02 Lilley 2006 Archaeology Diaspora and Decolonization

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 2847 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060560

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

28

Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization

IAN LILLEY

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (ATSIS) Unit, University ofQueensland, Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACTArchaeologists in settler societies need to find theoretically well-founded ways of understanding the sociopolitical milieux in whichthey work if they are to deal sensibly and sensitively with the colo-nizers as well as the colonized in their communities. This articleexplores one avenue that the author has found helpful in a numberof contexts. He advances the proposition that, with certain qualifi-cations, the social conditions of settler nations might usefully beapproached as the products of a single social condition diaspora in a manifestation that is unique to such societies because it positionsindigenous peoples as well as settlers as diasporic.

KEY WORDSdecolonization diaspora postcoloniality

INTRODUCTION

Archaeologists in settler societies live in interesting times. Thinking of thosein Australia, most are politically supportive of colonized Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander minorities despite broader community skepticism

29Lilley Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization

regarding assertions of Indigenous identity and claims to land, resourcesand cultural property. While most have close working relationships withparticular Indigenous groups and individuals, as a group they continue tobe confronted by skeptical if not hostile Indigenous reactions to their workon a more abstract, political level. This state of affairs has prompted some-times radical efforts to decolonize archaeological theory and practice byencompassing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests and outlooksand their complex and often subtle interplay with those of the colonizers(Byrne, 2003a, b; Clark and Frederick, 2005; David and McNiven, 2004).Such initiatives have unquestionably made progress, but if the Australiansituation is any guide, the circumstances in which settler archaeologists findthemselves can still occasion a great deal of personal and professional angst.This state of affairs would be easier to cope with intellectually, ethically andemotionally if practitioners had a better theoretical grasp of the phenom-ena they are trying to accommodate. To that end I propose that with certainprovisos they might usefully be approached as the products of a single socialcondition diaspora in a manifestation that is unique to settler societiesbecause it positions both the colonizer and the colonized as diasporic.

The qualifications are as follows. First, I am not equating the historical orcontemporary socioeconomic or political realities of settlers and colonizedminorities. Unlike the case for Aboriginal people after European settlement,the dispersal of colonists to Australia was voluntary for all but those trans-ported as convicts or ordered to accompany them as guards and adminis-trators. Moreover, no amount of hardship subsequently endured bycolonizers as a group including grievous losses in overseas wars wouldcome close to the enormities visited upon native minorities. What is more,in Australia as in other settler nations the intersection of race and classcontinues to result in gaping sociopolitical differentials between thesegroups, as made abundantly clear by empirical indices such as the appallinghealth statistics that characterize many if not most Indigenous communities.The issue, though, is very much one of perception. As I will show, there isgood reason to contend that settler Australians, particularly but not exclus-ively the large Anglo-Celtic majority, see themselves as victims of a capri-cious and unforgiving colonial fate. At the level of the social processesunderlying it, this aspect of the settler mentality is not fundamentally dissim-ilar to the perception of victimhood quite justifiably present in the outlookof colonized Indigenous peoples owing to their history of dispossession.Both groups have been uprooted and relocated by the colonial process,undeniable differences in the nature of this experience notwithstanding, andboth have thus been left with the very strong perception that they are victimsof colonial circumstance. The decolonization of the discipline (and indeedthe nation as a whole) demands that these shared perceptions are exposedand explained rather than ignored or denied, in recognition of the fact thatthey reflect a shared rather than a segregated colonial history.

30 Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

While the quality of victimhood through dispossession suggests thatcolonized native minorities can be characterized as diasporic, it must bestressed as a second proviso that this identification is an exploratory onethat remains controversial. For indigenous people and those who sympa-thize with them politically, the potential for controversy lies in twoprospects. The first, elaborated later in the article, is that characterizingnative communities as diasporic (i.e. dispersed) can imply that they havebeen cut off from the homelands with which they identify to ground theiridentity claims. The second is the opposite of the first to the extent thatthe diasporic condition emphasizes links to a homeland, it can imply thatcontemporary indigenous identity necessarily entails ties to land, as, forexample, Ingold (2000) contends in his discussion of relational indigene-ity. This could decentre Aboriginal perspectives that emphasize dimensionsof existence other than space (e.g. time) as more critical to social identity(as in the case in the US Southwest discussed by Bernardini, 2005). Forconservative political interests, on the other hand, the potential forcontroversy lies in the implication of diaspora theory that native peoplesassumed to have been thoroughly deracinated and delegitimized can stillclaim an authenticity rooted in traditional lands and traditional ways oflife. In contrast to the foregoing, the characterization of European colo-nialism as a diasporic process is commonplace, but the particular perspec-tive on Australia that I take up may be somewhat contentious.

BACKGROUND

Aboriginal people in what are now settler societies have protested againstnon-indigenous interference with their cultural property since Europeansfirst ventured into their worlds centuries ago (e.g. McGuire, 1992: 827). Itis only over the last couple of decades, though, that their objections havebegun to make any concrete impression on those doing the interfering, asprocesses of decolonization have reached beyond the outposts of empirewhere colonizer minorities had integrated or withdrawn to those where thecolonizers had become majorities and stayed. These latter Australia,Canada, New Zealand and the USA are among the established liberaldemocracies with developed capitalist economies in which postcolonialismwas born and continues best to thrive (Appiah, 1991; Dirlik, 1994). Theyhave thus seen sociopolitical change transform archaeology much fasterthan it has in other former colonies. Shifts to decolonize or indigenizearchaeology are just beginning to make themselves felt in Africa (Shepherd,2002) and Latin America (Politis and Prez Golln, 2004) as well as insome of the many parts of Asia not normally thought of as colonial butwhich have indigenous minorities, such as Japan (Mizoguchi, 2004) and


Taiwan (Blundell, 2000) but the process has made much more headwayin North America and most especially Oceania (Bedford, 1996; Byrne,2003a; Lilley, 2000a, b; Lilley and Williams, 2005; McGuire, 2004; Nicholasand Andrews, 1997; Watkins, 2000). The French territory of New Caledoniashould also be included owing to its close parallels with Australia (see Sand,2000; Sand et al., 2005).

Perhaps as much because of these positive developments as despitethem, emotive issues of who owns the past? (McBryde, 1985) continue todog relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in allthese places, owing to a moral imperative on politically sympathetic settlersalways to do more to alleviate racism and social injustice. The well-publi-cized controversy surrounding the repatriation of the Kennewick/AncientOne skeleton in the USA is probably the most obvious current example(Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, 2005; Friends ofthe Past, 2005), but Australian archaeologists will not forget difficult repa-triation cases such as the Tasmanian Affair in a hurry (Allen, 1995; Murray,1996a; Ross, 1996). This saw a major research project stopped in its finalstages and all excavated material returned from university laboratories tothe state from which it originated, where it remains in storage.

In such contexts, archaeologists are forced to engage with someconfronting questions. Perhaps the most common asks how native minori-ties widely seen to be distanced from the traditional pre-European pastby the passage of time and attendant cultural change can claim any sort ofauthentic indigenous identity or, even if that is not overtly challenged,whether they can legitimately assert control over either access to indigen-ous cultural property or knowledge about that property.

The issue is conventionally couched in terms of a highly instrumentalistpolitics of the past peculiar to decolonizing settler states. Broadlyspeaking, there are two perspectives on the matter. The first diminishes thedistinctiveness of indigenous peoples identity in relation to that of thewider population or at least that of other minorities. In Australia, this meansespecially the urban and itinerant rural poor with whom Indigenous peopleshistorically mixed socially and biologically. On these grounds they are takento be making claims regarding cultural heritage, land and other resourcesprimarily on the basis of morally dubious short-term political expediencyrather than to advance morally acceptable agendas founded on genuinecultural continuity with the traditional past (see, e.g., Maddock, 2003 for arecent social-anthropological version of this position; cf. papers in Keen,1994[1988] and Lilley, 2000a).

The alternative view acknowledges that maneuvering for political advan-tage is a significant part of the equation. It also understands, however, thatany such advantage is not inevitably about financial rewards or an end initself in a relentless spiral of special-interest politics. Rather, it accepts thatpolitical gains are more usually used as leverage in pursuit of other ends,


such as access to country or control over cultural heritage, that allow peopleto assure themselves and others of the legitimacy of their distinctiveidentity. This position agrees it is unacceptable to continue to portray realnative peoples only as the timeless, geographically remote Other. On thisbasis it sees contemporary politicking as the unexceptional behavior ofpragmatic modern people using the institutional tools at their disposal tomake their way in the modern world, and emphatically not as a sign thatpeople asserting a questionable native identity have fatally underminedtheir authenticity by behaving in such an obviously non-traditionalmanner.

Most archaeologists in Australia take the second view, including thoseexcoriated by the profession for being on the wrong side of the Tasman-ian repatriation affair (Allen, 1987; Murray, 1996a, b, c). Thus it is thatAustralian archaeologists like those in other settler nations find them-selves working in the confusing and often combative circumstances of thesort sketched at the outset. On the one hand, there are the contemporaryIndigenous people with whom archaeologists work. As noted earlier, mostarchaeologists are politically well-disposed towards them and Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander people routinely make use of archaeologicalevidence to advance their agendas. These Indigenous people believe theycan make legitimate claims to cultural property despite the history ofdispossession and dislocation most have suffered, and assert that this allowsthem to deny or diminish the validity of archaeological interests if itadvances their agendas. On the other hand, the wider national communi-ties of which these archaeologists and native peoples are part, and uponwhich both groups depend for funding, legislative support for heritageprotection and the like, go to considerable ideological, legislative andjudicial lengths to deny or curtail Indigenous claims, often in the processdenying the validity of archaeological support for those claims.

Australian commentators seeking to explain this situation usually makegeneralized allusions to processes of colonialism and of identity construc-tion by the colonizers as well as the colonized. Allen (1987: 4) is undoubt-edly the most succinct in the latter connection. He declares simply that theneed for modern Indigenous communities to symbolize their evolvingidentity through archaeological cultural property is apparent, though onwhat grounds he leaves unsaid. As regards settler Australians, writers suchas Byrne (1996, 2003a), Murray (1996a, b) and Russell (2001) contend thatcolonizers inevitably deny native populations access to their own culturalproperty even as they, the settlers, appropriate it for themselves. It is partand parcel of the way settlers establish and maintain a positive view ofthemselves while they occupy what was (and in the view of most Indigen-ous people still is) someone elses country. These sorts of perspectives aremuch the same as those concerning the situation in North America(McGuire, 1992, 2004; Rubertone, 2000; Trigger, 1980; though cf. Lilley,


2000b for a qualification), and both reflect broader concerns about archae-ology in the colonial and postcolonial worlds (Clifford, 2004; Gosden, 2004;Meskell, 1998; Meskell and Preucel, 2004; Scham, 2001; Trigger, 1980, 1984).My interest in this article is to add a dimension to such positions byconsidering the situation through the lens of contemporary diaspora theory.

DIASPORA

My contribution (Lilley, 2004) to Meskell and Preucels Companion toSocial Archaeology details the conceptual background of the termdiaspora, and the following draws directly from it. The simplest meaningof the word is to scatter people as seed is scattered for planting. All currentconceptualizations of the phenomenon rest on post hoc Biblical andClassical reworkings of even earlier and usually only vaguely documentedhistorical events. Old Testament references to Jewish exile have beencontinually reworked by Jewish and Christian writers, while Classical Greekand Roman visions of the world have been refracted through modernEuropean imperial and anti-imperial experience. Cohen (1997: 2) states inhis overview Global Diasporas that the ancient Greeks coined the term torefer in a positive vein to the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediter-ranean in the Archaic period (800600 BC) . . . through plunder, militaryconquest, colonization and migration. Cohen (1997: 26) contends that thisoriginal broad meaning was highjacked over the last two millennia by thenotion of the Jewish victim diaspora, which rests upon connotations offorced exile and continuing exclusion. Thus it is, in his view, that this moresinister and brutal (1997: ix) perception underpins early scholarly consider-ation of diaspora by the likes of the sociologist Weber, for example, in hisdiscussion of pariah peoples (Cohen, 1997: 1012).

Despite his misgivings, Cohens own survey builds upon what thehistorian Toynbee (1972) called the Jewish model of civilization toconsider the meaning of diaspora in contemporary social theory. So doother recent general treatments such as those of Clifford (1994) and Safran(1991). All acknowledge that the Jewish victim model has a strongentailment . . . on the language of diaspora (Clifford, 1994: 306). They alsopoint out that it helps us comprehend various other cases, including thespread of sub-Saharan Africans through the New World and elsewhere,principally as a result of the post-Columbian slave trade. Importantly,though, all these writers also emphasize that the classical Jewish model ofdiaspora is too narrow to apply to the range of phenomena now accom-modated by the term, including aspects of the Jewish diaspora itself (cf.Spencer-Wood, 1999). Safran notes in this connection that the termsdiaspora and diaspora community seem increasingly to be used as


metaphoric designations for several categories of people expatriates,expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic andracial minorities tout court (Safran, 1991: 83).

Safran proceeds from that observation to proffer a polythetic set of thecrucial attributes of a diaspora, including dispersal, memories or myths ofa homeland, distinction from the host society, an ethic of eventual return tothe homeland, a commitment to the maintenance or restoration of thehomeland and, lastly, a continuing direct or indirect individual andcommunity relationship with the homeland. Clifford (1994: 30410) andCohen (1997: 219) take a similar path. In expanding upon Safrans list,both reduce the emphasis on forced exile and commitment to a homelandwhile retaining dispersal among alien host communities as the centralcharacteristic of the diasporic condition. From there they differ: Cohen seesdiaspora primarily as a type of society characterized by these attributeswhile Clifford sees it more as a social condition produced by experiencingsuch attributes.

Cohen furnishes a descriptive typology of diasporas linked by his ownset of attributes and presents exemplars of each of his types. In addition toconsidering the classic Jewish case at length, he also includes the Africanand Armenian situations as victim diasporas. He goes on to discuss theIndian labour and British imperial diasporas, the latter being of obviousinterest here, as well as the Chinese and Lebanese trade diasporas and theCaribbean cultural diaspora. In connection with this, he discusses and ulti-mately largely disagrees with the stance of Clifford and other postmod-ernists. This is because they look to the psycho-sociological effects ofdiasporic experience. As Anthias (1998: 557, original emphasis) describes it,Clifford and like-minded postmodernists such as Brah (1996), Gilroy (1993)and Hall (1990) see diaspora as a social condition and social process. Thiscondition is structured by movement and the experience of being from oneplace and of another . . . where one is constructed in and through differ-ence as well as cultural accommodation or syncretism: in some versionshybridity (Anthias, 1998: 565, original emphasis).

Indigenous diaspora

Clifford (1994: 309, also 2004 and forthcoming) argues at some length thatin addition to such classic cases as the Jewish and sub-Saharan African situ-ations, Tribal predicaments, in certain historical circumstances, are dias-poric. He acknowledges (1994: 308) that this proposition is contentious,insofar as diaspora discourse, with its focus on migration and the re-creationof community, is in tension with indigenous, and especially autochthonous,claims, which stress continuity of habitation, aboriginality, and often anatural connection to the land. He argues, however, that:


diasporas are dispersed networks of peoples who share common historicalexperiences of dispossession, displacement, adaptation, and so forth . . .[Thus d]ispersed tribal peoples, those who have been dispossessed of theirlands or who must leave reduced reserves to find work, may claim diasporicidentities. Inasmuch as their distinctive sense of themselves is orientedtoward a lost or alienated home defined as aboriginal (and thus outside thesurrounding nation-state), we can speak of a diasporic dimension ofcontemporary tribal life. (Clifford, 1994: 309, original emphasis)

Elsewhere he puts it more simply: Indigenous diaspora is about a socio-spatial reality of connectedness-in-dispersion (Clifford, forthcoming: 95).

Even though none of them cites Clifford or vice versa, his perspectivemirrors that of Australian social anthropologists who have been making useof concepts of diaspora over the last decade in their discussions of continu-ity of ties to country amongst dispersed Indigenous Australians in the contextof native title determinations. Rigsby (1995: 25), for example, draws atten-tion to the existence . . . of a large category of [Indigenous] people who havebecome known as Diaspora people (by comparison with the Jewish people).Sutton (1995) also uses the term diaspora in much the same manner in thesame publication as Rigsby, but neither spells out the empirical or theoreti-cal basis of his usage. Smith (2000) and Weiner (2002) provide lengthiertreatments, though again without referring to the vast diaspora literaturethat has built up since the early 1990s. Like Rigsby, Weiner (2002: 7)compares the successful maintenance of tradition in exile by Indigenouspeople and the Jewish diaspora. He argues that if:

diasporic Indigenous culture in contemporary Australia is not to be seenonly as a debased and incomplete version of something more authenticwhich preceded it historically, then, whether it is recognised by the NativeTitle Act or not, diasporic native title claim groups understandings of theirconnection to traditional land must be considered as a variety of thecontemporary exercise of Indigenous rights in country. (Weiner, 2002: 8)

Smith (2000) comes to a similar conclusion overall, but expands usefully onsome important issues. Central to his exposition is a fact familiar to anyonewho works with Indigenous Australians, namely that the identity claims ofdiaspora people can be rejected by other Indigenous people who haveremained on their country in much the same way that such claims are rejectedby a skeptical wider community. Importantly for my stance here, though, hehas found that as the two groups become more familiar with each other inthe process of land claims, it becomes possible for local people to recognisediaspora people as kin . . . [while] diaspora people begin to revise their under-standings of kin relationships and relationships between people and country.Over time, the two relatively distinct groups, and their understandings, recon-figure each other (2000: 7). He realizes that anthropologists have tended toplay a key role here, with genealogical research establishing links . . .


recognisable to both groups, but he attributes the regeneration of a moreunitary form of contemporary land tenure primarily to fundamentals sharedbetween diaspora and local people (Smith, 2000: 7). Building on the workof Merlan (1998) that Clifford (forthcoming: 96) also cites, Smith (2000: 78)argues that an historically deep-seated epistemic openness apparent inAboriginal connections to country allows these shared fundamentals to berecognized, and that the two different approaches are not simply matters ofcultural erosion or lack thereof . . . [but instead] represent two distincttrajectories of cultural continuity articulating with changing contexts.

This general line of reasoning is elaborated by Clifford (1994: 309). Heobserves that All [indigenous/tribal] communities, even the most locallyrooted, maintain structured travel circuits, linking members at home andaway and in this way bypass an opposition between rootedness anddisplacement an opposition underlying many visions of modernizationseen as the inevitable destruction of autochthonous attachments by globalforces. As he has more recently noted (forthcoming: 96), this insightaccords well with the situation in Australia. Though Clifford cites Merlanand other scholars, papers in Keens seminal Being Black ((1994)[1988],especially Beckett, 1994[1988] and Birdsall, 1994[1988]), provide some ofthe most detailed and best-known descriptions of circumstances in whichdispersed Aboriginal communities retain ties with traditional lands and/orreserves and missions onto which they were moved, as well as managerelationships within and between very large extended family groups, byregular travel over beats, runs and lines connecting kin groups living indifferent places (see Byrne 2004 for a contemporary archaeologicallyoriented discussion of like matters).

Clifford (forthcoming: 96) suggests in this connection that in addressingthe spectrum of indigenous separations from, and orientations to,homeland, village or reservation, we need to complicate diasporic assump-tions of distance. I take this to mean that indigenous diasporas need notinvolve dispersal over large distances or across major political boundaries.That may often be true, but in the Australian context it is worth emphasiz-ing how similar the distances entailed in this sort of dispersal can be to thelong-distance and transnational movement encapsulated by conventionalnotions of diaspora, even though Indigenous Australians now live within asingle nation-state. Beckett and Birdsall both describe regular travel overcircuits measuring hundreds and in some cases thousands of kilometers,cutting across a great many pre-European territories. To put the matter inperspective, the return distance on one run discussed by Birdsall (1994[1988]: 149) is about the same as the distance West African slaves traveledto Brazil. One-way it is almost three times the distance of the originaldiaspora, the dispersal of the Jews from Jerusalem to Baghdad in 586 BC.

Understanding how and why native people literally go to such extraor-dinary lengths to maintain attachments to distant family members and


homelands despite the relentless assault on indigenous sovereignty bycolonial powers, transnational capital, and emerging nation-states(Clifford, 1994: 310) is critical to understanding the attachment of colon-ized indigenous people to their cultural heritage under the same conditions.Traveling to and through country along family beats is both a key symbolof Indigenous Australian identity and a means of creating or maintainingthat identity in a world that has long been intent on seeing the end of it,either through frontier violence or later policies of segregation or assimi-lation (cf. Byrne, 2004). In this, such travel is not unlike the traditionaljourneys through country along Dreaming tracks by senior men whoembodied those Dreamings and who were reinforcing their connections toparticular tracts of land (Sutton, 1994[1988]). It is also reminiscent of thetravel over often-prodigious distances that was involved in traditional cere-monial exchange networks (McBryde, 1987). As Clifford (1994: 310) puts it:

If tribal groups survive [today], it is now frequently in artificially reduced anddisplaced conditions, with segments of their populations living in cities awayfrom the land, temporarily or even permanently. In these conditions, theolder forms of tribal cosmopolitanism (practices of travel, spiritual quest,trade, exploration, warfare, labor migrancy, visiting and political alliance) aresupplemented by more properly diasporic forms (practices of long-termdwelling away from home).

It is only by grasping these sorts of articulations among different dimensionsof modern and traditional life that the need accepted by Allen in relationto contemporary Indigenous links with archaeological material becomestruly apparent as something more than simple special-interest politics.Attempts to maintain ties with country and kin and attempts to controlaccess to cultural heritage and knowledge about the past are closely relatedaspects of life in a diasporic condition. Ethnographic research makes it clearthat many Indigenous Australians see their history as fundamentally phys-ically constitutive of their distinctive identity, as are attachments to kin andcountry. People literally are their history, the latter being read as patterns ofinteraction among people and relationships between people and place overtime. Sutton (1994[1988]: 2545), for instance, found that men not infre-quently refer in ordinary conversation to [mythic] Dreamings [which governproper behaviour and relate people to place] as me, my father, or myfathers father . . . [and in] the third person they may refer to particularDreamings by the names of living people. It is on the basis of this embodi-ment of history that contemporary Indigenous Australians claim inalienableattachment to their tangible and intangible historical heritage despite thefact that they may have been geographically and even to varying degreesintellectually separated from that history for several generations. Becausehistory is physically part of them, they see it as theirs to control in the waythat knowledge was/is traditionally controlled through its embodiment in


particular individuals rather than being an alienable public good in theWestern Enlightenment sense. This leads Sutton (1994[1988]: 261) toconclude that:

In these terms, [contemporary Aboriginal] history construction is remarkablysimilar to the [mythic] Dreaming. The past is also the present, as one of itsaspects. The past is not transcendent or remote, but underpins and echoespresent and continuing reality. Just as the Dreaming is the person, in onefacet of its complex nature, the Aboriginal person is likewise the historicalAborigine not merely the survivor but the embodiment of the scarifyingprocesses of conquest, dispossession, resettlement, missionisation andwelfareism.

I suggest this sort of visceral connection between history and identity, ratherthan just cynical politics, was behind the pointed question Aboriginalwoman Ros Langford put to the Australia Archaeological Association over20 years ago, to counter claims that everyone and no-one owns the past:if we cant control our own heritage, she asked, what the hell can wecontrol? (Langford, 1983: 4).

It is interesting, in this context of embodiment, to consider an aside inwhich Sutton (1994[1988]: 261) describes how the contemporary whiteAustralian can sometimes also be defined and identified as the historiccoloniser, not merely as their descendent or beneficiary. This means that,much to their bewilderment, settler-archaeologists can be publicly accusedof personally doing unethical things they did not themselves do or thatarchaeologists as a group, rather than, say, medicos or amateur antiquari-ans, did not do only to be reassured privately by their accusers that theyshould not take it personally. This situation is perhaps best illustrated bythe anecdote Sutton (1994 [1988]: 2612) himself uses. He was walkingalong the main street of his state capital when he saw a policeman arrest-ing an Aboriginal man following a violent incident. Numbers of youngAborigines were looking on, and one shouted at the policeman CaptainCook c[..]t!. Cook was last in Australia in AD 1770, and even then nevercame within 1000 kilometers of the locality in question. The youths wouldnot have considered the policeman literally to be the individual Cookhimself, but by the same token the reference was something more thanmetaphorical. The abstract notion of the historic coloniser is commonlygrounded by Aboriginal people in the person of the most iconic of the conti-nents European explorers (Williamson and Harrison, 2002).

To draw this part of the article to a close, I note that using diasporatheory to comprehend key features of the sociopolitical milieu in whicharchaeologists work in settler societies falls under the rubric of what Scham(2001) calls a heritage recovery approach to the archaeology of the disen-franchised. Her language resonates very strongly with that of the diaspora


literature, and indeed she specifically draws attention to parallels betweenthe situation of colonized indigenous minorities and that of both the Jewishdiaspora and the profoundly difficult situation engulfing Jews and Pales-tinians in the Middle East. She reminds us that the clearest distinguishingfactor in colonial disenfranchisement is the effective replacement of anindigenous past by a narrative that emphasizes the conquest culture, whichinevitably prompts attempts to reassert an original culture usually nottruly lost despite the efforts of the colonizer (Scham, 2001: 188). Permeat-ing such tragic records of the past, she says, is a sense of loss that mustfinally translate into material terms. The recovery of a heritage is futileunless accompanied by attempts to quantify that recovery (2001: 196).Interestingly, in relation to the debate in Australia and elsewhere concern-ing the instrumentalist politics of indigenous heritage claims, Schamcontends that recourse for heritage recovery is always through establishedlegal and political channels . . . Heritage recovery is not just a heuristicexercise but also a compensatory one. This is why efforts to reclaim the pastare so often misunderstood (2001: 197).

The Anglo-Celtic diaspora(s) in Australia

It is no easy thing to get non-indigenous settlers including politicallysympathetic archaeologists to properly understand their situation vis--vis the colonized indigenous peoples in their societies. Grasping the impli-cations for identity politics of recognizing the diasporic condition ofcolonized native minorities is a significant part of the process, but is not allthere is to it. Settlers need to realize that they themselves also live in a dias-poric condition, and that it is this condition which is largely responsible forthe patterns and processes of cross-cultural engagement described anddecried in the postcolonial literature. This assertion should not raise anyeyebrows: the post-Columbian imperial diasporas of the major Europeanpowers are well-researched phenomena. Cohen (1997: 6681) describes theBritish diaspora at length as an exemplar. He argues that in addition to thegeneral characteristics of diaspora discussed earlier, one critical feature ofthe colonies of settlement established by the British imperium was thesuperordination the settlers and their metropolitan backers sought to assertover the indigenous populations (1997: 68).

Curthoys (1999: 45) takes up this theme in language redolent ofdiaspora in a paper drawing explicit parallels between the social conditionof settler Australians and the biblical narrative of Exodus. She states that:

Many non-indigenous Australians have difficulty in seeing themselves as thebeneficiaries of the colonisation process because they, like so many othersfrom the United States to Canada to Israel and elsewhere, see themselves asvictims, not oppressors . . . Australian popular historical mythology stresses


struggle, courage, and survival, amidst pain, tragedy and loss. Looked at moreclosely, the contest over the past is perhaps not between positive andnegative versions [of colonial history], but between those which place whiteAustralians as victims, struggling heroically against adversity, and thosewhich place them as aggressors, bringing adversity upon others. (Curthoys, 1999: 2, original emphasis)

Curthoys describes how Anglo-Celtic Australians see themselves in termsof three intertwined victimological myths. The first concerns the convictswhose expulsion from Britain underlies the nations beginnings. They areseen in the main as more sinned against than sinning, ordinary peopleunjustly transported to the ends of the earth for piffling victimless crimesagainst the rich and powerful. Second, though Australia is and has long beenone of the most urbanized societies in the world, there is the myth ofdescent from salt-of-the-earth pioneers and later outback Australians whoovercame an alien and relentlessly hostile land of desert and bush. Whatwere often called the depredations of the blacks are characterized as anintegral part of the unforgiving land, along with drought, fire and flood.Finally, there is Gallipoli. The convict era is now a very distant memoryand most non-Indigenous Australians long ago came to love what from asentimental poem every schoolchild learns to call our wide brown land.This leaves Gallipoli as the principal victimological story that Australianstell themselves over and over and cultural analysts recurrently explore(Curthoys, 1999: 11). Concerning a heavily opposed and ultimately unsuc-cessful multinational landing against Ottoman forces in Turkey during theFirst World War, it is a tale of a young nations trial by fire and ofAustralians defiant insouciance in the face of overwhelming force. It nowalso encompasses the unspeakable slaughter of Australians on the WesternFront, and their opposition against the odds in various other conflicts fromthe Boer War to Vietnam. Gallipoli has a number of subthemes, notablya strong current of anti-authoritarian anti-Britishness which Curthoys linkswith the convict and outback Australian myths. Above all, however, it isabout selflessness and sacrifice. Thus, writes Curthoys (1999: 13), do whiteAustralians become battlers against enormous odds.

The tribulations of the convicts, achievements of the pioneers and greatgallantry of those at Gallipoli, on the Burma Railway, or at Long Tandeserve to be remembered. It seems though that there is just too muchdissonance for most settler Australians between memorializing Gallipoliand the other myths on the one hand and, on the other, conceding any partof so-called black armband conceptions of Australian history which raiseissues of frontier violence and subsequent racism. At the time of writing,the highest levels of Australias government were embroiled in controversyover the disturbance of Australian war dead by Turkish roadworks atGallipoli. The works were intended to assist the movement of ever-increasing numbers of Australian visitors to the areas beaches to


commemorate Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landing on 25 April.Though on foreign soil, the site is likely to be nominated to Australiasnational heritage register in the near future. The countrys quality nationalnewspaper headlined the story Heritage Listing for Sacred War Sites(Mitchell, 2005). The deployment of the language of sacred sites in conver-gence with that used in Indigenous land and heritage claims is intriguing.Many if not most settler Australians reflexively contest the use of suchlanguage by native people. In this view, Aboriginal sacred sites are usuallyjust concocted for political or economic purposes. Plainly, though,Gallipolis status is unassailable: here is a real sacred site!

Indigenous claims are made even harder for non-Indigenous Australiansto bear by the aforementioned tendency of Aboriginal people to identifythe contemporary white Australian . . . as the historic coloniser. A fewyears ago this led Pauline Hanson, the now-faded darling of Australias FarRight, to complain: I draw the line when told I must pay for and continuepaying for something that happened over 200 years ago (cited in Curthoys,1999: 18). Hanson and her ilk ignore the fact that the last generally acknowl-edged massacre of Aborigines occurred in 1934 (Curthoys, 1999: 215 fn 3)and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in her/my home statewere effectively segregated by legislation until the 1970s. This means thatmost settler Australians, up to and including the Prime Minister of the lastdecade, explicitly prefer a white blindfold conception of the nations past,a proclivity which has become pronounced since the passage in the 1990sof federal legislation recognizing native title rights (Windshuttle, 2002, 2004,2005). It is this tendency that over the longer term has provided archaeol-ogists with the nervous landscapes and deep nations that Byrne (1996,2003a) and others describe, as it has erased colonized minorities fromAustralias historical landscape (Byrne, 2003b).

To return to the theme of diaspora, Curthoys (1999: 17) believes that:

Lurking beneath the angry rejection of the black armband view of history, isa fear of being cast out, exiled, expelled, made homeless again, after twocenturies of securing a new home far away from home . . . So keenly awarethemselves of being themselves displaced, many non-indigenous Australianshave fiercely taken on their new country as Home.

This is why we heard clear echoes of Ros Langfords question to archaeol-ogists in Pauline Hansons declaration that she is fed up with being toldThis is our land. Well, she demanded, where the hell do I go? (citedin Curthoys, 1999: 17). Paradoxically, this shared language reflects the waythe diasporic conditions in which both colonizer and colonized exist orientthem in such a way that they continually talk past each other.

This impasse is unlikely to be resolved until people on both sidesacknowledge the reality and legitimacy of the others perceptions asproducts of an entangled colonial history. Perhaps the most significant


hindrance here is the received wisdom among settlers that their territorialclaims (and thus other claims that rest on land title) carry greater moraland legal weight than those of the peoples they colonized. In the Australiancontext especially, this complicates attempts to make use of the insights ofdiaspora theory to illuminate the situation of native peoples as well as thatof settlers. This is because at the time of British colonization Australia wasinhabited solely by non-sedentary foragers. The absence of settled agricul-turalists allowed the colonists to characterize the continent as terra nullius(no-ones land): it was unowned and therefore available for settlement.Much the same thing happened in the other colonies of settlement (as wellas in more recent cases, such as Israel), but the authorities in Canada, theUSA and New Zealand all recognized forms of native title through treatieswith at least some native groups. Even if those treaties were later egre-giously compromised, they continue to provide Aboriginal peoples in thosenations with legal grounds to challenge actions of the state they deem tobe deleterious to their interests.

In Australia, there were no treaties, and the notion of terra nullius under-pinned the complete legal denial of Indigenous land (and, by extension,other) rights for 200 years. The vision of native peoples as nomads unat-tached to the land except perhaps in the same way that migratory animalsare ecologically tethered to particular regions remains strong in the narra-tive of settler authority. If misappropriated in this context, the language ofdiaspora, of connectedness-in-dispersion, could further undercut Indigen-ous claims to land and heritage rather than help people come to terms withassertions of continuity through its emphasis on connectedness-in-disper-sion. In other words, injudicious use of the language of diaspora could makethe colonizers even less inclined than they are now to listen to historicalnarratives other than their own. That would raise the ire and opposition ofcolonized minorities, perpetuating the spiral of claim and counter-claim thattypifies the identity politics of settler nations around the world. Those of uswho believe that an understanding of the dynamics of diaspora can helpstop colonizers and the colonized from talking past each other thus needto make certain that the story of continuing Indigenous connectedness getsthe same sort of hearing as that long enjoyed by the story of dispossession,while at the same time ensuring that settler sacrifices, attachments to landand fears of displacement are taken seriously rather than simply dismissedas corollaries of rednecked racism. Archaeology is well placed to helpadvance this effort through its emergent focus on cultural continuity as wellas change and on shared histories flowing from colonial entanglement(Harrison, 2004; Harrison and Williamson, 2002; Lightfoot et al., 1998;Murray, 1996b, c; Silliman, 2005; Torrence and Clarke, 2000).


Acknowledgements

Uzma Rizvi and Matt Liebmann very kindly invited me to participate in the 2005SAA symposium on postcolonial archaeology in which a summary of this articlewas presented. They also made thoughtful comments at short notice about theoriginal draft. This journals anonymous reviewers also made me think about anumber of issues I had skated over or around. I thank James Clifford for so gener-ously providing me with his forthcoming and unpublished papers on indigenousdiaspora, as well as for the inspiration his work has given me over the years.

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IAN LILLEY is Reader in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies atthe University of Queensland and Secretary of the World ArchaeologicalCongress. His interests include the archaeology of Australia andMelanesia and the place of archaeology in contemporary society. Hismost recent book is Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the PacificIslands (Blackwell, 2005).[email: [email protected] or [email protected]]

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02 Lilley 2006 Archaeology Diaspora and Decolonization