No Justice on Stolen Land

First we demand liberation, then we demand freedom, then we demand peace

In the name of Allah, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

This article may contain harmful knowledge and language for Indigenous knowers; please do not feel the obligation to read this article, whether it be part of it or the entirety. If there is something you feel I should remove, let me know.

To be seditious is to cast aside the idea that no matter how radical I am, I will remain patriotic to a nation that has thus far demonstrated a complete disregard for the non-White people. It is to call into question the legitimacy of a state’s right to exist, that in this instance Australia should exist, or that any colonial project inherently deserves to exist.

Yes, because your entire state-monitored education thus far in this colony has been designed to embody within you the idea that Australia inherently contains within itself, somewhere in the abscess of legality, mushed in with the pus of colonisation, the right to exist. And if you dare question this right, you will find the state and media bring down upon your head the full might of its defenders, the people who have lived an entire lifetime in privilege without ever once questioning what was sacrificed to guarantee them their privilege.

These colonial defenders are generally White, but this is not the total composition of the Australia-colony lovers. You will find in their number a great portion of insecure non-Whites eager to receive the carrot of recognition they were promised when they were hit with the stick of White supremacy. As though, in professing the superiority of the colony, the colony will set aside all the hatred it has propelled at them for their entire existence and will continue to do so.

The day they learn that they are no more significant to this colonial project than a fly is on a truck windscreen is the day they realise that they are celebrating the existence of an ode to White supremacy. See, Whiteness needs the non-White to consent to their own racial subjugation and dedicates its funds and projects to quash dissent through inter-communal conflict.

To give you an analogy, you will find that the money that pours into areas of poverty never actually seeks to solve the conditions that have created the poverty; it merely seeks to appear that it has done enough so that some parts of society will thereafter blame the poverty on the poor. It is as if to say, “They did so-and-so, and you are still poor; therefore, the poverty is of your own doing.” When you comment on the fact that the ghettos were a government creation and that the communities of impoverishment did not exist until the government cordoned off the minorities and then deprived the communities of the right to own their own methods of wealth generation, land ownership in the capitalist era being one of them, you will see in the critic a lack of interest. In their boredom, they will say to you, “But you forgot to take into account that the government gave them money.” Ah yes, how could it have slipped my mind? How could I not know that when the government gives something money, it instantly solves the problem? Never mind the question of how the money is spent; clearly, policy quality is determined solely by the sum attached. Ergo, $300 million to renovate prisons must surely be a better policy than $30 million spent on funding community-led projects, scholarships, and the like. After all, to any reasonable politician, $300 million funnelled into the pockets of the prison industrial complex is a better investment than $30 million into the hands of the subaltern and communal spaces. Punishment is an industry that generates far more income than any community project that provides education; these spaces exist, in the eyes of the White colonial government, as hubs of sedation.

Let me pause here. I would like to pre-emptively address a question that I have had posed to me on many occasions by those who shield themselves with Whiteness: “Why do you focus on race so much?” What they really mean to ask is, “Why do you keep bringing up the differences between us?” Allow me to answer this, so you will know why I write and will continue to write on this very topic:

So long as there remains a formidable difference between groups of people in this colony based solely on biological pseudo-science and privilege, I will continue to talk about and criticise the power that maintains this difference. It is not me speaking about racism that gives life to the damned beast of White supremacy, but it is the White power that continues to flog us like we are in dire need of control that maintains racism. You see, there exist fundamental differences in privilege and power between non-Whites and Whites that have yet to be dismantled entirely. There exists an entire group of people who, by the appearance of their skin and their ancestry, may be born to a lifetime of success in this colony guaranteed by the continued subjugation of the First Nations peoples. For example, a White property-owning family will, unless a freak legal accident occurs, have guaranteed succession; their child will inherit the land and the wealth with no interference. However, Indigenous land rights continue to be subjected to the whims of colonial governance, and if it appears to be profitable, then the Indigenous land will be stolen again and given to mining companies. So, the First Nations cannot be guaranteed their land, yet the inheritors of colonial wealth have their ‘birth-right’ guaranteed and protected by the state and its military. The mining families that have profited billions off the stolen wealth of Indigenous Nations are never at threat of having to return the wealth or land they have stolen and exploited.

But wait, how does mining have anything to do with Whiteness? Simple. There is no breaking into the mining industry in the 21st century; you must have come into it via inheritance. And who was permitted to found industries in the earlier days of the colony? None other than the White settlers. Take the example of Gina Rinehart. Her family had been active settlers here for generations (such as the first White woman who came to pastoralize in the colony, a very lucrative industry), and her father, Lang Hancock, “found” the largest iron ore deposit. So, what was he, a White man, permitted to do in the White colonial state? With the help of the state, Lang was able to exploit millions of dollars in stolen ore, mined on stolen land. His daughter, who inherited the mine, was able to use her privilege as a White person in this White colony to expand the mine and is now a billionaire. How much of this wealth was given to the Indigenous Nations who own the land and have never ceded their claim? None. So, now we have a billionaire who has their wealth and stolen land guaranteed by the state, and so long as the state exists, their wealth will continue to compound and pass down the generations. They, unlike the Indigenous Nations who had lived there for thousands of years, will never be at threat of colonial theft because, on the basis of their Whiteness, they are active participants in the theft. For her wonderful efforts in colonising, Gina has been awarded the Order of Australia.

On what basis was Gina’s family permitted to reach such heights? Their Whiteness. Setting aside entirely the issue of climate and capitalism, which has exploited the earth until its last breath, for a brief moment, do they wish for us to think that the Indigenous Nations would not also have founded iron mines if they saw it as an acceptable course to take as custodians of the land, which they, some five hundred nations, have done so for over 60,000 years? Because in the few centuries of ecological exploitation, the earth has been sent into a free fall towards a disaster. The colonisers, in their haughty nature, exploited the earth and drenched it in the blood of its custodians across the globe until the earth collapsed. But, again, setting all of this aside and presuming a course of action that no reasonable person would take if they saw the earth as their responsibility, as the Indigenous custodians do, rather than their property, the Indigenous Nations were not and are still not permitted to exploit the land. The Indigenous Nations under the colonial government would never be permitted to mine the land, sell the produce, and keep the profits as the White miners can do because the colonial government demands that it alone determine the zoning and toiling of the land. The Indigenous Nations, which exist on their own sovereignty, continue to be subjected to a colonial state, which demands that it alone reign supreme. Why? Race.

It was race that provided the palatable consent and ideological drive to colonise, and it is race that continues to permit the overbearing and violent rule of the White colonial government over the Indigenous Nations. It is on the basis of race that the colonial government, which has undertaken a project of genocide since its inception here in the 18th century, feels it alone may determine the best course of action for Indigenous “affairs.”

The solution, of course, is not the colouring of the structure; it is not maintaining the same institutions that have profited from genocide, but rather the complete demolition and abolishment of these structures. The Australian government, which has hereto devised and executed the genocide of Indigenous First Nations people and exploited stolen land for well over a century, cannot be the custodian of peace, decolonization, or justice. There cannot be peace on stolen land. The maintenance of the stolen land is violent because the violence of colonisation requires violence to maintain itself against the will of the colonised.

In the same way many of us have been exposed to colonialism in Palestine and have been eager to learn about the violent systems that have been devised solely to maintain these projects, we must also apply our anti-colonial demands to the settler colony of Australia. We must demand not only the abolishment of the colonial state but also the return of governance and custodianship to their rightful owners.

What this must include is a ‘redrawing’ of ‘Australia.’ This may also include no longer having one nation rule a landmass of 7.7 million square kilometres. But, of course, these questions on what the post-colonial state(s) must look like are not for us non-First Nation peoples to answer.

What is our responsibility? It is to fight alongside and behind the First Nations people in their struggle against a genocidal state that has thus far wasted billions of stolen wealth from Indigenous Nations on irrelevant and ineffective policies that have yet to even address the very first concerns of sovereignty, land rights, liberation, and freedom. There is yet to even be a thought floated about wealth redistribution in colonial governance.

In the same way we fight against the colonisation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians, we must fight against every single colonisation. Genocide, after all, is inherent to every single settler-colonial project.

Yet, we are reminded time and time again that there remains a significant subset of the non-White colonial population who desire so strongly a celebration of the state that guarantees their continued sustenance on stolen land. Many of those who were born here and have been fed from birth the idea that the settler-colonial nation of Australia is a land of opportunity have come to believe that this opportunity pertains to them. To this end, we are reminded of a passage from Albert Memmi’s The Coloniser and the Colonised:

A foreigner, having come to a land by the accidents of history … has succeeded not merely in creating a place for himself but also in taking away that of the inhabitant, grant­ing himself astounding privileges, to the detriment of those rightfully entitled to them. And this not by virtue of local laws, which in a certain way legitimize this inequality by tradition, but by upsetting the es­tablished rules and substituting his own. He thus appears doubly unjust. He is a privileged being and an illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper. Furthermore, this is so, not only in the eyes of the colonized, but in his own as well. If he occasionally objects that the privileged also exist among the bourgeois colonized, whose affluence equals or ex­ceeds his, he does so without conviction. Not to be the only one guilty can be reassuring, but it cannot absolve. He would readily admit that the privileges of privileged natives are less scandalous than his. He knows also that the most favored colonized will never be anything but colonized people, in other words, that certain rights will forever be refused them, and that certain advantages are reserved strictly for him. In short, he knows, in his own eyes as well as those of his victim, that he is a usurper.

…

The colonizer's role cannot long be sus­tained; it is unlivable. He cannot help suffering from guilt and anguish and also, eventually, bad faith. He is always on the fringe of temptation and shame, and in the final analysis, guilty. The analysis of the colonial situation by the colonialist is more coherent and perhaps more lucid, for he has always acted as though an arrangement were impossible. Having realized that any concession threatened him, he con­firms and defends the colonial system in every way. But what privileges, what material advantages, are worth the loss of his soul? In short, if the colonial adventure is seriously damaging for the colonized, it cannot but be unprofitable for the colonizer. Naturally, people did not fail to devise changes that would leave the colonizer all the advantages acquired while sparing him the disastrous conse­quences. They only forget that the nature of the colo­nial relationship depends on its advantages. Either the colonial situation subsists and it effects nothing, or it disappears and the colonial relationship and colonizer disappear.

But why is it that the settler fails to envision any decolonial outcome that does not involve some punitive punishment for themselves? Simple. Firstly, they have come to genuinely believe that the colonised people, that the Indigenous people, are inherently barbaric, and that they have some innate bloodlust. In this way, the coloniser projects the very real genocide onto the colonised, as though if settlers do not maintain the genocide, the Indigenous people will in turn commit a genocide. It is a projection, and you will find it in even the most genuine ally who professes that they love the cause but cannot imagine life under First Nations rule. It is racist, for every colonial genocide must be racist, though they often do not realise it because the Australian colonial education system has shielded them entirely from the reality of the genocide. Secondly, it is the lack of imagination for any system that is not the one they have come to know over the course of their lives. It is the idea that the best system is the one we live in right now and that there cannot be a better system prior to this, nor can this system be abolished. It may be reformed in the future, but it cannot be teared down because it appears that humanity, the best of it, only appeared when the system appeared. It is the idea that prior to colonisation, every single person in the world was barbaric, stupid, and stinky, but suddenly, after the establishment of colonisation, we have split the world into a binary of civilised and uncivilised. Colonisation therefore becomes a race to eradicate the uncivilised and protect the civilised, and still, until today, these colonial projects refuse to abandon this dichotomy of civilised and uncivilised. And so, the settler embodies these two ideas: that by virtue of their privilege of being a settler, a privilege denied to the First Nations people, they must maintain and help upkeep civilisation.

We must abandon these ideas entirely. The sovereignty of the First Nations ought not to even need proving, and yet we find ourselves in a world where it is incumbent on them to prove that they are indeed sovereign. Thus, though there exists a bloodthirsty and genocidal state, the First Nations people are the only path to liberation on this landmass. So long as the genocidal state remains, there is no liberation. There can be no assimilation into a state so intent on ending your existence. There is no justice in a state that has created a legal system designed to legalise genocide and protect itself with its own colonial law. For this, I bring a passage from Uncle Tony Birch, from his essay found in Native Title is Not Land Rights:

Because [Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner] had taken the case to the [federal] court [in 1999-2000] against the federal government, and [Justice O’Loughlin] could not find the federal government responsible because as [stolen] children the plaintiffs had been in the care of private institutions. They ‘lost’ on a technicality.. And the [justice] wanted to make sure that his acceptance of the truth of what happened [with the stolen generation] was on the record — he just couldn’t hold the federal government responsible. Yet despite this technicality, we need to note that none of those private institutions that these children went to initiated any of the legislation that resulted in their forced removal. The legislation, the law, that allowed Peter Gunner, Lorna Cubillo, and thousands of other children to be taken was legislation enacted by states and by the commonwealth. So let’s be certain of what is being said here: There was legislation that allowed those children to be tortured, and the government that passed those laws is not responsible for what happened to them.

Lorna and Peter, who had been stolen by the colonial state’s ethnic cleansing policies and subjected to torture (mentally, physically, and sexually) as children in an effort to erase their identity, had demanded damages from the colonial state for not just their pain but for the loss of their “Aboriginal language[s], culture[s], and way[s] of life, and for [the] loss of entitlements to land.”

Although Justice O’Loughlin recognised that all of their claims were indeed true, he could not find in their favour because of a technicality. It is to say that “Yes, I recognise you were ethnically cleansed, but for me to recognise that and award you damages of general equivalence to the loss of your identity would open up a precedent that this colonial state will never permit me to provide.”

This, after all, is the defence of the genocidal state. If we did not do it, we provided the ability for someone else to do it with our blessing. Yet, when it comes to responsibility, you will find no one home to demand justice from. Because there can never be justice on stolen land.

So we cannot demand justice from our oppressors; this we know already for those who have read Audre Lorde’s work:

Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the masterʼs tools will never dismantle the masterʼs house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

This is where I leave you today. Our job as anti-colonialists is not complete until each and every single colony is abolished. We cannot possibly support nor celebrate the ‘birthday’ of this colonial and genocidal state. Instead, we must be up in anger; we must do what we can to ensure that this birthday is the last, whether it be marching, taking action, educating, demanding, and learning, and if it is not this year, then the next year, and so forth until the vampiric colonial state begins to detract its claws and fangs from the still-living First Nations for the final time. The First Nations will be free, as will Palestine.

And Allah knows best.