The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was developed collaboratively over the last two years by myself, Warumungu community members, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich (software developers) and Chris Cooney (designer). Mukurtu means ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu. Dilly bags were used as safe keeping places for sacred materials. The archive is thus a “safe keeping place.”

The gist of the project is this: Warumungu community members wanted a way to manage the digital materials they received from a number of sources—mainly researchers, teachers and missionaries who had once worked in the community. How could they store, organize, distribute, and allow access to these images based on the Warumungu cultural protocols that surround viewing and distribution of images and the associated knowledge that goes with them?

Over two years of consultation, we developed a browser-based digital archive (using a MySQL database and PHP scripting language, the archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP web environment—Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP—for those techies out there) using the cultural protocols to drive the technology. That is, the information architecture of the system was driven by the specific Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing, distribution, and reproduction of images. There is a detailed summary concerning the functionality of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive on my blog.

Over the last few years of development I have met several people involved in similar projects—mainly in Australia (I’d love to know about others). Finally having Mukurtu installed in Tennant Creek though gave us the opportunity to 1) think of ways to develop it further in the context of Nyinkka Nyunyu as an art and culture centre and 2) reach out to others to find ways to improve and share what we have. We have begun to develop a framework for a flexible system that would allow other communities to customize the system to fit their own cultural protocols–what we need now are more developers! Although at present most of the content in Mukurtu is from personal collections, the goal is to now reach out to museums and begin a process of virtual repatriation of Warumungu cultural materials. The South Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria have already loaned physical objects to Nyinkka Nyunyu for their museum space. These objects are displayed at Nyinkka Nyunyu and are accompanied by Warumungu narration.

The local archive allows for thousands more objects to be virtually repatriated at a fraction of the cost. Mukurtu allows for the content to be curated by individuals in the community. People can tag the content with restrictions, add multiple stories and recollections, and sort it by culturally relevant categories. People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Digital archives—powered by Indigenous protocols and intellectual property systems—have the potential to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the institutions that hold Indigenous materials and the communities to whom they belong. Even if one thought that all objects should be repatriated, most Indigenous communities don’t have the money or facilities to store the objects properly. Many communities want museums to keep their objects safe—they want a voice in the way they are displayed and curated. Digital projects can provide one avenue for Indigenous curation. One great example of this is the Virtual Museum Canada project. The Canadian government has funded many First Nations web based museum projects (see the Dane Wajich project by the Doig River First Nations community).

There is potential, then, for digital archives and other web-based projects (that take seriously and integrate Indigenous protocols) to reanimate the terrain of museum display, curation, and information management and to establish collaborative development projects between technologists, anthropologists and communities. Local archives, “safe keeping places,” that use Indigenous cultural protocols to define access and distribution parameters should not be read as closing down the commons or sealing off information. Instead, these projects give us a way to interrogate the limits of commons-like narratives about information or information freedom. They give us a way to redefine access and control apart from big business models. They allow us to examine different modes of information distribution and reproduction and the ways in which these systems maintain and create knowledge through their specific protocols. These archives are as much about production as they are preservation—in these cases the two are intertwined. Can these systems also inform the larger debate about access to information in relation to digital technologies? They seem poised to do so.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the several groups in Australia, including the Green party, have planned rallies for November 17 as an “International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.”

The Government’s current top-down approach in the Northern Territory simply will not succeed. But John Howard doesn’t seem to want to listen. Join groups around Australia and the world on November 17th – an International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.

For more information check out the Green Party Blog here– the Greens are one of the only national political parties to openly denounce the intervention since day one. Like I said in previous posts this issue has not gotten very much attention outside Australia. This is a chance for folks to spread the word and let people know what the Australian government is doing to thousands of Aboriginal people. I’ll post more about it on my blog, Long Road, on November 17, hopefully others will too.

One of the things that struck me the most when I got to Australia in August was the state of depression, for lack of a better term, that had taken hold of many of these folks. In Alice Springs I met several anthropologists and linguists who worked in several of the communities in the region at an event one night. The mood was very somber. Not in a pity me sort of way, of course their lives weren’t being upended by racist policies, perspective was in tact, but the feeling was one of utter disbelief. The Howard government has been hostile to Aboriginal issues for the last eleven years, but even this seemed extreme.

At the beginning, with little in the way of information about what was going to happen, many people felt like their hands were tied—what were they to do? No one knew what exactly the intervention was going be like. The Brough intervention team went out of their way to ignore and dismiss the people who worked in Aboriginal communities. Non-Aboriginal people—especially academics and other so-called “lefties”—have been painted as part of the problem. If self-determination failed then it did so with these “outsiders” as part of the problem. People working in Aboriginal communities, where abuse and other social problems were documented, were indeed as much to blame as anyone—or so the logic goes.

The first week in October, (about three months since the declaration of a state of emergency) Jack Waterford (a reporter) wrote an article in the Canberra times called “Anthropologists’ Silence makes them Complicit.” The first sentence of the article sets the tone:

“Has there ever been a more contemptible, despicable or obvious silence than the silence of academics in the Aboriginal industry—anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, et al—over the Federal Government’s invasion of Aboriginal Australia?’

Although he singled out anthropologists in the title, other academics, according to him, are equally silent and complicit.
In the wake of the article a sometimes heated discussion erupted on the Australian Anthropology Society listserv debating Waterford’s accusations. I won’t quote anyone since it is a semi-private discussion board (although I believe anyone can join). I’ll summarize some of the views.

1. Anthropologists haven’t been silent, they just haven’t been listened to—or the venues in which they have spoken in are not well publicized and the mainstream media have been fairly pro-intervention
2. The issues of abuse are too complex to boil down to a sound bite, so anthropologists are left out because their views don’t lend themselves to sound bites.
3. There is a danger of anthropological work being used against Aboriginal people—i.e. one never knows how or where ones work will circulate or if parts of it will be used to uphold policies antithetical to its argument, so some material may not be published
4. Anthropologists have failed to adequately deal with the harsher realities of Aboriginal life focusing instead on more “traditional” aspects
5. Anthropologists know that the solutions to the social problems must involve long term collaborative work and the crisis mentality undermines the type of work that needs to be done
6. Ethically anthropologists have a responsibility to the people with whom they work and that is complicated when they work for/with government.

The “it’s too complex” argument seems the weakest. I remember hearing Fred Myers give a talk in which he said it was incumbent on anthropologists to make our arguments in ways that many audiences could hear. Complexity exists in all situations and yet solutions need to be found and be articulated.

Over the course of the few weeks that the discussion went on it became clear that ethical issues within the field are hotly contested and that there isn’t one view of the intervention (as to be expected). Some of the points link up with the discussion of anthropologists in the military, in fact this was directly brought up by a few people on the AAS listserv, that working with government “compromises” anthropologists work.

How should anthropologists work in these times of crisis? If it is not a war zone, but has become a de facto militarized space do different sets of criteria apply? Should anthropological work inform government policy? Is there a dividing line between anthropology and advocacy?

A friend of mine (non-academic) said that after reading my blog posts on Long Road said that my writing struck him as advocacy not academics. I’m not sure the distinction holds up for me. Where would I draw the line and what would anthropology look like without advocacy-type work? If one works in communities that are being over powered and subject to racist and dehumanizing policies doesn’t one have an obligation to expose these situations?

Update: I fixed up the post the server cut out on me at the end and the whole thing didn’t get saved….but now it’s fine.

Back to the intervention. As Jangari mentioned in a comment below there was a great Four Corners program on yesterday, you can watch the entire program or extended interviews online here.

Once the “emergency” was declared Northern Territory Aboriginal communities the Howard/Brough team set out their plan for action. The ‘intervention’ was given a mission: “stabilize, normalize, exit,” a “team of experts” (list here) and an operational commander: Major General Dave Chalmers. The military language continued as they announced a “boots on the ground strategy,” “command operations” and “strategic plans” and an “embedded” national media presence.

Major General Chalmers assignment is to act as the operational leader. There haven’t been machine guns, IEDs or tanks and the soldiers have playing footy with the kids pretty regularly. This is not Iraq. There is a joke circulating in Australia that Australia is the first member of the “Coalition of the willing” to invade itself (remember Australia was one of the first and remaining supporters of Bush and the war on terror). In Willowra, this sign greeted intervention teams:

Over the first six weeks of the intervention as the command team was moving from community to community a pattern started to emerge. The team would go in, often unannounced or with only a few hours notice. They would convene meetings in which intervention team personnel would often read from pre-written scripts about the changes ahead. The changes (which are part of the bundle of legislation passed on August 17, 2007, a good summary, here) included:

1. Changing the permit system (people need to get permits to enter Aboriginal land in the NT, this is handled by the land councils. The CLC approves over 90% of permit requests each year)
2. Increased alcohol restrictions
3. Restrictions on pornography and x rated television
4. Compulsorily taking over communities through five-year leases (and paying “just compensation” to the landholders)
5. Appointing a “community manager” to oversee the bureaucratic and “law and order” changes
6. Cutting off the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) which employee over 8,000 Aboriginal people in the NT and are the economic lifeblood of most remote communities
7. “Transitioning” people to “real jobs” through STEP programs or when their are no jobs putting them on “work-for-the-dole”
8. Quarantining 50% of people’s Centrelink payments (welfare, old age pensions, etc).

For a good summary guide see the Central Land Council fact sheets, here

The intervention in action:
Step One: Bring in military and police to “survey” communities to document the problem areas (forget that this documentation already exists in most cases). By all accounts the police and military personnel have served a very limited purpose: they mostly hung around, gave kids candy and watched while the bureaucrats spoke with the communities. Some have helped put up temporary buildings (for the bureaucrats to sleep in). It’s not clear what the military role was in the first place–other than to perhaps give the plan the necessary look of an emergency.

Step 2: Get health teams in to do mandatory health checks on children. Since the intervention was premised on the abuse–particular sexual abuse– of children the Brough/Howard plan called for health screenings. Once doctors weighed in that mandatory exams would themselves constituted abuse, Brough backed off and said the health checks were optional. As I mentioned last time the health checks have been less than impressive with the doctors admitting that they aren’t finding any new health problems. In September I was talking with a health professional that works in Elliot, just north of Tennant Creek. She said when the intervention team rolled in they had to continually ask the two Aboriginal health workers questions about the children they were evaluating. The health workers and their regular doctor do regular checks on all children already and have documented the health problems—ears, mainly—that already exist. The team who flew in at some expense re-documented what was already known (these types of stories are the norm). There have been approx. 2000 health screenings thus far (for more see this article)

Step 3: Bring in the “transition teams” to let people know that their ½ their Centrelink pay will be quarantined and if they are working on CDEP (community development employment projects)—sorry, you’ll know be on work-for-the-dole and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) will tell you what your new job is—it usually has to do with picking up rubbish (the Centrelink and DEWR folks who came to Tennant Creek said as much–oh but the artists who are now out of jobs could also “paint rain water tanks, they said). And, people will also be given courses on how to “manage” their (now lower) incomes. (the Four Corners episode does a good job of showing the implications of this–see above link).

With little in the way of details these meetings tended to be confusing for everyone. In Tennant Creek when the Centrelink folks came to town they refused to answer question off their script and said they were not allowed to give out printed versions of their PowerPoint presentations. Living Black, a national television show, did a great job of getting out to communities and talking with people after and during many of these meetings (you can watch the archived programs on their website).

Scrapping CDEP has been a major issue. With some 8,000 people WORKING on CDEP (this is not passive welfare as it has been portrayed) and the offer of only 2,000 “real jobs” by the Commonwealth, some 6,000 Aboriginal people are set to become unemployed. In communities people wonder how they will get along? How will they continue to live in small communities or on outstations without this avenue for employment? Another question on everyone’s lips was: how will taking over our land, scrapping our permit system and cutting off our livelihoods make our kids more safe? No one has yet to answer these questions. In fact, even many who support the intervention–Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson, Alison Anderson and Marcia Langton–question the logic of those provisions in relation to the overall need to “stabilize” communities. (Labor says if they win the election they will reinstated a reformed CDEP.)

Over the last few months as the intervention team has moved from community to community it has met with people who are angry, confused at the new policies, and bitter over the way in which this new plan has been carried out. Yuendumu residents have been vocal in their disdain for the plan. The community from Maningrida just filed a lawsuitthe first to challenge the legality of the legislation in relation to compulsory leases and the abolishment of the permit system. Art centres throughout the NT have banned together to form a national group to fight the scrapping of CDEP. Tennant Creek the artists at Julalikari Women’s Art Centre have made national headlines fighting to keep CDEP. The list goes on.

Major General Chalmers has consistently stated that the operation is productive and that they are implementing the necessary plans. Here’s one operational gem. Since 1/2 of people’s Centrelink incomes will be quarantined, they will have to get a debit card that allows them to spend their money only at certain stores: Coles, Woolworth’s and K-Mart. Community stores must apply to be added to the list of licensed stores eligible to accept the Centrelink payment cards. For the first phase of testing in 4 small communities, Centrelink has set up a caravan in the parking lot of the Alice Springs hospital where people must go to activate their cards and designate where they want to spend their money. So people must 1) find a way to get to Alice Springs from communities up to several hundreds of kilometers away 2) stand in line in the parking lot 3) decide then and there where they will spend their money for the next two weeks 4) if they change their minds, no problem, they can just get back in line and reallocate where they want to spend their money. This is what military planning has produced so far–limited health checks with no new medical information, confusion over community employment and basic services, and law suits challenging the compulsory leases.

Brough and Howard’s militarization of the intervention was necessary to produce the appearance of an emergency that needed a swift response. It has not, however, produced compliant subjects. The second phase of the plan, to “normalize” communities, is meant to get underway over the next year (if Howard is re-elected at the end of November, if not just what a Labor government will do is unclear). There have been calls over the last two weeks for Chalmers to step down as commander now that the initial phase is over–having a military commander preside over Aboriginal communities for too long might give Australia’s allies the wrong picture about their national stability. So far, he’s not going anywhere. If he stays and moves into the normalization phase what will that look like? The Major General checking to make sure work-for-the-dole participants pick up rubbish? Escorting children to school? Teaching people how to “manage their incomes” so they can be homeowners? Is this a new military exercise or is this comparable to more recent “liberation” campaigns?

In my next post I’ll discuss the role of anthropologists in the intervention and its aftermath.

I returned a few weeks ago from a two-month field trip to Tennant Creek a small town in Australia’s Northern Territory. I’ve been working in Tennant Creek since 1995 with Warumungu people. This trip was focused on installing a community digital archive–a collaborative project that we have spent about two years on. I’ll get to that at the end of the week, but I want to begin my blogging here with a discussion of the “intervention” into Aboriginal communities that began in June of this year and has no clear end in sight (sound familiar?).

First, the “emergency.”

In June of this year the “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children are Sacred” report by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson was released by the Northern Territory (NT) government. The report detailed child abuse (including sexual abuse) in Aboriginal communities and made dozens of recommendations for specific ways to address the problem including more community consultation, the use of interpreters, education, safe houses, etc. The report made it clear that this was not a new problem, and that solutions need to be long term and had to involve Aboriginal communities at every level (full report here, summary here). I’m not going to re-hash the debate that went on here at SM concerning the veracity of the report or who saw what where.

My purpose here is to examine and pose some questions about the relationship between settler governments and their indigenous populations in light of the events that followed the release of the Anderson/Wild report in Australia.

On June 21 2007 Prime Minister John Howard (who has been in office since 1996) and his current Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough called a special news conference to declare a national “state of emergency” in 73 Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and the town camps in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine (see the map here). Using the Anderson/Wild report as their basis, they announced their intent to ignore “constitutional niceties” in order to adopt a plan that was “radical, comprehensive and interventionist.”

It didn’t take long for the crisis rhetoric to be undermined as some commentators noted that similar reports had been released consistently over the last ten years without so much as a peep from the Howard government. But these critiques were largely eclipsed by the emphasis on crisis–John Howard even likened the NT situation to the hurricane Katrina: “We have our Katrina here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still.” This is one of the only mentions of the long history of problems predating the “emergency.” Most of the crisis rhetoric places the problem squarely in the present and thus The PM’s need to take “swift” action lest he be left looking like GWB post-Katrina.

What does the Commonwealth gain by defining Aboriginal communities as in crisis? How does this frame the way that Aboriginal issues are dealt with in the nation?

A little background…
Mal Brough has consistently criticized what he labels “communal” land ownership as being a roadblock to Aboriginal economic prosperity. He believes that land rights has been a failure and has lead to more indigenous hardship. In 2006 the Commonwealth was able to amend the Aboriginal Land Rights Act making leases of Aboriginal land easier (but still voluntary). For months before the “emergency” Brough had been working to entice Tangentyere Council to accept $60 million to “upgrade” and “normalize” the Alice Springs town camps. The Council held numerous meeting with community members and every time they knocked back by the $60 million because it came with relinquishing their ownership for a lease in perpetuity to the government. Howard and Brough desperately wanted a new way of managing both Aboriginal land–for development and investment–and Aboriginal lives. In 2004 Howard introduced the idea of “mainstreaming” to counter what he saw as the “failure of “self-determination” (which had been the stated government policy on Aboriginal affairs for decades). When Howard got into office in 1996 he began slowly chipping away at self-determination–particularly what he saw as “special rights” for Indigenous people. Mainstreaming was supposed to produce a “whole-of-government” approach whereby services to Aboriginal communities would be managed in an integrated manner by government agencies. One of the main goals of mainstreaming was to reduce red tape and improve the big three issues: health, housing and education. There is no evidence that this has been successful, in fact, given the government’s own admission of a crisis in Aboriginal communities, their mainstreaming has been a failure (see reports by the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy on self-determination, mainstreaming and the intervention here).

The stated crisis gave the Commonwealth the opportunity to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act, push aside Aboriginal civil and property rights, push aside the role of Aboriginal organizations, communities, and the NT government in confronting the issues of abuse and “law and order” and ram through over 500 pages of legislation with barely two days of debate. This legislation redefines the state’s relationship to Aboriginal people and land in the NT through welfare reform, mandatory leases, the suspension of Native Title claims,and prohibitions on alcohol (among other things). This is the biggest shift in Aboriginal policy in thirty years and yet there was little debate and the push back from Aboriginal organizations, some Democrats and Green Party members (both minor parties in Australia), activists and academics was met with hostility and bullying tactics along the lines of “if you’re not with us, you’re with the pedophiles” (for recent critiques of this on-going tactic check out this and this).

What the Howard/Brough legislation accomplished was a significant shift in the way that Aboriginal people, communities, and organizations deal with the government in terms of everything from individual and family daily needs to community leases of land. The assumption behind the emergency and the subsequent legislation is that Aboriginal people cannot manage their lives–thus they need the government to micro-manage their incomes, make decisions about where they should shop, what they can buy, and where they should live. (see Jane Simpson’s post here for more on how the money is actually being spent). Significantly, none of the 97 recommendations from the Anderson/Wild Little Children are Sacred report have been implemented and both of the authors of the report have been critical of the intervention (see here and here).

What has been pushed aside with the crisis framework is the collaborative role of Aboriginal people, organizations, and communities in deciding the direction of and the changes necessary to tackle the problems that no one disputes exist. This is all top down. An anthropologist friend of mine who lives and works in the Central Desert said that at the first meeting between Aboriginal people and the “intervention” team in the Alice Springs area an Aboriginal man stood up to address the government officials and told them that Aboriginal people don’t want to see their kids hurt or not going to school, they don’t want rubbish houses and no proper roads, but that they had been “singing out for help” for years with no response from the government, and now the response ignored what they had been saying, ignored their land rights and ignored their place in the decision-making for their communities. In short, this man made it clear that the government’s new mode of (non) engagement with Aboriginal people and communities denied their place within their communities and within the nation.

The Howard/Brough declaration of emergency and the subsequent legislation were an attempt to radically alter the field of indigenous politics, representation, and action. They certainly did not invent the use of crisis as a political tool. But what they have managed to pull off is a relatively uncontested (the majority of the Australian public is still behind the intervention and there has been scant international coverage, let alone criticism) upending of indigenous rights. In stark terms the Howard government declared Aboriginal communities failures. Building on years of undermining Aboriginal self-determination politics and programs (through successive years of under funding, the dismantling of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2004–the only national Indigenous representative body– and constant political attacks on Aboriginal communities defining them as dysfunctional), the Howard/Brough crisis legislation has undermined (but not undone) thirty years of political work. The arrogance of claiming self-determination and Aboriginal communities failures after only thirty years of at best ambivalent policies and programs highlights the Howard government’s assurance that they can get away with this type of new paternalism. The Australian state has essentially declared part of their own territory a “failed state” and in doing so have laid the groundwork for an antagonistic relationship with its Indigenous populations. What they have not been able to get rid of though are the 6,000 Indigenous organizations throughout the country and their extended networks. Unlike “old paternalism” this new shift will face continual challenges by a now entrenched Indigenous sector (see Tim Rowse on this here).

In my next post I’ll address the militarization of the intervention as well as the failures of and reactions to the government’s plan throughout the Northern Territory.

update: links for my comment below in response to Strong:

Rudd’s support for the intervention, here.
Marion Scrymgour’s speech, here.
Also I should note that Scrymgour came under attack by Brough after this speech. He said she should resign since she isn’t on board with Labor in supporting the intervention. Apparently criticizing the government is not accepted in Australia anymore. She has not resigned, but she did back down some.