Last week the NAIDOC committee announced its theme for 2018. I was suspicious of the timing so went on a twitter rant about it:
https://twitter.com/handsomemurri/status/928713352351588352
A few other Murris (who I have a lot of time for on twitter dot com but don’t actually know in real life), retweeted/smashed that like button on my tweets. It felt like I was on the right track. My position was that given the recent kick in the guts from the government, in the form of the refusal to even engage in a reasonable discussion around having a representative voice to parliament entrenched in the constitution, that it was poorly timed to announce a government-funded Indigenous celebration. The Indigenous people of Australia were being subject to another refusal by the oppressor to share power with us. NAIDOC felt like a diversionary tactic. A distraction. A non-response to what’s important. And just like one of the Aboriginal women on one of my favourite podcasts by Aboriginal women: that made me wild.
Then someone from the NAIDOC committee pointed out that their timing had nothing to do with the timing of the con rec council rejection. I was wrong. I probably confused the theme date with the poster is announced date. My bad. Their timing actually matches up with when the NAIDOC theme was announced in the previous two years (see 2016 and 2017). Not suss at all.
Sorry.
The theme Because of her, we can! is gonna be awesome.
But, what I keep thinking about, and what still doesn’t sit well with me, is the fact that mob seemed to get more excited about the theme than they were upset by the being-fucked-over-by-the-government again. People, mob, got over the hurt and disillusionment and like magic (Because of her, wiccan?) were ready to jump up on that government dick and party. We should be picking up spears, not waving little plastic Aboriginal flags.
NAIDOC Week is dumb
I think it was easy to hate on NAIDOC because I’ve been shitting on NAIDOC a lot recently; call it tokenism-induced diarrhoea. In short, what started as a key moment for the Aboriginal rights movement has been eroded by white nonsense, especially at the national/bureaucratic level. Whilst NAIDOC does have it’s positives, good ole Whiteness has moved in and is controlling what is meant to be an Aboriginal space; that’s colonisation 101 baby!
Australian flag leads the 2017 NAIDOC week march in Uralla, NSW.
NAIDOC week benefits from federal funding. It has support within Australian and Murri communities at the national and local level. Conversely, a lot of strategies that would help drive Murri self-determination are either underfunded or left unconsidered. This illustrates a government invested in keeping us down. Rather than supporting a body to help us reclaim land, language and culture, they’re benevolently providing resources for once a year community celebrations. This tactic does not and will never change social conditions for Murris.
Fundamentally NAIDOC isn’t about sovereignty anymore. It’s about white Australia shaping the Aboriginal community in it’s image.
NAIDOC’s becoming another way for the coloniser to oppress us. White Australia wants to say when and how we can publicly celebrate being Murri. Ask Adam Goodes what happens when you be too black at the wrong time; or ask Cathy Freeman carrying the Murri flag on her victory lap for the first time; or ask Damien Hooper what happened when he wore the “wrong” fucking t-shirt to the Olympics.
Looking at NAIDOC from a decolonisation perspective, the target areas of the Assimilation Policy weirdly overlap with the categories of the annual NAIDOC awards. You could almost draw a line under the top 5 categories, which probably came from community, and the rest, which are very assimilationy:
Conspiracy time – drawing lines between the assimilation policy and categories for the 2018 NAIDOC awards.
In a world without settlers in charge of the purse strings, we could suppose this a coincidence. An u n s e t t l i n g ko-inky-dink. But as it is, the presence of the oppressor in promoting an assimilated Murri as an award-worthy Murri is suss af and we should all keep our brown eyes on it.
Not the actual NAIDOC awards
HandsomeMurri 