Suchergebnisse

An investigation of the role of group-based shame and guilt in motivating citizens of ex-colonial countries to support restitution to former colonized groups which were the target of violence and oppression. Study 1 (N = 125) was conducted in Australia during the lead-up to the first official government apology to Aboriginal Australians. Among white Australians, guilt and shame were associated with attitudinal support for intergroup apology and victim compensation. However, only shame was associated with actual political behaviour (signing a petition in support of the apology). Study 2 (N = 181), conducted in Britain, focussed on Britain's violent mistreatment of the Kenyan population during decolonization. It tested a hypothesis that there are two forms of shame-essence shame and image shame-and demonstrated that image shame was associated with support for apology, whereas essence shame was associated with support for more substantial material and financial compensation. The findings are discussed in light of promoting restitution and reconciliation within nations with histories of colonial violence. Adapted from the source document.

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of 'Sorry' for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional 'foundational principle' to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court's decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes--such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)--as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of 'Sorry' by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired 'three strikes and you're out' approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired 'three 'sorries' and you're in'. Adapted from the source document.

Welfare is frequently seen as simply a question of providing aid to needy. In formulating welfare policy, however, the issue is not as clear cut, because with every handout comes a consequent loss to the dignity of the recipient. In this paper three such key paradoxes which confront the administrator, social worker or community agent operating in the field of Aboriginal welfare are discussed.

How often have you heard a well-meaning person asking 'What is the answer to the "Aboriginal problem"?' Aboriginal Australian academics once responded by attesting that whites were the problem, and that Aborigines must be given back their land. Today those same people are involved in intense debates about just what to do about the ongoing post-Mabo tragedy in remote Australia. So yes, this is a now-acknowledged, but a confusing, multi-facetted problem. Violence and early death are endemic. People are suffering. Too many deaths of loved ones – of very young people, of sharp-witted people full of life, humour and fun, and of talented, accomplished leaders in their prime.

Strangely, two recent critical political histories of Indigenous affairs — by Gunstone and by Short — reproduce a structure of perception that resembles the characteristic structure of 1950s perception: a sense of outrage at the helplessness of Indigenous Australians in the face of overbearing colonial pressure, eclipsing the narrative presence of the Indigenous political agent. By returning to the work of those political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists who observed the political reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, I suggest that a richer conception of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous agency is both possible and necessary. There are three interlocking topics in the writing of Indigenous political history: the changing quality of non‐Indigenous engagement; the Indigenous leadership and its historical formation; the differentiated institutional response of the state. The political history of Indigenous Australians should not be reduced to a narrative of the settler colonial state's persistently limited concessions to the Indigenous grievance — important though that theme may be.

The entire Australian continent was once covered with networks of Indigenous placenames. These names often evoke important information about features of the environment and their place in Indigenous systems of knowledge. On the other hand, placenames assigned by European settlers and officials are largely arbitrary, except for occasional descriptive labels such as 'river, lake, mountain'. They typically commemorate people, or unrelated places in the Northern hemisphere. In areas where Indigenous societies remain relatively intact, thousands of Indigenous placenames are used, but have no official recognition. Little is known about principles of forming and bestowing Indigenous placenames. Still less is known about any variation in principles of placename bestowal found in different Indigenous groups. While many Indigenous placenames have been taken into the official placename system, they are often given to different features from those to which they originally applied. In the process, they have been cut off from any understanding of their original meanings. Attempts are now being made to ensure that additions of Indigenous placenames to the system of official placenames more accurately reflect the traditions they come from.

The eighteen chapters in this book range across all of these issues. The contributors (linguistics, historians and anthropologists) bring a wide range of different experiences, both academic and practical, to their contributions. The book promises to be a standard reference work on Indigenous placenames in Australia for many years to come.