C H A P T E R 2 5 Toward a Postcolonial Archaeology of Indigenous Australia Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell Over the past three decades, archaeology has been New Zealand, Maori concerns are expressed in the use going through a period of self-reflection, particularly of the Maori name Aotearoa in place of New Zealand, with regard to issues of gender, power relations, and the colonial name expressing that history in the words indigenous control. The best-known and most con- “new” and “Zealand,” the name of a Dutch province on troversial issues in regard to indigenous control are the other side of the world. Differing colonial experi- ownership of the past and the repatriation of cultural ences have led to different outcomes in law and land materials, whether human remains or artifacts, held ownership. The dispossession of Aboriginal Austra- by statutory bodies such as museums and universities. lians was never resolved in any kind of agreed treaty, In many situations, indigenous groups have regained while the dispossession of Maoris was formalized in control over their ancestral remains by recourse to the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Again these outcomes, legal means. After heated debate and acrimonious liti- and the issues behind them, are paralleled by the U.S. gation, most Australian archaeologists now accept that experience where some indigenous Americans—Treaty indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Indians—came to such an outcome and some did not. control of indigenous archaeological materials in Aus- Seen from Australia, the United States is striking tralia is legitimate and part of the overall reconcilia- for the force with which scientific interest is expressed tion process between indigenous and nonindigenous and the weight it carries. Archaeology and anthropol- Australia. Indeed, some Australian archaeologists have ogy are largely still seen as disinterested sciences rather taken a somewhat self-congratulatory tone, in think- than the socially constructed kinds of knowledge they ing we “seem to be at the forefront in terms of the actually are (Deloria 1969). negotiation of relationships between archaeologists Increasing awareness of indigenous issues by ar- and indigenous people” (Burke et al. 1994:19). While chaeologists and their response reflects a slow de- important advances are being made, parallel develop- colonization of archaeology that mirrors broader ments are taking place in other major settler-colonial anticolonial changes in community attitudes towards contexts such as Canada and the United States (Biolsi who has a right to determine indigenous lifeways. In and Zimmerman 1997a; Nicholas and Andrews 1997a; Australia, these issues took on renewed significance in Swidler et al. 1997a; Watkins 2000). Furthermore, these the 1990s in the wake of the Mabo court case which changes have rarely been initiated by archaeologists; saw rejection of the two-hundred-year-old legal doc- rather, they have been developed by archaeologists trine of terra nullius—the view that Australia was an responding to indigenous demands for greater control empty land belonging to no one prior to European of their ancestral heritage. These changes have also colonization in 1788—and the recognition of extant grown out of governments and legislators responding native title, and the Federal government’s program to broader political lobbying by indigenous people for of “reconciliation” between Aboriginal and non-Ab- social justice and equality. original Australia. All these social, political, and legal The present chapter addresses these issues through changes set the scene for the development of a new, examples from Australia. We emphasize that the is- unique (Australian) archaeology tailored to accom- sues are not specific to Australia; the Australian story modate the desires of the country’s indigenous and is closely paralleled in the United States, Canada, and scientific communities. It will be the way Australians New Zealand, both in changing attitudes of archaeolo- decide to decolonize our unique colonial heritage (and gists and in wider social transformations. In Canada, its legacies) that ultimately will frame and constrain the recognition of First Nations’ rights and success is the future face of Australian archaeology. symbolized by the creation of the new provinces of the This chapter surveys anticolonial developments Arctic North, where indigenous interests are strong. In in Australian indigenous archaeology over the past 423 thirty years. Key conceptual issues that underpin We view the colonial culture of Australian archae- these developments are discussed and illustrated. ology as being composed of two intricately related However, the journey along the road of reconciliation concepts—disassociation and appropriation (Condori continues. Despite significant advances, Australian 1989; McGuire 1989). During the nineteenth and early archaeology remains underwritten by a number of twentieth centuries, Aboriginal people were disassoci- subtle and insidious theoretical constructs that have ated from their material heritage by suggestions that colonial origins. These constructs, we contend, con- some Australian archaeological sites belonged to other tinue to underscore many of the cross-cultural ten- “races.” We have identified two key examples of this sions that remain in Australian archaeology, in both process—rock art paintings from the Kimberley re- academic and public arenas. As a legacy of colonial gion in the northwest (McNiven and Russell 1997) circumstance, these constructs and tensions have rel- and stone circles in Victoria in the southeast (Russell evance for the practice of indigenous archaeology in and McNiven 1998). A more pervasive form of disas- other settler colonies such as North America. Indeed, sociation has been achieved by the deceptively simple looking under the surface of archaeology anywhere process of making the past an archaeologically con- in the world reveals that issues of power, control, structed past. The discipline of archaeology is founded and knowledge in regard to things of the past are in- on the premise that insights into the (pre)historic past variably entwined with issues of power, control, and are made via the analysis and interpretation of cultural knowledge in regard to things of the present. Even remains using Western scientific methods. As such, the ancient Stonehenge is now an overtly disputed place (pre)history of a region or a people can only be written (Bender 1998). following research by archaeologists. Feminist archae- ologist Joan Gero (1989:97) alerts us to the inherent COLONIAL CULTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY imperialism of an archaeologically constructed past: Many authors have written on the history and colo- nial legacy of anthropology, James Clifford (1988) The expansion of archaeology must be seen as an and Nicholas Thomas (1994) among others, showing aspect of cultural colonialism in which one system of knowledge erodes and ultimately supplants the struc- anthropology to have been complicit in the colonial ture of alternative systems. [The] replacement by process (Diamond 1974). Foucault (1970) has argued archaeology of other means of approaching the past that the human sciences—especially anthropology, is not progressive but imperialistic. linguistics, sociology, and economics—construct hu- man subjectivities at the same time as they describe To those enculturated in the West, the archaeologi- them. The central theme of these definitions is the cat- cal charter might appear self-evident. However, the egorization of people into dichotomies, insiders/out- notion of an archaeologically constructed past takes siders, normal/abnormal, us/them. Along comparable on new meaning in colonial contexts where indigenous lines, George Stocking (1985:112) has described the peoples have their own historical narratives. For Ab- anthropological discipline as “primarily a discourse of original Australians the construction of historical nar- the culturally or racially despised.” ratives frequently draws on the religious interpretive In North America, Bruce Trigger (1984) has been at framework provided by the Dreaming or Dreamtime. the forefront of exploring how the historical develop- Senior Wardaman people in the Lightning Brothers ment of archaeology has rested on the representation country of the Northern Territory classify rock art as of Native Americans as a singular and primitive Other. either bulawula (paintings of human origin) or bu- For Trigger the history of archaeological research can warraja (Dreaming pictures) (David et al. 1990, 1994; be seen as an aspect of the history of anthropology. He Flood et al. 1992; Merlan 1989). Although from an ties the growth of both disciplines to North America’s archaeological perspective, all of the art would be clas- colonial history. As a result, archaeology was unavoid- sified as of human origin, senior Wardaman draw on ably colonialist, its structure serving to “denigrate na- Dreaming cosmology to “read” the art. Immediately tive societies and . demonstrate that they had been an archaeologist goes with Wardaman people into a static in prehistoric times and lacked the initiative to shelter with archaeological and rock art traces and develop on their own” (Trigger 1984:386). While Trig- remains, different perceptions come into play, and ger overstates the discipline’s intentionality, he is right the “single and obvious” observations and classes of to call our attention to the relationship between repre- Western knowledge fail: the marks