History, memory and the politics of self-determination at an early outstation
History, memory and the politics of self-determination at an early outstation Book Section
Experiments in Self-Determination
- Author(s): Myers, Fred
- Secondary Author(s): Peterson, Nicolas, Myers, Fred
- Published: 2016
- Publisher: ANU Press
- ISBN: 9781925022902
Abstract: Looking back at the experience of the Pintupi outstation of Yayayi over the initial period 1973–75, when I was a PhD student doing field research there, I am divided between nostalgia and ambivalence. One can hardly ignore the memory of Pintupi people’s excitement to be away from the tensions and density of the large government settlement of Papunya, or the distinctive embrace of the resurgent civil rights movement expressed at Yayayi in a language of ‘Black Power’. Yayayi was one of the very first ‘outstation communities’ in the Northern Territory under the umbrella of changes articulated by the Whitlam Government’s embrace of something we call ‘Aboriginal self-determination’. A powerful notion at the time, as Peter Sutton (2009) has testified, this phrase needs to be kept in quotation marks, as we should, I suggest, explore what this political slogan meant. The exuberance of Pintupi returning to Yayayi, 40 km west of Papunya, was palpable. Their enthusiasm was matched by indeterminate expectations, by inchoate ideas of a future. Nonetheless, for me to have been there, as a young man with an equally un-nuanced progressive view of a possible future, is the source of my nostalgia, which, I suspect, is shared by many who lived or worked on the early outstations. Let me consider for a moment, then, what I mean by ‘ambivalence’. What did Yayayi amount to? I want to think about this because in recent years, the political screw has turned and one routinely now hears that the project or policy of ‘Aboriginal self-determination’ was a failure, the source of a perceived current severe dysfunction in many remote communities (see, for example, Hughes 2007; Johns 2001; Howson 2000). Many of us who did research in remote communities in the 1970s were strong supporters of an Aboriginal right to self-determination, as Peter Sutton has (again) pointed out, and in that sense, we may feel implicated in these results. What went wrong? It is important to say here that these policies were not really the consequence of the sympathies of anthropologists. The movement for Aboriginal self-determination was embedded in and catalysed by international movements of national liberation, civil rights and human rights.
- Urls: https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p331981/pdf/book.pdf
- Publisher Location: Canberra