun intended) occurs through various processes—amnesia, denialism, and colonial blindness, which create and maintain covert racism and cultural misunderstanding in society, and policy disconnection by governments and bureaucracies. The task of Christian theology and discipleship for nonindigenous Christians in this context is remembrance, recognition, and repentance.

“ALWAYS IN THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE”³

The lens I use for this analysis is a hybrid of liberation, radical discipleship, contextual and covenantal theologies in a postcolonial, post-Christendom framework in which the notion of empire is shorthand for systems of political domination.⁴ In the Bible, empire is exemplified by the oppressive actions of Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome in relation to the Israelites.⁵ According to the prophetic tradition of Amos and Jeremiah, Judah/Israel was driven into exile because she became like empire and forgot her origins as an oppressed people and therefore failed to be inclusive of the marginalized and the stranger. In the Gospels, the empire in Jerusalem is represented as Rome and the collaborating Judean authorities and elite.⁶ Jesus’ mission to Israel is a response to the hierarchy’s following the way of empire instead of the way of the prophets and the Jubilee. Similarly, after the conversion of Constantine, Christendom followed the ways of empire. Instead of being with the poor and excluded, the mainstream church worked under the protection of the empires of the West.

From this, I understand Christian missionary adventurism to be culturally conditioned by the Christendom belief in Western culture and that culture’s right to rule over “uncivilized peoples” in the name of God.⁷ The various European empires’ conquests of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia either led to Indigenous dispossession and oppression or their forced inclusion in the processes of Western trade. These conquests were, usually, accompanied by Christian missionaries who predominantly saw Western expansion as a means to promote conversion to Christianity.⁸ Christendom-infected Christianity provided a rationale for colonial oppression. In Australia, unlike other countries colonized by the British, no treaties were made with the colonized peoples. The acquisition of land and sovereignty⁹ in Australia was based on terra nullius, the understanding of the land as empty and therefore belonging to no one.¹⁰

Of course Australia was not in reality a terra nullius settled and civilized by Britain but a continent under the legal and spiritual custodianship of over 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations.¹¹ The laws of the First Peoples were ignored, as was the spiritual/political/legal/economic nature of their custodial role in relation to lands and waters. Rather than bring civilization, peace, and order to the land now called Australia, British “settlement” brought disease, dislocation, dispossession, and death to the First Peoples. The late Aboriginal poet, playwright, and artist Kevin Gilbert contended that the whitefella colonizing process originated from ancient Rome.¹² The invasion was met with resistance¹³ but eventually most First Peoples were removed from their traditional lands and forced onto missions and reserves where, in most cases, language and culture was forbidden. The structure of invasion, with its disruption of Indigenous economic, political, legal, and social capacity by the destructive process of dispossession, dislocation, dehumanization, and separation of families, remains to this day for both the First Peoples and the nonindigenous. The church’s participation in these processes was one of many expressions of its Constantinian compromise.¹⁴

THE SHADOW OF TERRA NULLIUS THAT FALLS ON THE NONINDIGENOUS

Colonial ways of knowing are not historical artefacts that simply linger in contemporary discourse. They are actively reproduced within contemporary dynamics of colonial power.¹⁵

The reproduction of colonial ways of knowing, as Ian Anderson suggests, not only explain the power dynamics between First Peoples and the nonindigenous but also how nonindigenous people view themselves in terms of their Australian identity. It takes the shape of a terra nullius epistemology which influences our understanding of the imposed structure of invasion as expressed in nonindigenous law, cultural myths, understanding of history and conception of nationhood. For example, the dominant cultural myth of seeing ourselves as victims (of distance or of nature or authority), rather than being complicit in oppression or inheritors of stolen land persists in the national consciousness.¹⁶

The first battle in removing the shadow of terra nullius from our (that is Australian nonindigenous) national consciousness concerns recovery from amnesia. W. E. H. Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lectures mark the time of the beginning of our awakening from the sleep of what he referred to as the “Great Australian Silence.”

Inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absentmindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.¹⁷

The cult of forgetfulness concerns how we view the history of colonization; the violence involved in settlement, the impact and effects of that violence, the questionable nature of the legality of invasion and, most importantly, the reality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws and cultures. This forgetfulness or amnesia helps maintain the structure of invasion—or in Stanner’s terms, the placement of the window. The disremembering of the First Peoples from the national consciousness enables their dis-membering from the Australian body politic. Our amnesia informs our denialism and our colonial blindness.

Mainstream terra nullius amnesia leads to a hegemony which functions in four ways:

• through systemic patterns of denial it deals with the anxiety around dispossession;

• through the power of being the victor who writes history it seeks to control the understanding of history by prioritizing written documents over the oral history of Indigenous peoples;

• through the power of Western science it seeks to objectify Indigenous peoples as others; and

• through colonial blindness it continues to define “best interests” according to the belief that the invading political, legal, economic, and social systems are superior.¹⁸

The above are based on the terra nullius presumptions that the First Peoples are:

• not fully owners of the lands and waters of Australia;

• not reliable tellers of the historical narrative of Australia;

• not subjects who can interpret their own situation; and

• not from a civilized culture.¹⁹

While there is contestation of these notions in public discourse, they persist in the general population and in right-wing commentary.

There is often a failure to question whether nonindigenous inheritance of the spoils of invasion is morally defensible and legally unquestionable. The firmness of our foundations as a nation is assumed despite the lack of treaty or any formal process of land transfer other than through occupation and colonial violence. These questions are placed outside the view from the “window” and their validity denied. But these questions and stubborn facts will not go away by ignoring them; hence our ongoing anxiety about dispossession. The violence of colonization, the questionable nature of settlement, and our foundations as a nation are not mere “blemishes” on our history, as former prime minister John Howard once characterized them²⁰, they are matters that remain unsettled (pun intended). At the onset of invasion, Captains Cook and Phillip were given instructions to seek the consent of “the natives” or “conciliate their affections,” respectively; neither was successful in this venture for a variety of reason...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Locating Theology
• Relocating the Bible
• Weaving Colonial Histories
• Postcolonial Practices
• Notes on Contributors
• Index