Table of Contents
It seems that contemporary perspectives on native title have shifted rather dramatically from the early optimism that saw the Mabo decision described as a ‘moral and historical statement of truth [that provides] the strongest justification yet for the claims of those dispossessed’, potentially even challenging (or at least problematising) settler sovereignty itself (Pearson 1993: 82). Former director of the Northern Land Council, Mick Dodson, has described native title as providing relatively few benefits for Aboriginal people, and as forming part of a process of ‘further dispossession’.[1] In a recent address he described the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) (NTA) and its amendments as embodying a racist doctrine of native title extinguishment (Dodson 2007).
One of the most forceful critiques along these lines has been that provided by Wolfe (1999), who argues that the principal function of native title is ‘paradoxically as much to provide grounds for delimiting indigenous relations to land as for their recognition’ (1999: 203). Put differently, to accept the terms of recognition within which the notion of ‘native title’ is framed is to endorse the terms for its extinguishment as well as the radical assumption of sovereignty upon which both are based. This view is a compelling one; the Mabo decision, the NTA (and associated legislation) and the growing corpus of native title case law, together certainly embody the power that defines sovereignty—the arrogation of authority to set the ultimate terms of exclusion and recognition, to delineate the space of rights and non-rights (see also Agamben 1998). And in this sense it is certainly possible to contend that native title is as much implicated in the continuing dynamics of colonisation as it can ameliorate aspects of it.
This theme is elaborated by Morris (2003), where he argues that the various determinations under the NTA have done more to limit and extinguish Indigenous claims to land than to facilitate them. He describes the original High Court Mabo determination as ‘essentially perverse’ in that it ‘did not concede, the right to indigenous communities to exercise traditional law and customs over their lands—and nor could it without undermining its own authority’ (2003: 140). At the same time, the decision enshrined a ‘continuation of traditionalism’ as the basis of native title claims, where ‘indigenous identity and culture must put itself through a trial, and demonstrate its members’ authenticity’ (2003: 140).
Aspects of the limits of native title are now well-rehearsed among anthropologists, though their critical observations have usually been both less trenchant and less political. Among the most prescient early commentators were Kondos and Cowlishaw (1995), who drew attention to the potential for native title to reify notions of tradition, while Merlan (also in 1995), pointed to the risk for a ‘regimentation’ of customary practices. A closely related concern seeks to problematise any stress on systematicity in native title at the expense of contingency and reflexivity (Weiner 2000). These views in some respects parallel Wolfe’s notion of ‘repressive authenticity’, where native title is depicted as displacing the ‘burden of history’ from ‘the fact of expropriation to the character of the expropriated’ (1999: 202).
But anthropologists have often also maintained an interest in exploring the transformative cultural and social potential in the arena of native title. Weiner (2003), for example, writes against the grain of a ‘space of recognition’ perspective of native title (see Smith, Chapter 6) in arguing for a more complex anthropological engagement with native title processes themselves as a ‘total social fact’, with productive potential in terms of the cultural and social practices of an indigenous population that has a long history of ‘conjunctural engagement’ with Euro-Australian institutional practices. At the same time, Weiner acknowledges the danger of an overall diminution in what the public and the legal establishment acknowledge as the ‘total condition of recognisable Aboriginality in Australia’ (Weiner 2003: 103).
In what is an excerpt from a larger study (Lahn 2003), I want to reflect on a similar question, that of the relation of native title to the total condition of recognisable indigeneity in Australia (rather than Aboriginality), with a specific focus on the Central Islands of the Torres Strait. As Keen (1999: 2) points out, indigeneity is an a priori interpretive concept within native title. I argue here that multiple forms of indigeneity are acknowledged among Torres Strait Islanders. I focus on the two contrasting modes with which I am most familiar, and which form a key distinction Islanders themselves draw in the Central Islands: that of being a ‘native’ or a ‘foreigner’. It is important to note that both these terms refer to people recognised in local terms as Torres Strait Islanders. But they are differentiated in the Central Islands as distinct states of being indigenous. It is equally important to stress that neither term is pejorative; in fact, the descriptive ‘foreigner’ has generally been associated with a degree of status in the Central Islands. Both labels are used for self-description (as well as ascription) though they are not expressions that appear in everyday interactions.
This situation is a difficult one to render in English, which lacks adequate means to characterise such a contrast in a way that still affirms an embracing state of indigeneity. It could be helpful perhaps to return to one of the specific etymological significances of the term ‘autochthony’, which involves the notion of ‘arising in situ’ (i.e. rather than arriving from elsewhere). In this sense, the labels of native and foreigner in the Central Islands could be understood as drawing a distinction between ‘indigenous autochthons’ and ‘indigenous non-autochthons’.[2] But such an approach is limited by the degree to which the term indigenous has come to be regarded among English-speakers as synonymous with the term autochthonous—to all intents and purposes, an indigene is regarded as an autochthon. With this difficulty in mind, I will utilise the Torres Strait Creole terms neitiv (native) and porena (foreigner) for the remainder of the discussion. While still somewhat recognisable to English speakers, their clear difference from their English cognates serves as a reminder that the terms do not bear the same conceptual baggage.
My intention here is to briefly explore the meeting between this neitiv/porena identification in the Central Islands and the representational requirements of native title. I argue that native title’s regime of value marginalised, and potentially stigmatised this kind of local identificatory distinction. My focus is Warraber Island, the southernmost of the Central Island group. I have been working there since 1996, conducting doctoral fieldwork and native title research. Warraber people first represented themselves as a claimant group within a claim based on the Torres Strait Islander Land Act 1991 (Qld) (TSILA); shifts in representation occurred in engaging with the different demands of native title.[3] These shifts illustrate aspects both of the unequal social relations inherent in the representational demands of native title as a state-sponsored regime of recognition, and of the capacity of local people to respond creatively to such demands.
Warraber residents use the neitiv/porena terminological division both when discussing their ancestors, and in expressing contemporary forms of local identity. It forms a profoundly significant expression both in their understanding of the past, and in their perception of their contemporary community. The primary significance of the neitiv/porena distinction involves a view that neitiv figures were present in the islands before the sudden influx of various foreigners or outsiders (ausaid man) into the Torres Strait from the mid-nineteenth century. This occurred as part of the arrival of European marine industries to the region, which brought with them a labour force composed predominantly of Pacific Islanders, though with a number of Europeans in supervisory roles (see Beckett 1977, 1987; Mullins 1990, 1995; Shnukal 1992a, 1992b, 1995).[4] Pacific Islands of origin included Vanuatu, Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia.
Some of the Pacific Islanders remained in the Torres Strait, marrying local Torres Strait women and producing children. The influence of these Pacific Islander residents and their descendants is especially marked in the Central Islands, which formed a key centre of marine industry activity. Aspects of Pacific Island music and dance forms, for example, have become a thorough part of contemporary Torres Strait Islander performance (see Lahn 2004; Lawrence 2004). Crucially, and as a result largely of colonial systems of racial classification, Pacific Islanders not only held superior positions in the marine workforce but generally served as intermediaries between Europeans and Torres Strait Islanders in various capacities, including Christian missionising activity. A legacy of this role was that the Pacific Islanders and their descendants, now referred to as porena, were regarded by local people as possessing special abilities—in particular the skills necessary to interact effectively with Europeans and European institutions (and, as a consequence, to buffer locals from the demands of these spheres).[5] Porena people in the Central Islands still dominate such quasi-governing bodies as Island Councils, and are regarded by neitiv residents as well-suited by their ancestry for playing such a role.
In fact, all Warraberans can potentially trace some form of genealogical connection to both neitiv and porena ancestors. The basis of contemporary identification as neitiv or porena relates to the status of male apical ancestors. Among Warraberans, as with other Central Island populations, there is a pronounced patrilineal emphasis in local thinking about descent. Female ancestors tend to be marginalised by comparison to their male counterparts; when Warraber people describe their personal lineage, as few females as necessary will be included in tracing connections to a male apical ancestor. Wherever possible, a patrilineage will be traced (or as near to a patrilineage as practicable). This parallels a general predisposition to depict men as the most active and influential social agents. All narratives concerned with historical events stress male ancestors, in particular the part played by exceptional and powerful men.[6] The role of women is generally overlooked or disregarded.
Those able to trace descent in this way from male apical ancestors who were porena are those who consider themselves today as also being porena. The most important and earliest of these ancestors for Warraber people is an individual from Vanuatu named Bubarei. Similarly, those who trace descent from a male apical ancestor who was neitiv (i.e. someone deemed present in the islands before the outsider influx) consider themselves to be neitiv. A large majority of Warraber residents do not possess any male neitiv ancestors. They describe their descent wholly in terms of male porena figures, rather than including female neitiv ancestors with whom they could assert a connection. Therefore, the majority segment of Warraber’s contemporary population represent themselves as porena.
The key factor in categorising significant personal ancestors in terms of a neitiv/porena contrast involves their presence on Warraber before or after the arrival of the marine industries. It is engendered by temporal association rather than ideas about ultimate origin. For Warraber people, this in turn generates further multifaceted associations that give rise to particular discourses of value. The first might be called the neitiv’s ‘power of precedence’. By pre-dating the arrival of others, neitiv figures are recognised both as being the original local landholders and also as possessing an intimate relation to locality, manifest in their close relation to particular significant sites in the landscape (some of which are associated with the fertility and productivity of island resources, such as the wongai fruit—a pre-colonial staple that retains symbolic importance). Porena ancestors are instead valorised as being ‘agents of change’, linked to what is regarded as a generally positive historical transformation of pre-existing life on Warraber Island. In this respect, for the wholly Christian Warraber population, the arrival of the marine industry is inextricably entwined with the arrival of Christianity. As noted, Pacific Islanders were prominently involved in both, as missionaries and as boat crew and owners (Lahn 2003).[7]
Importantly, while both valorising discourses coexist in Warraber society, they cannot be said to convey equal contemporary status or prestige on the two sections of the population. There are very few contexts where the ‘power of precedence’ asserted by the minority neitiv-identifying population is relevant, and to date, it has not provided a basis for eminence or influence in the Warraber community. By contrast, porena descendants, the majority population, have monopolised positions of formal and informal authority for some period on the island. During the involvement of Warraber and Poruma populations in NTA claim processes, issues of the contemporary significance of neitiv and porena ancestry re-emerged in potentially novel ways. But it is necessary first to trace the mode of collective representation that Warraberans developed in response to a first wave of land claims under the TSILA.