In a paper recently published in Public Humanities, I have turned to two authors: Paul Cohen (historian of modern China) and Martin Nakata (Torres Strait theorist of Indigenous Studies) for help. Cohen’s History in Three Keys (1997) blurs (but does not abolish) the boundary between History and Myth. Nakata’s The Rights and Blights of the Politics in Indigenous Higher Education (2013) seeks a space for critical exchange between ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Western Knowledge.’
Myth
Dark Emu can be read as ‘myth’ addressing politically progressive Australians’ historical consciousness. The book makes three claims—one about the pre-colonial past, and two (more implicitly) about Australians’ ability to transcend their nation’s colonial heritage. Pointing to the many ways that pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians intervened in the food productivity of their country, Dark Emu argues that we should credit them with the technology, knowledge and social formations typical of ‘agricultural’ societies. As he guides us to the conclusion that Aboriginal people were NOT ‘hunter gatherers’, Pascoe makes two further claims that invite us to be post-colonial readers. One is that the designation ‘hunter-gatherer’ was/is an ideology legitimising European colonisation. By overturning this orthodoxy Pascoe offers to decolonise our minds. His second claim is about our past and future relationship with Nature. Colonists have badly damaged the country, while insisting they were ‘improving’ it. So we should turn, in post-colonial humility, to Aboriginal land- and sea-use traditions, if we are to recover a sustainable human relationship with the natural estate for which we have become responsible.
That is, Dark Emu tells three stories – one about pre-colonial Aboriginal society, two about colonising and decolonising. In concert, they enable an understanding of our place in history, and they summon us to a morally and ecologically sustainable future. To label these stories ‘myths’ is not to denounce them as false but to read them as stories – widely accepted as true – that appeal because they empower. Many Australians have been seeking, since the 1970s, to make sense of our settler-colonial past. Dark Emu’s ‘Aboriginal agriculture’ thesis is an object of political desire aroused by Australians’ sense of national and ecological crisis.
Dark Emu is a work of ‘Indigenous Studies’. With its Indigenous author (Pascoe is Yuin) and anti-colonial politics, is it ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ or ‘Western Knowledge’? We need not choose, as Dark Emu is a hybrid, in at least three ways. First, Pascoe draws on archaeological research. Second, he mobilises a ‘stadial’ theory of history that values ‘agriculture’ as a more advanced civilisation than ‘hunter gatherer’. (This way of thinking about human diversity emerged from Europe’s Enlightenment and dignified colonisation as Europe’s civilising project.) Third, Pascoe’s account of the cosmology enabling Aboriginal agriculturalists omits or underplays what Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe (in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?, 2021) refer to as ‘highly valued ceremonies and speech acts that constituted spiritual species maintenance’. Evidently unacquainted with ethnographies of Aboriginal people’s spiritual management of the natural world, Pascoe has evoked the ontology of Aboriginal ‘farmers’ in terms too similar to those who colonised them.
Indigenous Studies
To make sense of Dark Emu’s hybridity, we can turn to Martin Nakata. While some practitioners of Indigenous Studies distinguish Indigenous Knowledge from Western Knowledge, Nakata has presented Indigenous Studies, at its best, as the product of their interplay.
In Nakata’s account, Indigenous Knowledge is spontaneously reproduced in “grassroots analysis”. It is “borne out of experience and out of community interaction with the analytical frames used for understanding that experience”, and it is the basis of many Indigenous persons’ challenges to the “wider intellectual world of Western knowledge, theory and practice.” What worries Nakata is the expectation that Indigenous intellectuals (in universities and elsewhere) will mobilise “grassroots analysis” uncritically, as their alternative to a Western Knowledge dismissed for its colonial provenance. The “Indigenous intellectual positions” that are needed for self-determination, Nakata argues, will emerge only from a greater commitment to self-criticism, eschewing “allegiances to community discourses that we know to be problematic or limited.”
Nakata wants Indigenous Studies to be a space of intellectual activity that draws critically on Western Knowledge in order to historicise and critique the Indigenous Knowledge that is rooted in community experience. He asks: “What happens when anti-colonial analysis becomes completely pre-occupied with resistance to, and rejection of, Western knowledge, theory, and practice?” He worries that students within Indigenous Studies are invited to a “very superficial, limited, and selective engagement with Western knowledge and theory in ways that misunderstand and misrepresent it.” As well, he advises Indigenous scholars to approach with caution the project that he describes as “restorations of Indigenous language, concepts, and knowledge.”
Nakata’s advice helps us to position ourselves in the contest between Dark Emu and its critics. Our judgment need not be a political loyalty test (insurgent Indigenous Knowledge vs reasserted colonial epistemic privilege) – especially if we are prepared to recognise that ethnographies (such as Sutton’s) have been and continue to be one of the forms in which Indigenous Knowledge has become available.
Full length article available at Tim Rowse ‘Dark Emu and Indigenous Studies’ Public Humanities 1, e109, 1–13.
