Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event

The difference between the lives of the settlers and those they colonized, he writes, is that the system works as designed Yuki Lindley.

As news that the NT refused to allow the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to view conditions in its prisons makes headlines, and as Kumanjayi White’s family continues to demand an investigation into why their disabled son was killed by police in a Coles supermarket, it is important to understand the context in which Indigenous lives are so often ignored, imprisoned and ultimately eliminated in the settler colonial state we call Australia.

As Australian academic and historian Patrick Wolfe famously concluded, “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event”. But colonialists always insist that colonialism is over and in the past; just as they insist that the only real Indigenous people are those who look at historical black and white photographs. Colonizers like to believe that colonial violence is the end of everything, and that this is a sadly bad way to start a colony, but that we can and must continue now because it’s not like there are any real Indigenous people left anyway.

But if we take the time to examine settler colonialism, we learn that it progresses from the first bloody stages of frontier violence to a more established, structural process of eliminating the indigenous by embedding colonization’s genocidal intent within the various power structures of the emerging state. At this stage, we see the emergence of laws that continue the process of elimination by targeting Indigenous people through policies such as the Aboriginal Protection Acts of the 1960s, which remove children from their families and dominate every aspect of Indigenous people’s lives, from employment to marriage to where they can live.

Today, the state no longer directly targets Indigenous people based on race and skin color; through a legal system that targets poor, traumatized, homeless, disabled people; As a result, it is indigenous people who are imprisoned due to poverty and systematic trauma inflicted on their families by the state.

Existing mandatory sentencing laws in WA and the NT fill prisons with poor, traumatized Indigenous people; the majority of them are imprisoned for minor, non-violent crimes of poverty, such as theft or unpaid fines. All the evidence shows that incarceration only leads to increased crime rates because of the re-traumatizing effect of prison.

This legal system makes no sense if you assume that the government wants to reduce crime rates; but in the context of settler colonialism, it works perfectly to distract natives from disrupting the peace of settler society. It’s about removing the poverty of indigenous people from our purview by locking them up on reservations or in prisons, the intent remains the same.

As an institution, the police are the biggest stick the state uses to control its people, and so it was the police force tasked with removing Indigenous bodies from society and tightly controlling them. Today, police have moved from lynching Indigenous people who were largely involved in settler society to a system of neglect, disregard, and excessive force designed to ensure that Indigenous people’s chances of survival are significantly diminished once they are detained. By insisting that the police continue to investigate it, the state ensures that its colonial intent of destruction continues to work as designed.

There is also the fact that Indigenous women are much more likely to be mistakenly identified as perpetrators when they seek help during incidents of domestic violence; This is why indigenous women often do not seek police assistance.

As Indigenous scholar and journalist Amy McQuire emphasizes, this leaves Indigenous women extremely vulnerable; Indeed, records of missing Indigenous women in this country reveal the lack of attention police show when investigating missing Indigenous women. This is why perpetrators knowingly target Indigenous women, because police are unlikely to collect evidence and investigate their disappearances.

As colonization continues to fragment Indigenous families, the state no longer removes Indigenous children to raise Indigenous children; Families continue to be torn apart by laws that criminalize poverty, but the law also imprisons parents for unpaid fines for minor offenses such as driving without a license or drinking in public. The result of these laws was that Indigenous parents were removed from their homes, trapping their children in a state-initiated cycle of neglect and poverty.

It was the state that controlled and often stole the wages of indigenous people (which were low to begin with) and ensured that they were unable to accumulate wealth and property through policies that excluded them from purchasing property. Even after these legal frameworks were abolished, racism in banking and real estate ensured that these sectors were excluded in practice; they were only allowed to buy property in the worst neighborhoods if they could get a mortgage. State-induced intergenerational poverty is why Indigenous people are targeted by laws criminalizing poverty and homelessness, with laws most prevalent in states such as WA and the NT due to their larger Indigenous populations.

Colonists have long had access to food through weapons, stealing prime land, forcing Native people onto reservations and missions, often ensuring that food shortages and overcrowding create conditions in which natives die; In these crowded, unhealthy areas, epidemics do the work of reducing the indigenous population of the colonial state. The destruction of Indigenous food systems has left them dependent on the government for food, and due to the lack of regulations to ensure adequate, healthy food availability and affordable prices, Indigenous communities continue to experience high levels of chronic disease, malnutrition, and child development problems; These problems are often accompanied by the lack of working stoves, running water and working refrigerators in their homes. Thus, the colonial state continues its intention to ‘soften the cushion of a dying race’, while eliminating the necessary conditions for the health and life of the indigenous people.

There is also the assertion of colonial power that determines how we understand knowledge, history and the world. Colonists long believed that they knew Native people and their experiences better than Native people did. White expert accounts of their time in Indigenous communities are flying off the shelves, explaining the Indigenous issue to a largely white audience. Of course, these foreign views formed under the logic of white supremacy rarely reflect the reality of Native experiences, communities, and worldviews. Colonial institutions of knowledge production often silence Indigenous perspectives in order to maintain power dynamics that allow Indigenous lives to be tightly controlled by systems intent on their elimination.

Outside the ivory towers of academia, the media continues to push the colonial narrative that portrays Indigenous people as unable and unwilling to govern their own communities. The media floods the public with images of dysfunction, crime and violence. While these are effects of colonialism, the media, through its choice of language and narrative, subtly suggests that there must be something inherently criminal and dysfunctional about the indigenous people themselves, and the settler population accepts this comforting narrative without question.

The colonizing power of the state in every aspect of Australian life negatively affects the lives of indigenous people. While wealth, education, and social status may provide a way out for certain individuals, the fact that we live in a settler colonial state means that the primary purpose of the state is to eliminate Indigenous sovereignty in order to gain access to their lands. As Patrick Wolfe has identified, the state requires the elimination of the indigenous as part of a sovereign people. This leaves Native people with the impossible choice of cutting off part of who they are, their ancestors, their history, and assimilating into the settler state, even as second-class citizens, or clinging to their sense of self within a structure intent on eliminating them.

As Orlando Patterson, a sociologist and historian, has shown, colonization severs kinship groups, languages, culture, and connection to Country through the process of eliminating what gives people a sense of self and belonging; In this way a proud sovereign people can be turned into an object, a tool, a slave. This is the process that Indigenous people resist every day, persistently and demanding their rights as a sovereign people, and it is this assertion of their humanity as a sovereign people that is incomparable to the settler colonial state we call Australia.

It is the incommensurability of Indigenous lives within the settler colonial state that underlies the gap between the lives of settlers and the lives of those they colonize. This gap is not a failure of the system, but rather the colonial system working as designed. How can indigenous lives be valued and allowed to thrive under a structure aimed at their elimination? This is the incommensurability that lies at the heart of all settler colonial states, and it is why justice comes so slowly for Indigenous peoples.