View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST provided by The Australian National University

Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country

Francesca Merlan

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the recent emergence in Australia of two small, and now regularly enacted, rituals: “Acknowledgments” and “Welcomes to Country.” These are expressions of recognition, or response to per- ceived neglect and injustice. Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other colonized and subordinated peoples, and includes practices of apology and reconciliation. In Australia, recognition implies expansion the of relationship between categories of people who have been on unequal, distant, and (at some levels) negligible terms as settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized. Practices of recogni- tion are therefore ambiguous: What is to be recognized, and how is recognition to proceed? Here I consider these rituals and their putative origins, structure, content, variations, and affect of participants and audiences. Both rituals cast recognition in ways that continue recent decades of national emphasis on indigenous emplacement, judgments concerning originariness, and authenticity; “Welcomes” also recast relations in terms of a host–guest framework. The emergence of these rituals fosters new kinds of indigenous public expression and receptions of recognition as well as some standardization of both. It is an indication of change, as well as of its limits in indigenous–nonindigenous relationships. [recognition, reconciliation, rituals, apology, indigenous–nonindigenous relations, Australia]

RESUMEN En este artıculo,´ examino el reciente surgimiento en Australia de dos menores, y ahora regularmente efectuados rituales: “reconocimientos” y “bienvenidos al paıs.”´ Estas son expresiones de reconocimiento, o re- spuesta a percibida negligencia e injusticia. Reconocimiento se ha convertido en un tema global, parte de una polıtica´ mas´ amplia de reparacion´ focalizada en indıgenas´ y otros pueblos colonizados y subordinados, e incluye practicas´ de disculpa y reconciliacion.´ En Australia, reconocimiento implica la expansion´ de la relacion´ entre cate- gorıas´ de gente que ha estado en terminos´ desiguales, distantes y (a algunos niveles) inapreciables como colonos y nativos, colonizadores y colonizados. Las polıticas´ de reconocimiento son por lo tanto ambiguas: ¿Queeslo´ que va a ser reconocido y como´ va a proceder el reconocimiento? Aquı,´ considero esos rituales y sus orıgenes´ putativos, estructura, contenido, variaciones, y afecto de los participantes y audiencias. Ambos rituales estruc- turan reconocimiento en formas que continuan´ decadas´ recientes de enfasis´ nacional sobre emplazamiento, juicios con respecto a originariedad, y autenticidad; “el bienvenidos” tambien´ reestructura relaciones en terminos´ de un marco anfitrion-hu´ esped.´ La emergencia de estos rituales promueve nuevos tipos de expresion´ publica´ indıgena´ y recepciones de reconocimiento ası´ como tambien´ estandarizacion´ de ambos. Es una indicacion´ de cambio, ası´ como sus limites en relaciones indıgenas-no´ indıgenas.´ [reconocimiento, reconciliacion,´ rituales, apologıa,´ relaciones indıgenas-no´ indıgenas,´ Australia]

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 2, pp. 296–309, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12089 Merlan • Welcome to Country 297

RITUALS: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND WELCOMES In recent decades, recognition has become a dimension of his article concerns the recent emergence of two small official and government outlooks, with respect to not only rituals of recognition in Australia, enacted on a grow- indigenous peoples but also other minorities. ingT number of public occasions.1 One of them, known as John Torpey (2003) links the global spread of these “Acknowledgment,” is delivered at the start of a public event “reparations politics” to postwar growth of “Holocaust con- and involves a short spoken statement of traditional belong- sciousness.” Elazar Barkan (2006:91) remarks on further ing on the part of indigenous people or groups to the place dramatic developments during 1989–1999 in relation to or region in which the event is taking place. It is usually wars (Africa, Yugoslavia) and transformations in governance delivered by someone in a recognized or official role but (Eastern Europe, South Africa, Latin America) during the who is frequently not an indigenous person. period. Ian Burruma (1999) has said that an identity rooted The other ritual of recognition, “Welcome to Coun- in victimhood “cannot result in mutual understanding.” Cit- try,” has a more complex structure. It involves the delivery ing this approvingly, Barkan (2006:93) proposes that growth by an indigenous person (or persons) to those assembled, and change in what used to be more starkly seen as victim and minimally of a verbal statement of welcome. This may be perpetrator identities informs this new space in national and accompanied by dance or other performance elements such international politics. Recognition is a dimension of broad as small rites of “smoking” (cleansing and purifying with global trends, carrying with it questions about acknowledg- smoke). Welcomes are understood to be based on a general ment and mutuality of relationship. level of acceptance of the entitlement and willingness of the Recent critical work on the concept of recognition gath- person or group in whose name he or she speaks to issue ered pace from the 1990s, strongly underpinned by Hegelian such a welcome. Welcomes thus presuppose indigenous en- accounts (Honneth 1996; Taylor 1994). Simon Thompson titlement and indigenous reception of the audience to whom and Majid Yar (2011) characterize these as based on the the welcome is extended. idea that we are formed by interaction with others, not These rituals are forms of recognition, normative re- independently of them—that we come to know ourselves sponse to perceived neglect and injustice (Taylor 1994). in others. To this certain theoreticians attach the morally Recent decades have seen similar moves in many parts of the positive notion that we can “flourish” to the extent we are world; in states of settler colonial origin such as Australia, recognized, as well as its negative corollary, that a per- recognition has focused on indigenous people who have been son or group “can suffer real damage, real distortion, if colonized, marginalized, and treated in discriminatory fash- the people or society around them mirror back to them a ion (Tsosie 2006). confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of them- In this article, I examine the emergence and variability selves” (Taylor 1994:25). Such concepts of recognition have of these rituals in Australia as well as differing receptions of attracted critical response (e.g., as reifying identity; see them. The structure and content of these rituals reveal con- Fraser 2000) as well as more detailed discussion of the com- tinuing inequalities in capacity to set context by indigenous plementary notion, misrecognition (McNay 2008). All these and nonindigenous people and interests. Though overtly accounts nevertheless presuppose kinds of interdependence. forms of recognition of indigenous people, these rituals re- Efforts at practical realization of recognition in contempo- inforce certain mainstream emphases on indigenous identity rary Australian circumstances imply the existence of ways of and being. They also, however, create a new space for in- interacting—and, to some extent, create them. digenous public presence. While some of the limited writing One thing anthropologists can do is critically engage by Australianist anthropologists on these rituals has tended with this normative move to recognize coming forth from to see them as implicitly coerced “whitefella business,” or as the societies within which we live and practically engage. I the product of liberal cunning, I suggest that they also need suggest that there is liable to be considerable ambiguity in to be seen from other perspectives. Importantly, they are recognition as normative project. In the case of indigenous taken up by some indigenous people and groups in ways that minorities, recognition involves transaction between parties appear to reflect some ongoing convergence between soci- that have been (and largely remain) in relations of inequality etal impulses toward recognition and indigenous responses and separateness. They are now to become recognizable to to it, complicating dismissive moral or political judgment of each other in new ways, through some shared sense of what them. can count as a positive exchange or transaction between them. In settler colonies such as Australia, such transactions RECOGNITION have to do with the question not merely of recognition in a Recognition is one term within a suite of themes and practices neutral sense but also, as some see it, of forgiveness of past having to do with amending historical injustices, including wrongs and kinds of interaction as well as a determination to apology, reconciliation, restitution, and reparation (Barkan “do better”: notions of apology and reconciliation. Others, and Karn 2006; Torpey 2003). It involves deliberate at- however, respond to such ideas of forgiveness and admission tempts to move away from earlier inhospitality to difference with disquiet, unease, or outright rejection. State sanctioned and toward greater hospitality to it that acknowledges the and advocated, recognition involves forms of public expres- worth of other peoples, cultures, and cultural productions. sion characterized in actuality by some degree of novelty. 298 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

Some indigenous supporters seek to validate them as “tra- A striking thing about Australia is the extent to which ditional”; other critics (both indigenous and nonindigenous) indigenous issues are constantly before the public and have regard these forms of recognition as “whitefella business,” been so for decades. Stories about woeful indigenous liv- not engaging closely with indigenous people and concerns; ing and health conditions, welfare reform and jobs creation, and some nonindigenous others see them as intrusive, alien- sacred sites, environmental disputes involving indigenous ating, and perhaps as hokum. All reactions, it is worth repeat- people and lands, the lack of any indigenous–nonindigenous ing, occur in the context of continuing systemic inequalities treaty on this continent, land rights and native title cases, between most indigenous people and their nonindigenous indigenous rates of incarceration, schooling, human rights, countrymen. Interactions of recognition thus have political Aboriginal art, and constitutional recognition of indigenous and social significance well beyond their immediate contexts people, to name just a few themes, are regularly front- of enactment and are freighted with all kinds of legacies and page or prominent news items—in all media, including connotations. Australia’s most conservative daily newspaper, The Aus- Anthropologists have taken up various viewpoints on tralian, which is the biggest-selling national broadsheet (pub- what can be seen as forms of recognition. Many are highly lished by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia). These critical of such efforts, seeing them as unremittingly colonial- matters are disputed, but they are regularly before us. In- ist, even in their liberal and seemingly progressive modes. digenous issues, in short, are treated as unfinished business In that vein, in The Cunning of Recognition, Elizabeth Povinelli by the nation at large, matters of ongoing responsibility and (2002) contends that Australian Aborigines are made to meet repudiation. It is out of this context that rituals of recognition impossible standards of cultural authenticity to gain recog- have emerged. nition in land claims, which have been central to recognition efforts in Australian government indigenous affairs policy STRUCTURES OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND over the last 40 years. Her view has been acclaimed but WELCOME also critiqued (Moses 2011) as limited by dichotomous “re- Acknowledgment involves admitting or owning up to some- sistance/cooption” terms (either resistant to or captured thing, a matter of appreciation, or a declaration made to en- and taken in by them) of indigenous people’s responses to sure legal validity. Acknowledgment rituals are structured state initiatives. Dirk Moses alleges that analysis of state as an affirmation of the entitlement and belonging of indige- measures as nefarious attempts to incorporate and domes- nous persons or groups to a place, typically by an outsider. ticate indigenous perspectives leads to inadequate repre- Acknowledgments are sometimes spoken by indigenous per- sentation of indigenous responses to them and misjudges sons regarded as nonlocal, this degree of externality allowing indigenous agency. The work of another Australian anthro- them to do this (and explicitly provided for in some recent pologist, Philip Batty of Museum Victoria, has long been government protocols for such events). concerned with repatriation of human remains and sacra— Welcomes have a classic host–guest structure in a way yet another element of reparations and recognition poli- Acknowledgments do not. A host is normally someone who cies. Batty has argued that repatriation “can be seen as just has an entitlement or belonging within a domain to which one element in the broader desire for national redemption” the guest is admitted. The host is to be respected but is (2006:60), rather than as responsive to erstwhile owners also morally bound to extend hospitality to the guest. While and their concerns. Gillian Cowlishaw (2011:170) charac- an Acknowledgment may be made by someone without terizes recent (state-led) support of allegedly “traditional” direct address to those understood to be acknowledged, and indigenous cultural expression as creating “myths” about in- without reciprocation, a Welcome frames both parties as digenous people that are “neither instigated nor controlled” participants of the event. bythem.Alltheseauthorscallintoquestionwhethercapacity Acknowledgments and Welcomes are commonly deliv- to demonstrate one’s entitlement in land claims, repatria- ered at universities, schools, government or public service tion, and distinctive cultural capacity is about recognition of events, exhibitions, building or facility openings, confer- “cultural diversity,” as government policy and national dis- ences, sports events, and other gatherings. There is a par- courses might suggest, or whether these efforts amount to ticular sense of their appropriateness at events having to do management of postcoloniality (Morton 2003) and a striving with indigenous affairs and organizations but not only there.2 for national redemption. While there are valid grounds for They seem to be especially common in the large urban such critiques, I think that the recent attempts at recognition seaboard cities and major regional towns where government discussed here are not only guileful but also, on some levels, departments and professional facilities are centered. These soulful, reflecting the desire for inversion of power-laden are the institutional interfaces between experts and intel- indigenous–nonindigenous relations on the part of some lectuals (both indigenous and, more often, nonindigenous) sections of the mainstream population. I also suggest that employed in them, who are aware of “reparations politics” responses to these rituals are diverse, and especially to the broadly speaking, and indigenous community structures, extent that they are regularly taken up by indigenous people, representative organizations, and persons. the rituals are potentially transformative in ways that unitary Attached to the wall of various venues at the university moral or political judgment of them does not recognize. where I work (in Canberra, the national capital) is a generic Merlan • Welcome to Country 299

“Acknowledgment of traditional custodians that may be used been in the past, has been continually exposed to expanding within the University, as appropriate,” which reads: andchangingdemandsforostensiblyauthoritativeAboriginal representation, including at events such as these. I acknowledge and celebrate the First Australians on whose tra- ditional land we meet, and whose cultures are among the oldest The invocation typically involves a short speech— continuing cultures in human history. preferably, where possible, at least partly in an indigenous language.6 Fluent speakership in an indigenous language may This form of statement leaves out any specific “tribal” name. be one local criterion of status and of selection for this role. This strategy is sometimes adopted for places where, as Other elements include dance, music, and sometimes a rit- in Canberra, indigenous originariness is contested among ual purification, usually a smoking (exposure to the smoke 3 competing groups or unclear for other reasons. Such of green leaves) of participants’ bodies, considered cleansing statements celebrate the land as traditionally that of First and renewing. The content of Welcomes varies regionally Australians and tend to focus on the antiquity of indigenous in ways that reflect the history of indigenous–nonindigenous cultures. They also leave judgment open regarding when relations and the nature of local indigenous culture and prac- such an Acknowledgment may be appropriate. tice. A somewhat more elaborate form suggested for use (their own and others’) by an indigenous incorporated body of Adelaide, South Australia, runs as follows: PRECEDENTS AND CONTINUITY? The Tramountanas-North Association Incorporated acknowledges that the In considering these rituals as continuous with earlier ones, land we meet on today, in respect of the Adelaide Plains region, are [sic] or as innovations, it is important to balance assumptions the traditional lands of the Kaurna people and in respect of the Elliston that would count any similarity between present and past District, are the traditional lands of the Wirangu people. practice as continuity against a critical assessment of the na- We also acknowledge the Kaurna people as the custodians of the greater Adelaide region and the Wirangu people as the custodians of the western ture and conditions of the contemporary practices. There is Eyre Peninsula region. no doubt that some elements of Welcomes (such as dance) We respect the Kaurna & Wirangu people’s spiritual relationship with have long been in use among groups of Aboriginal people, their country. especially among those whose ceremonial and daily practices We recognise that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still important to the living Kaurna and Wirangu people today.4 remain more continuous with earlier ones of their people and distinct from those of other Australians. Others are Here an indigenous corporation recognizes indigenous clearly recent. Overall, to see these rituals as simply contin- people and groups and their attachments to land, the wording uous with earlier practices would, in my view, miss what are implying its externality to them. Institutions are encouraged very considerable dimensions of change. In this section, I ex- and given directives for Acknowledgments and Welcomes to plore what we know of Aboriginal greeting and welcoming become a dimension of their protocol. The New South Wales when these activities were not explicitly focused on relations Health Department (2005) specifies events or occasions for with nonindigenous outsiders as a background against which these rituals as including the following: commemorations to place current Acknowledgments and Welcomes and con- and major festivals; area health service meetings; opening textualize understandings circulating in Australia about their of new hospital wards; major policy and program launches; origins. That these rituals are widely understood to be recent conferences, forums, and statewide meetings; and major does not, of course, prevent either indigenous or nonindige- sporting events at which NSW Health is a major sponsor.5 nous people from wishfully identifying them as traditional.7 Forms of welcoming also occur in smaller and more remote Precolonially, Aboriginal people regarded as kin anyone locations on particular occasions, especially ones featuring with whom they had regular contact and could readily extend prominent outside visitors, but in the inland region of the kinship and other forms of social classification to others with upper Northern Territory that I know, I have never yet whom they had less frequent contact. Beyond that range, seen a Welcome to Country of the kind described here in others were stereotyped as strangers, often enemies, and a remote community. Welcomes occur at and demarcate a sometimes distant beings were thought to be monsters—at boundary in a way most characteristic of particular settings least until they came within interactional range and could in which indigenous–nonindigenous relations to place and be considered otherwise. Situations like that of northeast to each other are not presupposable or self-evident. Arnhem Land in which there were regular visits from people The “Welcome to Country,” on occasions of the kinds (Macassan trepangers from Sulawesi) who remained foreign mentioned above, is issued by an Aboriginal person locally were unusual. No particular “welcome” ceremonies are re- selected for the task to open the proceedings. Usually this ported in the context of Macassan visits over perhaps two is someone designated an “elder,” a respectful term that centuries, nor does Macassan evaluation of Arnhem Lan- connotes qualifications of age, experience, and local standing ders as uncivilized seem to have changed significantly, de- (usually grounded in specific family membership, together spite periodic complex interactions, including travel of some with an individual’s ability and willingness to act in situations Arnhem Landers to Sulawesi for periods of time (Macknight in which Aboriginal interests are to be represented before 1972; Campell Macknight, personal communication with a public). The category of eldership, whatever it may have author, March 25, 2013). 300 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

Documentation from various parts of the continent difference more like the local self is the prerogative that (Smyth 1972 for Victoria; Spencer and Gillen 1927 for head waterers and sweat rubbers take on themselves. This the Center; Thomson 1932 for Cape York) indicates that distinguishing act among (relative) equals is based on a claim indigenous people had highly structured protocols for en- of the local to belong intimately to the surrounding country countering others from whom they had been separated for to which the visitor is to be introduced. The second main periods of time and those with whom their relations were point of such small practices is to introduce the visitor— infrequent or distant compared to their more habitual com- not to other persons as such but to the country and to the panions. This documentation suggests that coming together particular forces (including people now deceased) inherent was typically gradual and restrained, mediated by acts and in it. Thus, small Welcomes enact a triangular kind of rela- events of (re)integration rather than outreach as if to people tion in which locals mediate between country, understood unknown. to be sentient and able to be addressed, and visitors. Third, The account of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen the very act of taking on such mediation is understood as an (1927:505) for Central Australia illustrates the restrained aspect of local belonging, which need not be—and in my ex- and gradual nature of encounter. Travellers or visitors to a perience usually is not—formulated verbally at any general camp (singly, or typically in small numbers) made smoke categorical (such as “tribal”) level but, rather, in terms of signals by lighting fires so that their intention to approach kinship between person and place (e.g., a local may address was made clear; they then placed themselves within sight of a sentient locale as “uncle” or “mother”) and is enacted by the camp. The visitor rubbing, watering, speaking. Fourth, from a local indige- nous point of view, such introductions are protective, not does not at first go close up to [the camp] but sits down in silence. simply “welcoming” in the ordinary understanding of that Apparently no one takes the slightest notice of him, and etiquette word as “kindly reception or greeting.” There is a pervasive forbids him from moving without being invited to do so. After perhaps an hour or two one of the older men will walk over to indigenous sensibility that the living country may present him and quietly sit down on the ground beside the stranger. If dangers to people unknown to it and whose being is not the latter be the bearer of any message, or of any credentials, he intimately involved with it. Therefore, practices like head will hand these over, and then perhaps the old man will embrace watering and sweat rubbing, as well as a local’s addresses him and invite him to come into the camp. Very likely he may to ancestral beings announcing who has come to visit, are be provided with a temporary wife during his visit, who will, of course, belong to the special group with which it is lawful for him understood to reduce that element of foreignness that might to have marital relations. attract harm. There is a noticeable olfactory dimension to local be- Spencer and Gillen (1927:505) recount that after the ice longing: people who perform these kinds of acts assume that was broken, people fought over unsettled grievances. Those the country and its living forces are sensitive to smell, that coming together shared a sense of the mores and constraints locals and nonlocals can be distinguished, and the olfactory to be observed, as well as a sense of what were mutually difference between them can be reduced by these small acts. relevant affairs and events, even if there were scores to settle While this aim is overtly inclusive, in my experience the im- among them. This combination of recognized difference plied claim to distinction that Aborigines themselves attend and reintegration in restrained tenor seems characteristic to with social acumen is between those who take on them- of the material we have for similar parts of the continent selves the right, and the duty, to perform such rituals—as from the reports of outsiders who were privy to events they see it, on behalf of others to protect them—and others that remained, at least in the main, focused on the relations not entitled to do so. among Aboriginal people. Since the advent of land claims in the 1970s, such small Anthropologists and others who achieve some degree rites have sometimes been enacted as part of opening proto- of local recognition are aware of other protocols. Some in- col in claim hearings, as protective and welcoming gestures, digenous people (largely those remote dwelling) who live and also as a demonstration of traditionality, highly valued in on country for which they exercise custodianship may enact this setting. In such communities, dance may figure in cere- small rituals to introduce newcomers or visitors to particular monies and as an element of welcoming outside guests, but places: they water their heads from local water sources, rub typically this occurs without the verbal declarations of self- underarm sweat on them, and speak to forebears and Dream- identification that constitute the basic enactments of recent ings at particular locales to make the newcomer known. Such Welcome protocol. practices as these differ from recent Welcomes in important In recent Welcomes, on the other hand, address is to an ways. audience constituted in the event as a “welcome public” in First, interpersonal ritual acts such as head watering and contradistinction to the welcomer(s). A welcome public is sweat rubbing were (and are) applied to small numbers of composed of a set of people who typically came together for visitors at close quarters. Such visitors are typically already some (other) purpose. This is related to awkwardness of fit known in some measure but are coming into closer contact between the Welcome’s host–guest structure and aspects of with the living countryside for which locals consider them- the event structure in which it is performed, as discussed fur- selves responsible. Making visitors who bear some kind of ther below. The audience is typically constituted in terms of a Merlan • Welcome to Country 301 modern social imaginary that assumes forms of strangerhood Sir William Deane, previously a High Court judge and and professional, occupational, or other purposes outside of then the 22nd governor-general, appointed by Keating, was persons as constitutive of gatherings. There may be perfor- a strong supporter of the reconciliation movement and also mative elements, but these may or may not directly engage emphasized the acceptance of moral responsibility. In his the “Welcome public.” There is little, if any, emphasis on inaugural 1996 Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture, “Some making welcomer and welcomed more corporeally alike. Signposts from Daguragu,” he said: Events usually begin with welcomers’ verbal declaration of It should, I think[,] be apparent to all well-meaning people that local belonging, together with a verbal “welcome,” usually true reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indige- in the sense of friendly, receptive greeting. Such events are nous people is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgement ones of “stranger sociability” (Deem 2002), in which indige- by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, op- nous people declare aspects of their identity before people pression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples . . . Where relatively unknown to them as part of enunciating their lo- there is no room for national pride or national shame about the past, there can be no national soul. [Deane 1996] cal belonging. An example below shows that the content of a Welcome, in a region where there persists relationship Such readiness to publicly acknowledge settler respon- to country as sentient and embodied, continues the older sibility for shaping contemporary indigenous conditions be- emphasis on the duty and prerogative of locals to protect came an index of a conciliatory approach. Many government visitors. institutions worked over the reconciliation decade and be- yond to develop public practice or protocol embodying it. As part of its reconciliation effort, for example, the primary RECENT ORIGINS: RECONCILIATION AND Australian multicultural and multilingual radio and televi- RESPONSIBILITY sion broadcasting service, SBS, was determined by the late Most Australians realize that both ritual forms have become 2000s to acknowledge as part of their screen design the tra- part of public protocol in the recent past. Given their re- ditional custodians of the land where SBS offices stand in cency, one might imagine that their origin could be pinned Melbourne and Sydney. By 2010, descriptions and proto- down, but they remain the product of an era of reparations cols for developing and practicing both Acknowledgments politics and, thus, cannot be so neatly located. It seems likely and Welcomes to Country were sections in such documents that Acknowledgments arose in Australian governmental and as the Handbook of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies bureaucratic contexts, energized by actions and statements published by Queensland education authorities (ATSI Hand- that prominent Australian politicians authored and put into book 2010), as well as in those of The New South Wales De- circulation. partment of Education and Training, the New South Wales Reconciliation implies the “reciprocal recognition of the Aboriginal Education Consultative Group Inc., and the New moral worth and dignity” (Verdeja 2009:3) of different par- South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF 2008) and NSW ties as those between whom relations are to be mended. Health (2005) cited above. Protocolization was accompanied A touchstone of settler–indigenous relations in North by bureaucratic elaboration: specification of the elements of America and elsewhere (e.g., South Africa) in the 1990s, the rituals that may be performed, fee structures for ser- reconciliation was institutionalized in the decade 1991–2000 vices rendered, payment methods, possible differences in in Australia. In 1991, the Report of the Royal Commission protocol varying according to whether acknowledgers were into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommended a formal nonindigenous or nonlocal indigenous persons, and so on. process of reconciliation, resulting in that year in the es- In a few years, the practices have become if not required, tablishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation at least highly prescribed and formulated as institutional (CAR), which took initiatives at national and local levels.8 protocol. A speech by Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating in Such readiness to acknowledge settler responsibility has 1992 captured and energized the reconciliation mood. He also become a crucial dividing political sentiment, how- made an address, now often called “the Redfern Speech,” on ever. It is more typically (though not uniformly) associ- December 10, 1992, in the inner Sydney neighborhood of ated with positions of the Australian Labor party (which Redfern Park. A significant indigenous population had lived Keating headed in 1991–1996) than its main political ri- in the area for the previous several decades; they were cer- val, the Liberal-National coalition. Keating’s successor and tain to be a large proportion of the audience. In this speech, opponent, John Howard (Liberal-National Party Prime Min- Keating was the first Australian prime minister to publicly ister from 1996–2007), saw the Redfern Speech as a regret- focus on settler responsibility for resulting and continuing table display of political correctness and a marker of the “soft conditions within Australian Aboriginal communities. He left.” Historian Geoffrey Blainey, not long after the Redfern said: “We committed the murders. We took the children Speech, dubbed this sort of readiness an overly negative from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and ex- “black armband” view of Australian history. clusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice” (Keating The reconciliation decade also saw various “people’s 1992). This grabbed public attention and continues to be movements” for reconciliation as well as pursuit of a fed- seen by many as a landmark moment. eral inquiry into the “Stolen Generations.”9 This became a 302 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014 standard way of referring to (indigenous) children who were dancers.10 Dr. Walley says he was later asked by the North- taken from their parents (approximately between 1909– ern Territory Tourist Commission to perform the Welcome 1969), supposedly for their own benefit, and institutional- in Alice Springs in the mid-1980s. The practice grew from ized or made available for adoption or fostering by other that time, only becoming widespread in the 2000s—that parents, both indigenous and nonindigenous. The inquiry much is clear. culminated in the 1997 publication of Bringing Them Home: Dingo identified the recent rise of Welcomes with con- Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal texts of interaction between Aborigines and other Pacific and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Australian Islanders and its later transfer to “settler” publics. This sug- Human Rights Commission 1997), leading to public pres- gests a distinction between Acknowledgments, which appear sure for the issuing of an apology. The CAR planned the to have been fostered within the Australian sociopolitical first National Sorry Day for May 26, 1998. It placed Sorry context as described above, and Welcomes, which may have Books for signature throughout government offices and busi- emerged in engagement between indigenous Australians and nesses throughout Australia, allowing thousands to express Pacific Islanders around visits and cultural events. Initially, at their support for apology and reconciliation by signing. De- least, they seem not to have been simply a product of internal spite such intensifications in the late 1990s, Prime Minister Australian indigenous–nonindigenous relations.11 Dingo did Howard resolutely refused to issue an apology concerning not say how he saw the connections of the Welcome with the Stolen Generations, issuing instead a statement of “re- earlier indigenous Australian practices.12 gret” in 1999. His semantic guardedness was clear: regret The character of Welcomes varies with place and the involves a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment nature of indigenous and other practices current in those over something that has happened or been done, but it is locales. Kim Doohan (2008) describes the growth of Wel- not taken to entail admission of involvement or depth of comes between miners and indigenous people at Argyle, an sorrow concerning “something that can neither be forgotten important diamond mine site in the East Kimberley, West- nor forsaken” in the way that an “apology” does (Tavuchis ern Australia. Most Australians would consider this a remote 1991:34). area, relatively sparsely settled by outsiders until fairly re- In sum, recently the theme of settler responsibility for cently (though those that came had considerable impact on indigenous conditions was articulated at influential levels indigenous people), and its indigenous inhabitants relatively and entered public discourse. This heightened sentiment “traditional.” Welcomes have come to be a regular part of in favor of reconciliation and public acknowledgment of the miner–indigenous interface, grounded in an intimacy of indigenous identity and belonging. In a counter-movement, indigenous relationship with country. these themes also shaped up as politically differentiating and A diamond-bearing lamproite pipe was found in 1979 divisive. at a site that Aboriginal people associate with a Barramundi (fish) creator. Local indigenous people regard the signature WELCOMES: PERFORMING THE DIFFERENCE diamonds found there as Barramundi’s body fat and internal There are specific but differing accounts of how Wel- organs. At that time, large mining companies were becoming comes arose. Some suggest that they, too, were stim- aware of the need to forge new kinds of relationships with ulated by CAR’s suggestion in the 1990s, which urged indigenous groups, especially in light of an intense dispute in observing protocols and “negotiating with local Abo- a neighboring region. In 1980 the Western Australian gov- riginal and Torres Strait Islander elders or representa- ernment of the day enjoined exploration company AMAX tive bodies to include appropriate indigenous ceremony to drill for oil on what Yungora people had claimed and into official events” (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/orgs/ defended for some time as a sacred site: the pastoral prop- car/roadmap/pg3.htm). erty Noonkanbah in the Western Kimberley.13 Wishing to There is another more actor-specific version. In a blog avoid another such dispute, the Argyle miner, CRA Explo- entry that may have been intended to be derisive, journalist ration Pty Ltd., took the unprecedented action in the same Piers Akerman (2010) recounted a claim made by nationally year of negotiating a Good Neighbour Agreement with in- known indigenous move star Ernie Dingo that he and a friend digenous people local to Argyle. Despite its shortcomings were responsible for the Welcome to Country: (Doohan 2008:22), the negotiation marked a change from It has now been revealed that the concept of the welcome-to- governmental force majeure, which had characterized the country ceremony was made up in Perth by entertainers Ernie Noonkanbah dispute. Dingo and Richard Walley in 1976, after pressure from visiting With continuous debate over the relationship through- Pacific Islander dancers who refused to perform at a festival unless out the 1980s, made more tumultuous by threatened mine they were welcomed with a ceremony, as was traditional in their closure, from 1996 local Kija people began to perform a own region. ritual welcoming, manthe, that “includes an enactment of This has the whiff of disdain for something “made up,” not the host-guest relationship and confers safe passage in the traditional, about it. According to the two men themselves, landscape and protection from malevolent spirits and be- in consultation with Perth “elders,” they devised something ings” (Doohan 2008:117). The ceremony involves burn- acceptable to the visiting New Zealand and Cook Island ing of green leaves and “smoking” those being welcomed, Merlan • Welcome to Country 303 together with dancing and singing of songs connected with Greenop writes against suggestions (Cowlishaw 2011) the Barramundi dreaming. Local indigenous people under- that these rites are to be understood as external impositions stand the manthe ceremony as a means of seeking permission on Murri (indigenous) community. She argues that their from the country and the spirits of old people to disturb the existence is integral to indigenous self-understanding and ground as well as for protection for the outsiders. While internal process, distributed and organized in relation to day and casual visitors are not required to attend manthe, locally significant distinctions. there is apparently debate about whether they should do so. My sense is that these Welcomes are the product of Since 2002, new workers to the mine site have been re- both external influence and community-internal social pro- quired to attend a manthe as part of their induction (Doohan cess, but one must see these as linked to each other and not 2008:118) and to undergo cross-cultural training. Senior separate. The Welcome and other arrangements are clearly people who provide the manthe service are self-selected and products of considerable self-consciousness about the defin- are paid. How people view manthe “ranges from the tradi- ing, supporting, and building of Murri community as some- tional indigenous interpretation to the skeptical cynicism of thing worthy of recognition in, but different from, other some Miners” (Doohan 2008:134). Outwardly, miners typ- aspects of suburban Australia. These concerns have become ically remove their hard hats, bow their heads, and behave internal to local social activity.15 deferentially. Over the last several decades, repatriation of cultural Kelly Greenop (2013) writes of Welcome to Country and skeletal materials has been a significant dimension of protocols that have emerged over the last ten years in In- recognition and reconciliation work. Katherine Lambert- ala, which has been, for the last 50 years, a suburb of urban Pennington (2007:317) describes a Welcome to Country Brisbane (Queensland). The area has a mix of indigenous and pronounced by the chairman of the La Perouse Local Abo- nonindigenous residents. The names of indigenous socioter- riginal Land Council on the occasion of return of the return ritorial groups have (revived?) currency; traditional owning in 2002 of 21 indigenous individuals to this area in urban groups include Jagera, Yuggera, and Ugarapul. Indigenous southern Sydney. La Perouse, from being an early landing people distinguish “traditional owners,” those they regard as place in colonial times, became a marginal area of growing having long-term connections to the area of Inala, from more greater Sydney, the site of an infectious diseases hospital and recently arrived “historicals” (some of whom may claim “tra- a fringe-dwelling indigenous population, and then an indus- ditional owner” status elsewhere). Both phrases reveal the trial suburb. It has long had a substantial Koori (indigenous) pervasiveness of concepts originating in the recent decades population. Speaking as a Dharawal elder, the welcomer ac- of claim and other state-led processes. The number of recog- knowledged the efforts of the Australian Museum and other nized traditional owners is small, as compared to the overall authorities that allow these remains “a proper burial in their size of “Murri” (indigenous) community in Inala. own lands” (2007:317). Lambert-Pennington sees such rites Greenop argues that Welcomes have been taken up as having produced new avenues for Aboriginal representa- in the local community in ways that reflect “transcending tion and as making external organizations “wake up” to the sovereignty”—that is, authority deriving from local par- possibilities of new kinds of relationships with indigenous ticipation, acceptance, and recognition, rather than from people and organizations. state-led processes.14 Some indigenous people eschew in- Reconciliation, acknowledgment, and welcome were volvement in native title, feeling they need not prove very deliberately brought together in an event, “the crown- their credentials regarding land to anyone. A typical Inala ing gesture of a ‘reconciliation’ process” (Moses 2011:146), Welcome is short: which took place in 2008 in Canberra, the national capital, at which I was one of hundreds of attenders. This was an- Good morning everybody. My name is and I am the Jagera other Keating-like gesture on the part of the Labor Prime traditional owner person of this country. I’d like everyone that’s Minister elected to office in 2007 after Howard, Kevin Rudd. coming into our country . . . to know that you are welcome here, you are welcome in the country of the Jagera people. I would like On February 13, 2008, Prime Minister Rudd made a mo- you all to remember the forgotten ones, the ones who are passed, tion of apology to the Australian Parliament regarding the and left us. [Greenop 2012] above-mentioned “Stolen Generations.” In the apology Rudd referred to “mistreatment”: Speaking for country, Greenop says, is done by traditional owners; acknowledgment, or speaking about people and Today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest country, largely by historicals. But, she argues, at events continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past seen as “whitefella business” (such as Welcomes to state mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of representatives), there is a tendency for “historicals” to give those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in welcome speeches and for “traditional owners” to do so at our nation’s history. [Rudd 2008] funerals and football carnivals—more intimate, community- internal events. An Inala Welcome to Country for Babies This carefully selected term—mistreatment—was probably ceremony was innovated in 2011, intended to increase the heard as appropriate in the context of discussion of the sense of community belonging and togetherness. removal and management of children, a topic of heightened 304 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014 public profile in the Anglo-American world in the last few confronts such difficulties, it may be given up or may not be decades.16 considered from the outset—although event organizers feel Public, including indigenous, reception of the Rudd some moral pressure to do so. Apology was largely positive (see Moses 2011), but pre- Kristina Everett (2009) suggests that Welcomes are a dictably it met with criticism from the federal opposition. safe alternative for mainstream Australia, offering relatively At the same time, Rudd proposed that Acknowledgment cost-free recognition of indigenous precedence. But she also of indigenous relationship to the area of Canberra, the na- notes that these events cannot be completely scripted or tional capital, become established as required opening pro- controlled. The Welcome framework can be a vehicle for tocol of parliamentary sessions. Some two years later a first indigenous expression that departs from the expected script. Welcome ceremony marked the opening of Parliament in For example, she details how indigenous Welcome per- 2010, shortly after Rudd had been succeeded as leader of the formers, at an event organized in western Sydney by the Labor Party (and as Prime Minister) by Julia Gillard (June of Australian National Trust to celebrate the location’s colonial that year).17 Canberra indigenous elder Matilda House was significance, enacted—instead of the expected “Dreaming” invited to conduct the opening of this 43rd Parliament (666 story—a shooting of locals by the British. The dying per- Australian Broadcasting Corporation Canberra 2008). One formers refused to leave the stage, creating a spectacle that, of her grandchildren handed Prime Minister Julia Gillard a interestingly, both indigenous and nonindigenous audiences message stick. Gillard declared that “to begin our proceed- evidently found discomfiting. ings with a welcome to country is a powerful demonstration Emma Kowal (2010, n.d.) and Eve Vincent (2012) con- that Australia’s Indigenous heritage now lies at the heart sider welcoming in relation to questions of belonging from of our public life” (PM 2010). Inviting parliamentarians to the perspective of two subgroups of “white anti-racists.” walk through the smoke of a small smoldering fire burning Kowal (2006) has done research with nonindigenous people on Parliament’s decorative mosaic forecourt, Matilda House who work in indigenous health, in whose workplaces and remarked encouragingly, and (one may guess) not without conceptual frameworks whiteness carries a certain stigma irony: “Please move forward and get a cleansing. It helps.” of supremacy. Such “white antiracists” transform their sense At this, however, an indigenous acquaintance commented to of feeling unwelcome, she argues, embracing the position me critically that smoking is meant to drive away bad spirits; of dependence, of invitee, that a Welcome makes explicit. was it appropriate for Welcomes? (personal communication Vincent (2012) explores the relations of “Greenies” to in- with author, September 29, 2010). digenous people who share certain environmentalist (e.g., On this occasion, four different indigenous groups antimining) sentiment and offers them the possibility of par- danced and sang for 40 minutes. That the ceremony oc- ticipating in environmental rehabilitation on their lands in curred in the members’ hall, a semipublic space between terms of a host–guest relation. The focus for both authors is the House and Senate chambers, rather than in parliamen- on “antiracist” acts as opening spaces for change and inver- tary space has been suggested to be a significant dislocation sion of standard indigenous–nonindigenous social relations. of the event from the central place it should have had (see Kowal (n.d.) also notes rejection by those who see both Macauley [2011], who also senses disparagement in com- kinds of rituals as challenges to what they assert as their ments, including those of Kevin Rudd, that the dances were incontrovertible belonging.19 “entertaining” rather than involving or moving). Based on reactions from academic and other partic- ipants in audiences of which I have been part, it seems ETHICS, AFFECT, ENTITLEMENT that while many feel these rituals may be a positive step Many Aboriginal groups have come to consider performing in the indigenous–nonindigenous relationship, there is also a Welcome to Country to be their prerogative. Depend- widespread unease about them. This is not due to reluctance ing on the location and what they do, they may charge in these audiences to recognize indigenous people and be- upward of several hundred dollars for it.18 Many who are longing: willingness to do so is especially great in academic regularly called on to perform pride themselves on offering audiences. Nor does it seem to arise from disparagement of a Welcome they consider to be of good standard. Inter- these rituals as “invented tradition.” While observers some- nal indigenous criticisms seem common, in my experience: times cite these rituals as continuous with “traditional” ones, allegations of inferior or inappropriate performance or ab- there seems to be a more general sense that these forms have sence of legitimacy to perform (see again note 3). Such developed and been circulated and adopted over the last few considerations are sensitive and of intense interest within lo- years. Other ethical issues seem to underpin this unease. cal indigenous communities, and event organizers are often One relates to the fact that these gestures continue the aware of them. Relatedly, sometimes Acknowledgments, Australian state’s long-term prioritization of traditional re- and especially Welcomes, are passed over by event organiz- lationship to land and to specific regions and locales (not ers. A range of difficulties often affects staging of the rituals: simply to the continent as a whole) as fundamental to contention among indigenous groups, for example, and the indigenous self-recognition, as well as to others’ recog- fact that sometimes performers show up late or not at all. At nition of indigenous entitlement. The unease sometimes university conferences when the effort to find a welcomer surfaces publicly around the issue of entitlement to local Merlan • Welcome to Country 305 recognition where it is contentious and known to be so differentiated regard and reciprocity. In Welcomes, what is in academic and government circles, such as in Canberra. the host hosting? To what is the guest being admitted? And What are we to make of this often-notorious difficulty in is the guest going to leave? establishing who is originary with the expected certainty There is some awkwardness of fit between Welcome to and historicity? Event organizers may be put in the position Country events and norms of host–guest relations. Events of preferring no Acknowledgment to having to navigate such introduced by Welcomes are often ones that arise from difficulties. And what of the fact that indigenous people pri- nonindigenous concerns and forms of organization: univer- oritize questions of legitimacy and respond to each other with sity conferences and events, municipal and school celebra- acrimony? tions, and national and international sporting events (Everett While many indigenous people can rightly celebrate 2009). Most of these have gone on for years without Wel- their sense of traditional belonging in particular locales, oth- comes. By the same token, the notional “guests” or audiences ers are unable to because of the considerable dislocations and being welcomed at many Welcome events are fully at home dispossessions that have characterized so much of colonial in them; they are guests or outsiders only with respect to the and recent history. While locatedness is taken to be posi- Welcome moment. It is the indigenous welcomers, many tive, one must acknowledge the pressures that so centrally times, who are actually in the practical position of special foreground it and ask whether this constitutes a mechanism invitees, their timely appearance sometimes in doubt. Fi- of exclusion, allowing a continuing focus on what the pub- nally, the welcomed “guests” are not about to leave; in fact, lic understands as an Aboriginal “high culture” of Dreaming they are usually about to make use of the event space for and territoriality as opposed to cultural conduct of everyday predetermined purposes. life. While the status inversion of Welcomes may fulfill some Second, Welcomes raise questions, not only about who “antiracist” desires (Kowal n.d.), that Welcomes also con- is speaking, and entitled to, but also about whether those tinue to be contested, and reparations politics rejected, is il- speaking may in any sense be seen as having been coerced lustrated by Blacktown’s (western Sydney) Town Council in to do so by public expectations and how indigenous and November 2012 having dropped recognition of Dharug na- other participants see the elicitation of indigenous voice and tion traditional owners from the opening protocol of council presence. Both indigenous and nonindigenous spokespeo- meetings while it investigates conflicting claims from other ple have raised the question of whether Acknowledgments Aboriginal groups. That this is a political statement and not and Welcomes are becoming compulsory and, thus, less simply temporary or tactical is suggested by the fact that genuine—though clearly indigenous people often approach the same newly elected Liberal council, following on two them with commitment and pride. A handful of indigenous decades of Labor local government, has also brought back a people, however, have expressed to me that they sometimes portrait of the queen that had been in storage and prayer feel as if organizers simply want them to perform. And above by an Anglican minister instead of the Labor-mandated I observed that indigenous revelation of identity, and claim “moment of reflection” (Aussie News 2012). to relationship to place, is made the basis for creating a form of “stranger sociability” between indigenous and nonindige- nous. CONCLUSION Third, these events also raise questions of disparity be- Acknowledgments and Welcomes to Country might be seen tween claims to belonging thus publicly enacted and cele- to conform to the postcolonial charge levelled at West- brated and considerable limitations on social and economic ern self-critique (Spivak 1988) and reparations rituals (Batty participation of indigenous people in Australian society. 2006): attempts to challenge or alter the dominance of West- In an article that touches on the subject of Welcomes to ern people and practices thinly veil ways of reconfiguring Country as part of a wider treatment of dance as performa- and conserving that dominance. Put more benignly, some tive dialogue, anthropologist Fiona Magowan (2000) men- Australians are deeply invested in recognizing indigenous tions that she and other academic colleagues were deeply people and rights, and discourses of apology, reparations, divided about organizing a Welcome in 1999 for the Musi- and reconciliation have accordingly circulated widely over cological Society of Australia in Perth, Western Australia, on the past two and a half decades. So far have sensibilities be- the grounds that it might be seen as token and hypocritical— come oriented to recognition of the other as part of what a salve of conscience rather than a genuine contribution to it means to preserve the self that one can scarcely imag- change in attitudes and conduct. ine a recent history without public displays of indigenous These grounds for unease invite further reflection on the recognition, however strongly contested by some. structure of Welcomes. They frame the indigenous person Rituals channel participants into particular versions of or community as host and the settler others as guests. A host social order (Handelman 2004). Acknowledgments and is normally someone who has an entitlement or belonging Welcomes continue to orient their publics to imagery of in- within a domain to which the guest is admitted. The host is to digenous people as entitled insofar as they belong to places. be respected but is also morally bound to extend hospitality This version of indigenous being grew in strength with the to the guest. The host–guest relationship is about mutual but call for land rights in Australia from the late 1960s. Increasing 306 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014 public, including governmental, expression of nonindige- so—with both the structure of events in which Acknowledg- nous responsibility heightened public awareness of indige- ments and Welcomes are performed and broader structures nous conditions in other ways. All of these things have led to of Australian society. greater acceptance over the last few decades of indigenous precedence on the continent and mainstream desire for in- digenous presence in the public sphere. Australia’s passage Francesca Merlan School of Archaeology and Anthropol- through a variety of policy periods and governmental prac- ogy, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Aus- tices has brought some sectors of mainstream, especially tralia; [email protected] urban, Australia to a point of experiencing as oppressive the absence of the (cooperative?) indigenous interlocutor. Posi- tive ways of experiencing indigenous presence have included NOTES art, music, imagery, and advertising. As sentiment changed, Acknowledgments. Thanks to AA’s anonymous reviewers, and there emerged a question for at least some of the public of to Editor-in-Chief Michael Chibnik, for their criticisms and sugges- how the absence might be filled corporeally and in those tions that helped to shape this article. I am indebted to Kelly Greenop public places where people are personally or institutionally andEmmaKowalforsharingunpublishedmaterialthatiscitedhere;to most favorable to recognition. members of the Australian National University anthropology seminar The trend of change toward indigenous recognition in series and the Institut fur¨ Ethnologie und Ethnologische Sammlung, Australia has been significant, though not uniform. The ex- University of Gottingen,¨ for comments on earlier drafts; to Cameo tent to which Acknowledgments and Welcomes will ac- Dalley, David Dinwoodie, Nicolas Peterson, Joel Sherzer, and Tony company and stimulate broader change in the tenor of social Woodbury for suggestions concerning Australianist and Americanist relations remains to be seen. With Acknowledgments, in- sources; and to Alan Rumsey for critical and editorial reading. digenous presence is sometimes only named in its absence. With Welcomes, personal representation becomes an is- 1. I have observed these small rituals over the last 15 years from sue within the specially constructed frame. These events within the academic institution where I work as well as in nu- give public prominence to a recognizable indigenous agent, merous other government and professional venues, mainly in the usually an “elder,” who the wider public can assume is national capital, Canberra, but also in the Northern Territory. speaking with some rightful authority and who usually does I have also spoken with colleagues and others in the audiences have status within local indigenous networks. Do rituals about their reactions, observed (mainly) academics struggling of recognition encapsulate such people in a certain kind with the question whether or not to stage these rituals at aca- of indigenous, often “high indigenous Culture,” iconog- demic events, elicited e-mail responses from colleagues, spoken raphy? Some incidents recounted above (e.g., of the in- with some indigenous people involved directly or indirectly in digenous performers miming dying who refused to leave these performances, researched the academic literature on repa- the stage) show that these events can open up moments rations politics, and paid attention to national media reports and of frame breaking. However, they also support and pro- blogs. voke contention about belonging, precedence, and legiti- 2. The percentage of indigenous population for Australia as a macy among indigenous people, who to that extent comply whole is estimated at 2.5 percent but varies from .6 percent for with the majority society’s value orientations to authentic- Victoria to 31.6 percent for the Northern Territory. In terms ity and historicity. Is recognition momentary, with things of absolute numbers, New South Wales and Queensland have then continuing as before? Not entirely, for Acknowledg- the largest indigenous estimated resident populations. An ap- ments and Welcomes continually present moments for con- proximate third of overall indigenous population is resident sideration of inequality and incompleteness in indigenous– in major cities (e.g., Sydney), while only 25 percent of people nonindigenous relations. Examples above also suggest that, identified as indigenous live remotely or very remotely. The cat- to some extent, these forms of recognition and value be- egories “indigenous” and “nonindigenous” are underpinned by come internalized by indigenous people in a perhaps increas- a binaristic logic that overrides the complexities of (changing) ingly conventionalized and convergent public conception of processes of self-identification and the character of populations. indigeneity. See http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4705.0. Earlier I noted Barkan’s (2006:93) assertion that growth 3. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngambri_people for an and change in what used to be victim and perpetrator identi- account of tensions among various groups. In 2013, an ACT ties informs the new reparations space in national and inter- government anthropological report was released concluding national politics. Recent Acknowledgments and Welcomes that the struggle among indigenous groups (Ngunnuwal, are intended to engender recognition between categories Ngarigu, Ngambri) for the mantle of Canberra’s “first people” constituted as “indigenous” and “nonindigenous.” This in- is likely to remain uncertain. The report stated that evidence scribes difference but does so in terms of transformed cate- gathered from the mid-1700s onward was too scant to support gories more positively cast as hosts and guests. But while the any group’s claims. See http://www.canberratimes.com. host–guest relation encourages collective consciousness rais- au/act-news/canberras-first-people-still-a-matter-for-debate- ing, it continues to be at odds—sometimes discomfitingly 20130408--2hhq4.html. Merlan • Welcome to Country 307

4. See http://www.tramountanas1842.org/content prayer, may be locatable here. In general, however, Brady sees /KaurnaWiranguTraditOwnersStatement.pdf. continentally distinctive healing practices (e.g., North Ameri- 5. See also http://www.nswtf.org.au/pages/welcome-country- can sweats, Australian healers’ object extraction) as not readily or-acknowledgement-country.htmlfortheprotocoloftheNSW transferred. Teachers’ Federation. 13. Earlier decades had seen disputes, including the one referred to 6. Everett 2009 describes the use of a reconstructed Aboriginal at Noonkanbah, over the coincidence of numerous prospective language in a Welcome in western Sydney in 2001 organized by mining areas with claims by indigenous groups to the sites’ sig- the Australian National Trust. Developed by people of Dharug nificance. This was frequently interpreted by miners as strategic affiliation, who claim Aboriginal ownership of a large part of or manipulated on the part of the Aboriginal and any environ- what is now modern Sydney, this use of language was gener- mentalist groups concerned and as not preexisting their own ally well received by the public, though the language forms, mineral finds. reconstructed from limited evidence, were intelligible neither 14. Indigenous people sometimes speak of the wider Inala-based to the performers nor, of course, to the audience. Though community as including past and present resident whites. Dharug claims are contested both by the Australian state and 15. Similarly, Welcome protocols at the Argyle mine are products other indigenous groups, Dharug have nevertheless been reg- of self-conscious repositioning of rather different cultural ma- ularly invited to perform Welcomes at schools, local councils, terials that are still very available to senior Kimberley people. and other events, including the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the However, just a few decades ago, they would probably have 2006 Commonwealth Games torch relay. been reluctant to reveal these to (very likely inhospitable) out- 7. The view sometimes expressed that these events, Welcomes side scrutiny. in particular, are “ancient Aboriginal custom” without which 16. In the United States, the first National Incidence Study of Child it would be dangerous to travel into someone else’s country Abuse and Neglect was conducted in 1979. (Macauley 2011) may implicitly presume that they need to be 17. Some hoped that other consequences would soon follow the seen as traditional to be publicly valued. I take the view that in apology—perhaps compensation and recognition of indigenous many significant ways, they are not—but recognize the defensive people in the Australian Constitution. While this has been much impulse to see them as such. debated, it has not yet occurred. Kevin Rudd, suddenly returned 8. A Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987– to the prime ministership in June of 2013 as the result of an 91) was established to study and report on the high rates of death internal Labor Party leadership spill, has again begun to urge among Aboriginal people in police custody. (Though Aborigines constitutional recognition of indigenous people. In an election are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice sys- following shortly thereafter, however, in September of 2013, tem, the outstanding indigenous–nonindigenous disparity was Rudd was voted out of office. the higher rate of indigenous deaths in policy custody, as com- 18. In Alice Springs, the (now incorporated) body considering it- pared to deaths in prison.) This inquiry marked heightened self entitled to perform Welcomes has recently advertised in government concern with statistical evidence of national pol- the local newspaper, asking for the public’s cooperation in not icy’s failing to make differences in indigenous health, longevity, resorting to others willing to perform. and living conditions. Lengthy interview of Aboriginal witnesses 19. As journalist Andrew Bolt (2010) has put it: Welcome to gave their voices some national projection. Country ceremonies are racist and anything but welcoming to 9. The first Sea of Hands was installed on the October 12, non-Aborigines who were born right here. The Herald-Sun,in 1997, in front of Parliament House, Canberra, with simi- which this comment appeared, is Melbourne’s (and the nation’s) lar displays in every major Australian city and many regional largest-selling tabloid. centers. 120,000 plastic hands representing the signatures of participants were installed on the lawn of Parliament in REFERENCES CITED Canberra to mobilize a “people’s movement” for native title and 666 Australian Broadcasting Corporation Canberra reconciliation. 2008 A Historic First: Traditional Indigenous Welcome Begins 10. See, for example, Karetu 1993 on the New Zealand haka; see Parliament. 666 ABC Canberra, February 12. http://www. http://www.korero.maori.nz/forlearners/protocols/powhiri. abc.net.au/local/stories/2008/02/12/2160380.htm, html on the Maori powhiri welcome ceremony. accessed January 21, 2014. 11. Events that have fostered wider Pacific relations include the Fes- Akerman, Piers tival of Pacific Arts, which has taken place every four years since 2010 Sorry to Say This but Hypocrisy Unwelcome. The Tele- 1972. In 1988 it was held was in Townsville, north Queensland, graph, March 18. http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/ with the theme of “Cultural Interchange.” The previous festival piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/sorry_ had been in French Polynesia, and the following one of 1992 to_say_this_but_hypocrisy_unwelcome/, accessed January was held in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. 21, 2014. 12. Brady (1995) has described another context of international in- ATSI digenous interaction: the rise of indigenous Australian–North 2010 Handbook of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander American visiting and exchange in relation to “culturally appro- Studies. Brisbane: Queensland Studies Authority. priate” substance-abuse treatment programs. Some synthesis in http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/senior/snr_atsi_10_ “smoking” or “smudging” practices, perhaps also in greetings and handbook.pdf, accessed 24/01/2014. 308 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

Aussie News Fraser, Nancy 2012 Blacktown Council Welcomes Back Queen and God. 2000 Rethinking Recognition. New Left Review 3(May–June): Aussie News, November 3. http://www.dailytelegraph. 107–120. com.au/blacktown-council-welcomes-back-queen-and-god/ Greenop, Kelly Jane story-e6freuy9--1226509462611, accessed February 4, 2014. 2013 “It Gets Under Your Skin”: Place Meaning, Attachment, Australian Human Rights Commission Identity and Sovereignty in the Urban Indigenous Community 1997 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National In- of Inala, Queensland. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, School quiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait of Social Science, University of Queensland. Islander Children from Their Families. http://www. Handelman, Don humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home- 2004 Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in report-1997, accessed January 24, 2014. Public Events. Oxford: Berg. Barkan, Elazar Honneth, Axel 2006 Restitution and Amending Historical Injustices in Interna- 1996 The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social tional Morality. In Politics and the Past: On Repairing Histori- Conflicts. Cambridge: MIT Press. cal Injustices. John Torpey, ed. Pp. 91–102. Lanham: Rowman Karetu, Timoti and Littlefield. 1993 Haka! The Dance of a Noble People. Auckland: Reed. Barkan, Elazar, and Alexander Karn, eds. Keating, Paul 2006 Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation. 1992 Redfern Speech (Year for the World’s Indigenous Peo- Stanford: Stanford University Press. ple). Speech delivered on December 10. http://antar.org.au/ Batty, Philip sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf, ac- 2006 White Redemption Rituals: Reflections on the Repatriation cessed January 14, 2014. of Aboriginal Secret-Sacred Objects. In Moving Anthropol- Kowal, Emma ogy: Critical Indigenous Studies. Tess Lea, Emma Kowal, and 2006 The Proximate Advocate: Improving Indigenous Health on Gillian Cowlishaw, eds. Pp. 55–63. Darwin: Charles Darwin the Postcolonial Frontier. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of University Press. Public Health, University of Melbourne. Bolt, Andrew 2010 Welcome to Post-Colonial Manners in University Country. 2010 Don’t Welcome Me to My Own Country. The The Australian, March 23. http://www.theaustralian.com. Herald Sun, March 15. http://blogs.news.com.au/ au/opinion/welcome-to-post-colonial-manners-in-university- heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/ country/story-e6frg6zo-1225843990258, accessed January dont_welcome_me_to_my_own_country/, accessed January 21, 2014. 21, 2014. N.d. Welcome to Country: Acknowledgment, Belonging, and Brady, Maggie White Anti-Racism. Unpublished MS, School of Social and 1995 Culture in Treatment, Culture as Treatment: A Critical Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Appraisal of Developments in Addictions Programs for In- Lambert-Pennington, Katherine digenous North Americans and Australians. Social Science and 2007 What Remains? Reconciling Repatriation, Aboriginal Cul- Medicine 41(11):1487–1498. ture, Representation and the Past. Oceania 77(3):313– Burruma, Ian 336. 1999 The Joys and Perils of Victimhood. New York Review Macauley, Gay 46(6):4–9. 2011 The National Apology Three Years Later. Supplementary Cowlishaw, Gillian Special Issue, Journal of Australian Studies 11(3). http:// 2011 Mythologising Culture, Part 2: Disturbing Aboriginality in www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/australian-studies, the Suburbs. TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology accessed January 21, 2014. 22(2):170–188. Macknight, Campbell Deane, Sir William 1972 Macassans and Aborigines. Oceania 42(4):283–321. 1996 Some Signposts from Daguragu. Vincent Lingiari Memorial Magowan, Fiona Lecture. Canberra: Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. 2000 Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Po- Deem, Melissa etic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Specta- 2002 Stranger Sociability, Public Hope, and the Limits of Po- cle. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11(2):308– litical Transformation. Quarterly Journal of Speech 88(4): 321. 444–454. McNay, Lois Doohan, Kim 2008 Against Recognition. Cambridge: Polity. 2008 Making Things Come Good: Relations between Aborigines Morton, John and Miners at Argyle. Broome: Back Room. 2003 Abortive Redemption? Apology, History and Subjectivity Everett, Kristina in Australian Reconciliation. Journal of the Polynesian Society 2009 Welcome to Country . . . Not. Oceania 79(1):53–64. 112(3):238–259. Merlan • Welcome to Country 309

Moses, A. Dirk tion of Culture. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. Pp. 2011 Official Apologies, Reconciliation, and Settler Colonialism: 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Australian Indigenous Alterity and Political Agency. Citizen- Tavuchis, Nicholas ship Studies 15(2):145–159. 1991 Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. New South Wales Health Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005 Welcome to Country Protocols Policy. Sydney: New South Taylor, Charles Wales Health. 1994 The Politics of Recognition. In Multiculturalism: Examining New South Wales Teachers Federation the Politics of Recognition. Amy Gutmann, ed. Pp. 25–74. 2008 Welcome to Country or Acknowledgement of Coun- Princeton: Princeton University Press. try. http://www.nswtf.org.au/pages/welcome-country-or- Thompson, Simon, and Majid Yar, eds. acknowledgement-country.html, accessed January 21, 2014. 2011 The Politics of Misrecognition. Farnham: Ashgate. PM (with Mark Colvin) Thomson, Donald 2010 Hostilities Begin as Federal Parliament Opens. 1932 Ceremonial Presentation of Fire in North Queensland: A http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3024247.htm, Preliminary Note on the Place of Fire in Primitive Ritual. Man accessed February 4, 2014. 32(198):162–166. Povinelli, Elizabeth Torpey, John, ed. 2002 The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and 2003 Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. University Press. Tsosie, Rebecca Rudd, Kevin 2006 The BIA’s Apology to Native Americans: An Essay on Col- 2008 Address to the Indigenous Welcome to Country, Open- lective Memory and Collective Conscience. In Taking Wrongs ing of the 42nd Federal Parliament, Member’s Hall, Par- Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation. Elazar Barkan and liament House, Canberra. http://www.pm.gov.au/media/ Alexander Karn, eds. Pp. 185–212. Stanford: Stanford speech/2008/speech_0071.cfm, accessed January 21, 2014. University Press. Smyth, Robert Brough Verdeja, Ernesto 1972[1878] The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating 2009 Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia. of Political Violence. Philadelphia: Temple University Melbourne: J. Currey, O’Neil. Press. Spencer, Baldwin, and Frank J. Gillen Vincent, Eve 1927 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, with a preface by Sir 2012 Hosts and Guests: Interpreting Rockhole Recovery J. G. Frazer. London: Macmillan. Trips. Australian Humanities Review 53. http://www. Spivak, Gyatri australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November- 1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpreta- 2012/vincent.html, accessed January 21, 2014.