Dr. Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016) is widely known as the historian that founded the field of settler colonialism studies. Being Australian, much of his work focused on Australia. But since the U.S.A. is also a settler state, Dr. Wolfe's work is equally helpful to U.S. Americans who want to understand how America came into being, and what it continues to be now.
Pinky interviewed Dr. Wolfe in 2009 in her hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, while he was visiting the University of Hawaii to give a series of lectures. In this interview Dr. Wolfe answers Pinky's questions about what settler colonialism is and why people (especially settlers!) should learn about it. He also reflects on some of his experiences teaching students about this most important subject.
This is a fairly long interview, but if you read through the whole thing, by the end of it you'll probably find that at least some of your most basic ideas about the world have been smashed to dust. In a good way.
This interview has been edited for length (just a little) and also to make it more easily understandable in written form (a bit more).
Drittens & Pinky, editors.
January, 2024
Pinky: Hello, Dr. Wolf, and welcome to The Pinky Show.
Patrick Wolfe: Thank you, Pinky. It's good to be here. Call me Patrick, please.
Pinky: Oh, okay… Patrick. So. What is "settler colonialism?"
Patrick Wolfe: People talk about colonialism as if it's one thing. They say, for instance, "British colonialism." Well, British colonialism encompassed British India, where a small minority of Englishmen dominated hundreds of millions of Indian people. British colonialism also covered, say, North America, where in addition to dispossessing Natives, the British brought enslaved Africans. British colonialism also refers to somewhere like Australia, where the relationship was only between the British and the Natives, who were effectively removed from the landscape to a great extent through genocidal techniques. These are all examples of British colonialism, but they aren't all settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism refers to the kind of colonial project that Native people confront, in which the colonizers want to replace them. Settlers come to remove Natives from their land and in their stead build a new settler society. So unlike, say, a relationship of slavery, where the colonizers require the bodies of laboring slaves and go to substantial lengths to preserve slaves' lives and buy them and sell them as valuable commodities, in the case of a settler-colonial relationship with Indigenous people, rather than being valued for their bodies, Indigenous people are only valued for the land that can be taken from them.
Thus, the logic of settler-colonialism is what I call a "logic of elimination." It's a relationship in which the Native is removed - gotten rid of in all sorts of ways - so that the settler can replace them. Accordingly, unlike somewhere like, say, British India, there's no 1947 that comes along when all the white guys go home and suddenly the faces in the legislature change color. That certainly hasn't happened yet for Indigenous people. They become demographically overwhelmed, they become a minority - and I mean that numerically - within settler society. And the problem that Natives confront is just one of survival, of resisting assimilation, which is a way of getting rid of them by converting them into settlers. Therefore to distinguish different types of colonialism, you have to start with the experience of the colonized people.
Pinky: So settler colonialism is about settlers eliminating the Indigenous people so that they can build their own society on their land?
Patrick Wolfe: It's about the relationship between Natives and settlers, yep. And it's almost invariably connected to other relationships as well. Take for instance, the North American situation. The settler colonization of Native Americans coincided, was part and parcel with the enslavement of Africans - the two went together. The best known theory of private property in European liberal thought is that of John Locke. John Locke argued against an aristocracy, for a new middle class who were wanting to take power, wanting to have property ownership of land themselves - things they'd been barred from by the aristocracy. These people were arguing, you know, we go out and work on this land, we make something with it, we make it more efficient, we render it capable of supporting a larger population, we do all these industrious kinds of things - therefore we should be entitled to it. And Locke argued that private property comes about - is earned - as a result of mixing labor with land. Now, in a colonial system - and here the North American case is easiest to describe - the labor was provided by enslaved Africans, and the land was provided by Native people who were being dispossessed. So the Lockean formula, as it worked out in the American colonial situation, was kind of color-coded: the mixture of black labor and red land produced white private property. So they're integrated, they are part and parcel of the same overall process, but it is vital to distinguish the Native experience - which is one of settler colonialism - from those of others.
Pinky: It sounds like what you're describing is inseparable from other historical processes - specifically, imperialism and capitalism. So if people ask you to tease out the differences between these three mechanisms, how do you start to explain that to them?
Patrick Wolfe: Well, I'm not sure that I want to tease out the differences to the extent that they lose their integration, because you're absolutely right, they are completely integrated. Colonialism changed form as capitalism developed, but also vice versa. It is crucially important to see the emergence of European capitalism (the same goes for European science, philosophy, and all the rest of it) not as if it was something - the word is autochthonous - something that happened just within Europe, as if it was spontaneously conceived on European soil. European capitalism only developed as a result of colonialism. It is colonialism that produced the wool, produced the cotton, for the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire and these places. The raw materials came from the other side of the Atlantic, part of the so-called "Atlantic Triangle." A ship would be loaded up in a European port with trade goods, which would then be taken down to the coast of West Africa, and exchanged for human beings. They would take weapons, they would take alcohol, they would take coloured cloths, they would take iron bars, various things which were African trade commodities. They would then be exchanged for enslaved captives who would be taken through the appalling Middle Passage across to the Americas, where they'd be exchanged for plantation produce - cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, whatever it may be, and that in turn is then taken back to Europe and exchanged for trade goods to go down to Africa. So it's a triangle and the enslaved people from Africa are providing the labor on the plantations that produce the goods that are part of that system. They're also of course involuntarily participating in the dispossession of the Natives whose land that plantation is built on. So these components are closely linked. Unless we understand these relationships, we're stuck with seeing capitalism very narrowly and unrealistically as something that just developed within Europe. It didn't. It developed globally as an imperial relationship. The West only became the West through its relations with the rest. And what transformed Europe simultaneously transformed Africa, much for the worse, and simultaneously transformed the Americas, much for the worse. The three occurred together in coexistence and mutuality with each other. So you can't say capitalism without thinking "a global imperial system."
And that's only the production side. Consumption's another side, and exactly the same argument applies. The Englishman's sweet tooth came out of, first of all, slave plantations of sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean and so on, but also tastes had to be developed and cultivated so that goods would be consumed on a large scale, not only in Europe but also out in the colonies. Markets had to be built. So in addition to their roles in the production of stuff, the Natives and the enslaved are made to become consumers for these markets. This is why Gandhi's Khadi campaign was crucially important. [Editor's note: Khadi means "homespun" in Sanskrit-based languages.] At the time, Indians were not allowed to make their own clothing. They were made to purchase the products of cotton mills in England. They'd grown the cotton in some cases. Much of the cotton was grown in India and Egypt as well as the [American] Deep South, taken over to England, finished up into garments, then shipped back to India where these products could be sold to the colonized. You've probably seen pictures of Gandhi with a loom - that's not just about hippies who like it because it's earthy and natural. It's not that at all. It's about refusing to participate in the colonial market, and that was profoundly radical.
Pinky: Let's talk about the term. Who are the "settlers" in the term "settler colonialism?"
Patrick Wolfe: Settler is a much abused word. Just because there were settlers in, say, French Algeria or British Rhodesia, it doesn't mean that these were settler colonies. In both cases, the colonizers were minorities that depended completely upon Native labor. In other words the fact that there's settlers present does not mean it's settler colonialism in the manner in which I'm talking about. And sure, if there's Natives around, they're going to be used and exploited. They're going to be used as guides and trackers and cheap labor and sexual labor and all these kinds of things, but the primary relationship between settlers and Natives is not one of elimination, as it was in places like, for example, Hawaiʻi or Australia or British North America. In these places the settlers' intention was to get rid of the Native people and replace them with themselves. So when I say settler, I'm talking about a member of a community which is in an all-or-nothing, zero-sum contest with the Natives for possession and occupation of Native land. And that, I think, is a definition which I need to adhere to quite strictly.
So in the context of settler colonialism, a settler is anybody who is not Native. So in the North American example, the European colonizers are settlers. And yes, enslaved Africans also became settlers in North America. I'm not saying they wanted to be. The point is it doesn't matter whether they wanted to be or not. From the Native point of view, they have come and replaced the Natives, whether they liked it or not. And they helped to build the new settlement? Absolutely. Involuntarily, coerced and all the rest of it. Doubtless the same could be said for, say, Japanese or Filipinos brought in to provide cheap labor for the sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi - also settlers. I'm not saying they don't suffer or something like that. Of course not. But the point is they are not Native and they have replaced Natives.
Pinky: You used the term "logic of elimination." Could you give me an example of what that is - maybe something from history, but also a contemporary example too?
Patrick Wolfe: Okay. I use the term logic of elimination for a couple of reasons. One is because I don't believe that settler colonialism is always inherently genocidal. It often is, obviously - where two groups of people are contesting over one piece of land, the possibility of genocide is never going to be far away. But it's not always genocidal for various reasons. So I use the term logic of elimination, firstly, to distinguish settler colonialism from genocide, although they overlap substantially. To be able to make clear that certain, often even benevolent-looking policies are consistent with this basic settler colonial need to remove the Natives and to replace them. So at its most obvious, you can say, yes, frontier massacring and wars and homicide - that obviously fits into the logic of elimination. So that's an easy case, we don't need to waste our time arguing about that. But what happens after the dust dies down on the frontier?
What happened in Australia after the murderous activities on the frontier was that Aboriginal people were confined to missions and reserves and things. Even the state-run reserves, they always appointed missionaries as head of them, so you might as well call the whole lot missions. Now, as opposed to the rhetoric of marauding savagery, which characterizes frontier talk, you know - "The natives are out to kill and rape our women and take our property! Let's send out a posse and murder them!" As opposed to that rhetoric, the rhetoric of the missionary project sounds very philanthropic. In Australia, settlers would say, "We are here to smooth the pillow of a dying race, and to make their passing comfortable." This is the 19th century, so according to Social Darwinism, Aboriginal people were just denizens of the old stone age, Paleolithic people who in Europeans were encountering their immeasurably distant future, who were much fitter and selected by history to survive. So it wasn't that we killed them, it was just somehow written into the laws of nature that they would pass - "That's the way evolution works." So, to look after them during this period where they would fade out of existence was seen as a philanthropic, charitable kind of thing to do. So the rhetoric used by the missionaries did look entirely different from frontier rhetoric, but hello, what's the effect in terms of the settler colonial agenda? Well, it gathers Native people together, thereby vacating their erstwhile territory and rendering it available for nomadism, pastoral settlements, and all the rest of it. So, it doesn't matter whether you're murdering people and calling them savages, or rather being paternalistic and benevolent - the effect is the same, it's consistent with elimination.
Go another step further into the 20th century, and this applies in North America as well and Australia, but I'll stick with the Australian example just having gotten this far with it. Australia became a notionally independent country in 1901. White settlers wanted to turn Australia into a "white man's paradise" and right away created what's known as the White Australia policy, whereby people of non-Anglo descent were scheduled to be "returned" whence they came. Now this could be a third-generation Chinese person whose grandparents came in 1850 for the gold rush, didn't speak a word of any language other than English - they'd get sent to Shanghai. Could be an Afghan cameleer, could be a sugar cane worker from Fiji in North Queensland. All these non-white people were scheduled to be pushed out of the country, and in some cases they were and in some cases they successfully evaded all this. But what about Aboriginal people? There's no way you can put Aboriginal people on a ship and send them somewhere else where they presumably belong. So the internal correlate to the external policy of deporting people of color was an assimilation policy, which culminated by the middle of the 20th century in a policy of taking so-called "half-caste" Aboriginal children away from their families, the so-called Stolen Generations. And this was couched in racial terms, that lighter-skinned kids should be taken because it was considered shocking that somebody with "civilized blood" - "white blood" - would be allowed to grow up in an encampment of savages. Bogus anthropological theories were used to prove that Aboriginal people could be safely "bred white" without any fear of atavistic throwbacks. It was all safe to adopt them.
My point here is that by breeding people white, you are eliminating them just as surely as whether you put them on a mission or if you'd shot them on the frontier. The point is demographic removal. So when you ask me about why I use the term "logic of elimination," it's to encompass that versatility, that range of very different strategies which subtend a common settler colonial end.
And going right up to the present as you asked me to, consider the example of blood quantum in Hawaiʻi, wherein anyone applying for a Hawaiian homestead lease has got to have at least 50% Native Hawaiian blood. Okay, I may not understand the details very well, but I understand fully what's going on there as soon as the words "blood quantum" is mentioned - Natives are being excluded from the Native category. They're officially being eliminated and their numbers are being reduced for official purposes. That's the logic of elimination.
Pinky: One of the things that I often see settlers here in the United States do is to try to claim Indigeneity for themselves. They say things like, "Hey, my family came to America a long time ago, so I'm basically just as Native as Native Americans", or something stupid like that. Isn't this also just another way of trying to eliminate Native people?
Patrick Wolfe: I've noticed in the United States a lot of people say, for example, "Well my family has been in the U.S. for three generations and therefore we can claim to be Native because I was actually born here." People don't seem to differentiate based on where their people come from. There are white people in New Zealand making land claims under the Maori treaty as Native title claims on exactly that basis. Of course if somebody is born in a country they're native to that country, "native small n." That just means they're born there. But there is a difference between being born somewhere and belonging to the Native community. European liberal discourse most stridently resists anything which is not individualist. Corporate identification as a member of a community, in my view, means that the person, the individual, should number one, identify as a Native, and number two, that identification should be ratified and endorsed by the Native community concerned. Those two things are required. And that can [still] apply if somebody was born overseas. It's not actually got to do with your place of birth, it's got to do with your collective identification.
Pinky: I wanted to ask you about the United States in particular. Sometimes it feels like Americans have a habit of trying to analyze every social issue there is through the lens of race. How do issues of race help people to lose sight of Native-settler relationships within settler colonialism?
Patrick Wolfe: You're good Pinky, that's exactly I think one of the most important issues that there are. The reason that I find it so important is that race above all obscures history. Terms like "People of Color," covers Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, and so on - these are all People of Color. Yet they are communities not only with entirely different histories which have gone on in different parts of the globe, but they also are communities with quite separate relationships to imperialism and to U.S. capitalism all around.
Pinky: Yeah, I think here in the United States, in the public imagination, Native Americans are thought of as being, like, "just another ethnic minority," even though it's only Native Peoples' land that the United States was built on.
Patrick Wolfe: [nodding] Earlier on I pointed out that enslaved people involuntarily contributed labor to a system to which Indigenous people also involuntarily contributed land. Now that distinction plays right through in racial terms. By the end of the 17th century, with very, very few exceptions, if either of a child's parents was an enslaved person, that child was also a slave as soon as they were born. The obvious reason being, slave owners didn't want to be breeding "non-valuable" human beings. This logic continued into post-emancipation racial classifications as well. Consider the Virginia anti-miscegenation legislation of 1924, a law designed to preserve [white] "racial integrity" by prohibiting interracial marriage. It defined anyone with even one African ancestor, no matter how distant, far back or remote that ancestry was, to be Black. Called "the one-drop rule," this definition made a person Black regardless of what they looked like phenotypically.
But! Even at this incredibly high watermark, that high point of American racial strictness, that same legislation contained what was known as the "Pocahontas exception" - a clause that specifically allowed for descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas - that is, people with Native American ancestry - to be called "white." They didn't have to be called "colored." Now, the reason that's a crucial exception is because for the objectives of settler colonialism, Native people have always been very easily converted into whites. In contrast to African blood, which seems to have this miraculous potency that'll overwhelm any amount of any other blood - you're always going to be Black no matter what, right? - Native blood is almost the reverse. Any admixture of settler blood compromises your Nativeness, you become a so-called "half-breed" or whatever it is. Ultimately, you end up being, like in the Australian situation, bred white. So to say that this is all about color or race is actually to disguise those very different historical relationships which feed through into racial discourse, which is there as a kind of trace of the initial relationships Europeans used to co-opt those populations in the first place. Race is a way of not having to talk about that kind of thing. It's a way of talking about nature and biology and stuff, rather than history and struggle.
Pinky: So are these claims of America being this kind of model, multicultural society is ultimately just another strategy for obscuring its settler colonial structure?
Patrick Wolfe: In a word, I'd say yes. I feel more confident talking about Australia, where certainly the answer is yes, absolutely, no question. Our telephone directories are a living, practical multiculturalism. We have this mosaic of happy faces on the back cover, and they're all recognizably different colors and different ethnicities, and the one in the middle is bound to be Aboriginal, you know? It's kind of like, "Hi! Here we are, all People of Color!" It blends out the Indigeneity completely. And in that way multiculturalism becomes a new, and I think much more insidious and threatening, form of assimilationism.
Pinky: Just so you know, we have those telephone books in the U.S. too.
Patrick Wolfe: Right, Pinky? [laughs]
Pinky: I wanted to ask you about 2007, when the UN passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. What's the significance of that? Is it only important for Indigenous Peoples, or is it also relevant to non-Indigenous people too? [Editor's note: The text of the document is here. ]
Patrick Wolfe: Another good question, Pinky. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples took a lot of fighting for, something like 20 years. A whole lot of Indigenous people had to give up being in their homelands and go live in Switzerland, mainly, all that time, to try and get this thing through. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples certainly has limitations. However, symbolically, the fact that certain settler governments - Australia in particular - that originally resisted signing it, were brought to make an acknowledgement that there exists a global Indigenous community, and that this acknowledgement took place at the United Nations level, I think this is significant. Because once the fact of colonial violence is acknowledged, Native people don't have to keep proving that it actually happened anymore. So from that point of view, it's a very important thing.
It's also a creature of its times, and these are very, very significant times for Indigenous people, which is, in a nutshell, the age of the internet. Indigenous people have always been overwhelmed by settlers. In contradistinction to Natives, there are always more settlers where the first ones came from. In the case of Australia, if they run out of English, then they bring half of Ireland, or Italians, doesn't matter. There can always be more settlers from elsewhere, as opposed to Native communities, which reproduce themselves within a fixed, local context. Now, the internet provides possibilities not only for Native people to get together and to exchange information, to exchange strategies, exchange historical experiences and so on, but to actually step outside that local confinement and be able to operate, for instance, at the UN level. In the case of Australian Aborigines, an Aboriginal person might say something like, "We don't get a look in at Geneva. Who are we, this small group of people?" But when there is a global Indigenous constituency, talking as one through the internet, this makes a very large difference. And I think that the UN declaration is a symptom of that difference coming about, as well as anything else.
Pinky: Okay, but why would something like this be necessary if they already made a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948? I mean, since Indigenous people are obviously humans, what does the Indigenous rights document do that the human rights one didn't cover?
Patrick Wolfe: Well, it's back to this question of the specificity, the particularity of Indigenous peoples' relationship to colonialism, which is one of confronting elimination. And that is something that all Indigenous people share. Say, for example, Palestinians, Tibetans, people from West Papua - you know, all sorts of people who aren't necessarily being colonized by white Europeans. People who are engaged in a territory-based struggle for simple survival are a separate category from humanity as a whole.
To go back to the distinction between African Americans and Native Americans in the U.S., this is very, very crucial because so long as the bearer of rights is the individual citizen, Natives don't get a look in. There's always more of everybody else. They always get outnumbered, okay? Thus, it is very, very significant, it seems to me, that during the civil rights movement (post-Brown, in the 1950s and 1960s), that what African Americans were struggling for, and ultimately achieved - how so ever formally, but you know, at least formally achieved - was to be treated equally with white people. Roughly, something like that, okay? Allowing Native Americans to be treated equally with white people is to take away their reservations, is to give them "one person, one vote" (since they're always going to be outnumbered). The refusal to acknowledge them collectively is precisely Indian people's greatest threat, which is what they have to confront. This is what Indian Affairs during the 1950s was all about - the termination of treaty relationships on an individual basis, whereby Indians would have to leave the reservations and go and live in places like Los Angeles or Chicago. What that was about - ostensibly a campaign to make Indians U.S. citizens on an equal footing with everybody else - what it was actually about was breaking down the reservation, breaking down tribal communities, and making them into "individuals." So a declaration of human rights applies to individuals all over the world. A declaration of Indigenous rights applies to tribal communities or to other collectivities in a way that distinguishes that kind of collectivity from ordinary nation-state liberal individualism. And the unit is collective rather than single. That's what's particular about them.
Pinky: Okay, thank you, that makes it a lot clearer. Next question. When I hear you talk about settler colonialism - the study of it, the analysis of it - what is the objective of trying to make people understand what settler colonialism is? Is it part of a long-term political project? Like, do settlers need to know these very painful histories so that we can try to stop settler society from perpetrating so much violence against Native people? Do we use this knowledge to make sure Indigenous people get back their land?
Patrick Wolfe: That is so difficult, because… I mean, yes - sorry - in a word, yes. But what might that end look like when Native people are so enormously overwhelmed? To be realistic the odds are so enormously stacked against them. What is it that they can do? Sovereignty is the major question at issue here. And it may be that territorial sovereignty to any significant extent is becoming increasingly less feasible. I mean, you know, previously enslaved people can get reparation. They can get billions of dollars. The only reparation that Natives can get is territory. And they're not going to, you know, to any significant extent because it's exactly the same territory that forms the foundation and basis of the nation state. So it seems to me that we have to think about devolved sovereignties, about shared sovereignties. Rather than see sovereignty as just one monolithic thing, we have to see it as bundles - bundles of rights and obligations and duties and entitlements and all the rest of it, some of which are achievable. Language is achievable. A whole lot of cultural things are achievable. The kind of basic human rights to shelter, welfare, clothing, et cetera - all achievable. There can be compensatory measures to bring people back up from centuries of deprivation, which looks like positive discrimination, but it actually can be applied collectively. And allowing Native communities to decide not just means, but ends, is a crucial thing. What tends to happen in most settler colonies is that even around the question of sovereignty, what the Natives are offered is: Do you want way A, way B, or way C to get to this foreordained goal that we've set for you? So the ends are not up for grabs, only the means are. Sovereignties increasingly are going to have to be about Native people choosing their own ends. And that's one of the hardest things for a settler state to live with. It's seen as surrendering, even though it's not territorial.
Now, it seems to me, what we were talking about earlier on about the internet and these global connections, empower Native people to, amongst other things, demonstrate the contradictions in liberal democratic ideology. Take the first Gulf War, okay? What Saddam Hussein did to Kuwait and got away with for something like six weeks, Israel has been getting away with for 60 years in Palestine, scot-free. That kind of parallel can be made over and over and over again globally through the internet by Native peoples, you know, pooling their information and resources. And I think that to try to be optimistic, that realm of contradiction - calling liberal democratic ideology to account on its own terms - is something that Native people are extremely well equipped to do.
Pinky: You're not Native?
Patrick Wolfe: I'm not Native.
Pinky: In your work as an educator, do you work primarily with settler students or Native students?
Patrick Wolfe: Primarily with settler students. We are way behind the United States and certainly Canada in terms of Native education in Australia, Aboriginal education. It's getting better. I established a teaching of Aboriginal history at the University of Melbourne in 1990. This is one of the top three universities in the country - there had not been Aboriginal history courses at that university up till literally 19 years ago. And I was the first person to - sorry it sounds big-headed, it just happens to be the case - I was the first person to employ Aboriginal teaching staff. None of them had PhDs. Why? Only three Aboriginal PhDs in the country in 1990. And they were in medicine, engineering, and education. True. So within the last 20 years, a whole lot of Indigenous people have come through and got themselves "qualified" and now the situation is changing quite dramatically. But the reason that I teach overwhelmingly settler students is because that's the make-up of an Australian university. Very few Indigenous people are at them. It's not by choice or anything.
Pinky: And in your teaching, when your students come to a better understanding of what settler colonialism is, does the information help them to change their relationship to, for example, to land?
Patrick Wolfe: For once, Pinky, there's a flaw in your question from my point of view, which is this - they already understand it extremely well. [ Editor's note: I think Dr. Wolfe thought Pinky was referring to his Aboriginal students; Pinky was actually asking about the reaction from his settler students. ] They are not the people who need the kinds of things I've been talking to you about explained to them. They know it only too well through their family history, through their lived experience. They certainly appreciate a kind of scholarly language with which to express these things, but there's nothing conceptually new to Indigenous people about anything I've got to say. Absolutely not. Historical detail - yes of course - sometimes they haven't got all the details of Australian government policy over two centuries. But in terms of the fundamental conceptual grasp of what is going on and what is the nature of the Indigenous relationship to mainstream Australian society, they don't need anybody to tell them anything.
So far as their non-Indigenous co-students are concerned, yes, a lot of them are greatly surprised, and some of them are strongly resentful, and some of them get incredibly passionately carried away by it all, which is great.
Pinky: I guess I was thinking about, like, here in the U.S., among settler students there's just an enormous level of denial regarding the basic structure of the United States. The basics of settler colonialism isn't understood or discussed in schools. Or outside of schools, for that matter. Start talking about the meaning of settler colonialism and most people begin to slink away, or they freak out.
Patrick Wolfe: So far as defensiveness, I've noticed this with U.S. students. I think it has to do with all these moral philosophical claims to being the kind of bastion of democratic freedoms and all the rest of it. They don't like being reminded that Thomas Jefferson died a slave owner, you know? They don't like being reminded that George Washington owned 145 human beings. It just isn't comfortable. One of the reasons why I said earlier that Australia "sort of" became independent in 1901, is because we never had a Boston Tea Party. We have a constitution that remains an act of the British Parliament to this day, you know? It was handed to us. So it's a different national narrative with a different set of claims about why we're the greatest in the world. Our national narratives haven't got to do quite so much with all this justice and freedom and fairness stuff that Americans have to believe in, which in some important way the Indigenous case in the U.S. so blatantly violates. So I think the defensiveness is first because it does so blatantly violate it. But also I think it's because of the presence of that "three-cornered thing" that the origins of the U.S. is rooted in - it's primarily Natives, it's enslaved people, and it's Europeans. We haven't got that dynamic in Australia. Our slaves were white - rather they were convicts - so they vanished in the second generation. It makes a huge difference, okay?
I mentioned earlier about the Aboriginal history course I taught at Melbourne Uni. A large number would be American students. Sometimes up to 40% of a class of 150 would be U.S. exchange students. This is because one thing you can't do [at a U.S. university] is Aboriginal history in Australia, you know? So a lot of them would choose it, it's different. So at the beginning of the year, you kind of sit down and get to know the group and say things like, "What brings you to this course, why are you interested?" And there was an extraordinary uniformity about the U.S. students' answers. At least half of them say something like, "I have been interested in and involved in the civil rights movement and Black people's struggle in the United States, and so I want to come and look at Black people's situation here in Australia comparatively…" And I'd say, "Right, yep, yep - how about Natives?" And their eyes glaze over, you know? They're comfortable, they're cozy with "Black." That's a U.S. thing about race; race is what you're supposed to look at. But you say "Natives" to them and there's an awkwardness and they'll say, "Well, they're all on reservations…" or something like that, "You never see any..." And I don't know [the United States] well enough to be able to venture all the reasons for why, but I see exactly what you're talking about, and it's very deep and it's very defensive and they're anxious and they're troubled and I think it's a good thing. I think they should be anxious and they should be troubled and they should be threatened by it because, you know, it shows that the process of legitimating the dispossession of Native Americans hasn't been completed yet. There's still openness, there's still gaps that can be exploited.
Pinky: I'm guessing that a lot of people who are watching this program, this may be the first time they're hearing about settler colonialism. For those of them who are understanding the implications of what you're saying and they would like to study more about this concept, can you offer them suggestions on where to go looking?
Patrick Wolfe: I think it is really worthwhile for people to read histories written by Native people, and then to compare those with established "national narrative"-style histories that are, for instance, disseminated in secondary schools. Just putting the two next to each other, I think, is a really important thing to do. I would recommend taking a Native history (of whatever) that's a politically conscious attempt to fill in the gaps and rectify the distortions in the 'standard narrative' histories. So, read that Native history slowly and carefully and think about it, put it down, leave it for a few days, let it all turn around in your subconscious. Then go and get the standard, established narrative that's used in the school system and read that. You will see it through very different eyes. I think that that kind of backwards and forwards dialectical process of reading is a really good way to start.
Pinky: Is that the way you work with your settler students?
Patrick Wolfe: I ensure that they do read a lot of Native writing, and I ensure that they are addressed by a variety of Native people. The students usually come with an image of Aborigines - maybe a traditional person holding a spear and standing on one leg and staring into the sunset. But instead they're meeting a light-skinned person in a suit. It's not what they're expecting at all. It is really important for settler students to see a whole range, or as wide a range as I can get them to see, of Aboriginal modernity. And to therefore disabuse themselves of those stereotypes and to find that a very modern-looking Aborigine can still be above all motivated by local family concerns in a way that would be seen as very traditional in some anthropological textbook. It may look and sound very different in Melbourne, or some suburb in Melbourne, but it works the same way. Exposure to Native people of a variety of levels of attainment within the European education system is also important.
Another thing that's very important for students who are going to go on to be professors and teachers - they're going to be in government and all in these important places - is to learn how to say things straight and clearly. You may be speaking in some instances to Native people who may not have the same educational background. It's a very important exercise because in that way you're making yourself accountable to the listener. And if that person says, "Huh, what's that? Don't understand…" you've got to give it to them again until they can understand it, and in doing so you've made your knowledge in some way accountable. I think it's a really important thing to have to do, to accept an obligation, to share rather than to take.
Pinky: I know you're familiar with U.S. history, the American context. We have a couple million American viewers who'll probably watch this - is there anything that you'd like to say to them, from the Australian continent to settlers in the United States?
Patrick Wolfe: Wow Pinky, thank you for such a challenging question, my head's spinning. I don't want to be presumptuous, okay? But nonetheless there are incredibly important things that U.S. citizens need to know about Indigenous people in Hawaiʻi, about Indigenous people all over the United States. Firstly, "minorities" and "race" - these are terms which disguise and cover over the particular situation in which Native Americans exist vis-a-vis everybody else. Native Americans are not just another minority, they're not just another race, and when I say that I don't mean to belittle minorities. What I'm saying is that the term minority, like the term race, covers over their particular situation, their particular beleagueredness. Settler Americans should be looking at Indigenous health statistics in the United States. They are appalling, they are absolutely shocking, they're like the worst in Africa, okay? And it's going on in their midst. For all sorts of reasons, Indigenous issues are relatively invisible, and that's exactly how the government and corporations want it to be - out of sight. So I would say just try to learn about it. You don't have to go off meeting Indigenous people all the time and being big buddies with them - you know, they might not want you to be anyway, that's not the point. The point is to get it right. See how particular the Indigenous issue is. See what's special, what's specific and unique about it, and just go and look up some of the statistics, it will blow your minds. People need to know this, and stop all this blather about freedom and equality and democracy, because that's all it is, until the Indigenous question is addressed properly in terms of a sovereignty that means something.
Pinky: Patrick, thank you very much.
Patrick Wolfe: Thank you, Pinky.
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