President s National Ministers Conference Darwin June Sovereignty and Treaty. Rev Dr Chris Budden

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1 Sovereignty and Treaty Rev Dr Chris Budden Introduction Nayuka Gorrie, a young Aboriginal woman, offers a wonderful illustration of what sovereignty is all about. Imagine for a moment you're living in this sick share house, you have rules, you have food, and you all pay rent on time. Then suddenly some random starts rocking up and using your shit and utilities. After 228 years, you're like, 'hey bro, can we talk about that time you moved in and didn't ask?' Your only real choice is to ask them to sign onto the lease. We were here first, pay the bond So far this whole invasion has meant us losing stuff, getting scraps and being told to be thankful. The thing we want recognised is our sovereignty. 1 Sovereignty is about honouring those who were here first, and starting to negotiate a new way for us to occupy this land together. I want in this time to explore three things: * The story we have told as Second Peoples that allows us to deny the claims of sovereignty that we heard yesterday, and the way the church has supported our colonial identity. * Some mis-understandings about sovereignty. * The issues that I believe the church needs to deal with. I hope that my First Peoples friends will gain knowledge about why Second Peoples are so stubborn about this issue. The challenge to our identity as a nation I think that the first challenge around the claim to continuing Indigenous sovereignty is that it questions the stories we tell about ourselves i.e. the way we see ourselves as a people, as a nation, and as Christians. As human beings we need enough to live, relationships, and a level of freedom or autonomy to control our own lives. We seek dignity and well-being. 1 Nayuka Gorrie, interview with Lateline. 1

2 We make sense of life, we explain and justify how things are, we suggest why things should be this way or should change through the use of stories, rituals, laws, celebrations, and what we say is acceptable behaviour. These are the lenses through which we understand life. They shape our identity and locate us in community. They seek to justify our behaviour; to make us moral. There are always different stories in any community, told by groups protecting their own interests economic and social, political and religious. An illustration: There is an old movie set in the 19 th Century, in which a miner s daughter marries the mine owner s son. A decision is made to close the mine. She protests that this will harm her family who have supported the mine owner s family for generations. His reply is: no, we have provided your family with work for generations. Same events, but a different meaningstory. The church is one of those groups that seeks to explain life, and influence the stories and practices of the wider community. It is important to recognise that the stories we carry are not just interesting intellectual accounts of life. They become part of us and our identity. They connect at an emotional level to who we are and our place in the world. A story: My family never ate meat on Good Friday. This was a practice that was part of my understanding and experience of the meaning and importance / significance of the death of Jesus. I passed this tradition to my family when I married and had children. I am 68 years old, and have never eaten meat on Good Friday. At Easter time this year my wife and I joined her sister and husband on a trip to New Zealand. We talked about meals for Good Friday, and decided to have a meat meal. It wasn t what I would have chosen, but we were on holidays and I wasn t going to make a fuss. The meal arrived, and I could not eat it. I just could not. Our stories are central to who we understand ourselves to be. Invasion and colonial occupation We need to remember that invasion and colonial occupation are always about the exploitation of labour, the taking of land, the shift of wealth from the colonised lands to the colonial centre, and some sense of national glory. 2

3 What colonising people need to explain to themselves and those they have colonised is why this exploitation and treatment of the colonised is a right and proper thing indeed why it is not so much exploitation as a good deed. As communities we need to be moral, to do what we believe is the right thing. These stories are a really important part of who we are. I want to remind you of the story we told as settler colonists, as Second Peoples to explain and justify our place in this nation. I want to explain the story that shapes our identity, and our claim to be moral people. I want us to have a good look at ourselves. There are three related parts to our story: i. What does it mean to be a human being? ii. How do we understand land? iii. What is the role and power of governments? Land and governments The First colonial expansion (15 th Century). Issue is: how to stop nations going to war over territories, and how should people in these newly discovered nations be treated. Papal Bulls (Doctrine of Discovery 1493) 2 that divided world between Spain and Portugal, gave exclusive right to occupy and claim ownership of other lands, and convert and civilize and take their land, labour and wealth. People People made in the image of God, but some are heathens and some Christians. Until the 16 th Century the view was that kings owned land, and people used it in return for some form of service. The view arose that people were separate individuals who could own land and sell their labour. 2 A Papal Bull of 1095 gave Christian Europe permission to occupy non-christian lands, and was the foundation of the Crusades. Papal Bulls Nicholas V - in 1452 (Dum Diversas) and 1455 were about Portuguese expansion, and permission to enslave the Saracens was Columbus s discovery voyage. The Papal Bull Inter Caetera Alexander VI ensured that Spain could claim the lands Columbus discovered, and divided the world between Spain and Portugal with a line running north-south, that ran through what is now the SA-NSW border. The three 15 th century Papal Bulls are the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery Church/God support for colonial expansion. 3

4 The state (as against kings) arose as an agreement between people for a body to protect them and their property. In the times prior to this sovereignty involved shared responsibility and custodianship. The king couldn t just do what they liked. A new view came that said sovereignty is absolute. The government can do what they like. There was also a reclaiming of the ancient Roman view that ownership of property was absolute. You could do what you liked with your property. Land was divided between that which was inhabited ( waste ) and that which was not, and at law you could not take what others inhabited. (Hugo Grotius, 1645) As the view arose that wealth should be distributed more evenly, based on labour and effort, waste land became un-worked land. This is John Locke s view (late 1600s) that land/nature only becomes property with labour added. The irony is that this beginning of the legal doctrine of terra nullius was aimed originally at wealthy land owners who gained their land by inheritance rather than effort and would not share it. Science, and particularly evolution challenged the view of Genesis that all people were made in the image of God. There arose a new view that to be human was to be free from others, and to think rationally and in ways that would apply to all. In practice this meant that reasonable people were white, European males educated in particular ways thus excluding women and people of other cultures from full humanity. (Kant and Hegel) In more extreme cases this led to the chain of being, which placed black people on the low end of human-ness. William Blackstone (jurist, judge and Tory politician, ) reintroduced the view that all land was Crown Land. People could hold title to land, but underneath that title was a more basic (or radical) title of Crown Land. 4

5 So, in Australia the colonial occupation was justified on the grounds that Australia was waste land i.e. did not have boundaries nor labour added and thus could become the possession of the sovereign British Crown. Given the claimed primitive status of the people they did not have recognisable laws which are about property - and could not enter into treaty. The moral story was that this occupation occurred peacefully, and so that waste land would now become productive as God intended Genesis 1: 28 fill and subdue the earth. The church also played a role in supporting the colonial narrative and practices. While it defended the idea that all people were made in the image of God, it largely shared the idea of the superiority of European civilisation. So it believed that First Peoples could be part of society if converted and civilized, and taught habits of hard work. It usually held that both individual people and the culture were evil, and certainly were without God. It confused citizenship and discipleship, and valued obedience to the state so no resource in the gospel for protest. The view of human beings was deeply racist. It was a racism that sought to make First Peoples invisible as evidence that the land was empty and unoccupied. So assimilation, stolen children, frontier wars and massacres, and out of sight on reserves and missions. Church still said all people were made in image of God, but believed they needed to become like Europeans. The people who brought the gospel to First Peoples were largely compassionate and caring people, people who made great sacrifices so that others could hear the story of Jesus. But they lived in this European world and church, and believed that the best thing that could happen was for First Peoples to find a place in the same world. Justice Marshall (Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823) in the USA reintroduced the idea of the Doctrine of Discovery in a secular version. 5

6 He argued that the discovering nation gained sovereignty and title over the land, and the local Native Americans became dependent nations. Land was meant to be bought off them, and treaties entered into. The claim of terra nullius in Australia was overturned by the Mabo High Court decision (1992), that affirmed that people could claim ownership of the land; which would imply sovereignty. However, it is arguably the case that the Mabo Judgement and the subsequent Native Title Act (1993) enshrined in law both the doctrine of discovery (Britain discovered the place and thus can claim sovereignty), and the legal fiction of Crown Land as the underlying title of all land. So, the founding story of Second Peoples is that Britain discovered this land and had right of possession, and the Government owns all the land. Invasion was a good thing because the land was unused and un-owned, and now it can be used properly. European civilization would enable First Peoples to become more fully human, and would benefit by being converted. All this was quite proper because the country was settled peacefully, rather than invaded. As a nation we imagine ourselves to rightfully possess this place, and contribute the benefits of European life on the First Peoples. This is our place, and we set the borders and decide what will happen here. First Peoples can fit in like the rest of us. I cannot stress too much that this has been Australia s story, the foundation of our understanding as a nation. It still touches who we are and, particularly, the ongoing racism that marks our soul and relationship with First Peoples. The ongoing claim to sovereignty says that this story is not true. People were here, they are custodians of the land, and they wish to have control of their own lives. So, this is the first really deep challenge. Our national story and identity is untrue. The way we have told the story of Jesus does not always bring life. 6

7 DISCUSSION: How do you respond to the way history and identity has been described? Does this in any way name one of the issues/ concerns for you in this conversation about sovereignty? How do you respond to that account of the life of the church? What new thoughts does it raise? How do you want to respond? How is sovereignty possible? A major issue for many of us is that the idea of sovereignty seems wrong. Surely sovereignty rests with states, and is about the exercise of absolute power by governments or parliament over certain territories, usually nationstates. This is the view we hear when people talk about border control or we will determine who comes to this country. This view of sovereignty is less viable in a world of globalization and the emergence of an international human rights regime. States do not have absolute control. We now live in a world of multiple bodies, communities and political units continually negotiating the limits of their autonomy and authority, and what rights they can exercise in any situation. We need to separate the idea of the nation and the state. The nation is all of us. The state is one of the ways in which we govern our life. It is possible understand a community or nation that consists of various bodies with different sorts of sovereignty. We are being challenged to make space for the idea that First Peoples are both citizens of this nation, and also have political rights as independent communities. While there is not one First Peoples view about sovereignty, the common concern is to assert an inherent right as a community and not just as individuals to negotiate their place within the nation. We usually assume that settlement was a past, historical event. But what if we assumed that settlement and the ways in which people share the continent is an ongoing social and political project? In this case the claim to sovereignty has to do with the terms in which First Peoples engage with or belong to the wider social and political community. DISCUSSION: Does this sense of what sovereignty means help you in this discussion? What difficulty / unease does it leave you with? 7

8 The other challenges this brings Indigenous sovereignty challenges the way we see ourselves as a nation, and the truthfulness and morality of the stories we tell. Australia is not a peacefully settled land, and cannot claim to be simply a white possession in which the state has a simple and absolute sovereignty. We are invaders who live on stolen land, and we have a history of abuse as we have tried to make First Peoples invisible. We have told the story of Jesus in ways that too often serve the colonial settler agenda. This means that there are some other challenges to face: i. We need to own up to the story of our nation, and open ourselves up the possibility of negotiating a new settlement and a new political order that is good for the nation if not the exclusive claims of the state. Can we recognise a new form of settlement, a new way of sharing the country that gives genuine self-management, rights of citizenship, a communal voice in parliament, and a genuine voice in custodianship of the land? What role might the Uniting Church and its members have in encouraging that conversation in the wider society? ii. We live on stolen land. We took the land without payment, treaty or any negotiation. We robbed people of their economic foundations, and their responsibility as custodians of the songs and stories that sustain the land and the people. But we cannot go back 229 years. Second Peoples are here to stay. The challenge is: how do we deal with that? Can we build a society that recognises theft and (i) seeks some form of reparation, (ii) seeks ways for people to fulfil their custodial obligations to land, (iii) allows Second Peoples to live here with some security, but (iv) does not put the interests of large corporations like mining companies before the needs and survival of the people and the earth? What do we learn from New Zealand where they have recently declared a river to be a legal person? If you harm the river it can sue you through two people appointed to represent it. iii. Can we as church recognise our place in stealing land and make amends? How does a church whose moral rules are opposed to theft deal with this? How do we move beyond reconciliation as a conversation about relationship, to reconciliation as the effort to put right? 8

9 How do we explore the world of Zacchaeus (Luke 19: 1-10) and reparation? There is a need to sit down and negotiate how the church shares this country, and builds new settlement. There is a very interesting story in 2 Samuel 21 that might challenge us around this issue. I don t mean it tells us what to do. Indeed there is part of this we would not want to do. But it does challenge us around reparation and sovereignty. The background to the story is that there was a remnant of the Amorites called the Gibeonites who still lived in the land at the time of David. Israel had promised it would not destroy the Gibeonites, but Saul had tried to wipe them out. God says that this action of Saul was still causing distress in Israel. Now here is the amazing bit. David the King calls the Gibeonites and asks to speak with them. He says to them: What shall I do for you? How shall I make expiation, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord? (2 Sam 21: 3) David says to them, you tell me what I should do. What do you believe is the necessary framework of repair? Drawing on this passage, Lisa Sharon Harper, asks: Can you imagine putting that level of power in the hands of the oppressed power to set the framework of repair? 3 Can you imagine our PM or church leaders calling a conference of the leaders of First Peoples in Australia and asking: What do you say we should do for you? and actually being willing to listen to what was said. What happens, asks Harper, if you move away from a legal framework to a relational one? Relationship was broken the moment the First European explorers landed on [these] shores and determined the people living there were not called by God to exercise dominion on that land. Repair of this relationship requires that we go back to that moment to recognize the people s right to steward the land, and thus submit to their legitimate authority. What do you say that we should do to make things well for you? we should say. Then the relationship could begin to be repaired. 4 3 Lisa Sharon Harper, How Shall I make Expiation? in Sojourners (January 2017): 39 4 ibid, p. 39 9

10 iv. In challenging our founding narratives, claims to sovereignty invite us to ask what remnants of racism still inhabit our lives, what unacknowledged assumptions about whiteness still shape relationships. v. Sovereignty challenges the church to revisit the story it tells about itself and Jesus, and to ask how that story has been entangled in the settler colonial history of this nation, and too easy alignment with power. Think of the situation: * We decided that God had not entrusted this land to First Peoples. Indeed, we decided that God was not in this place at all. * We decided we could build our churches on the land of First Peoples, with no reparation. * We cooperated with and shared in the racist narrative that underpinned invasion and continuing occupation that people did not exist as real people; and with all the best intentions we still struggle with the heritage of that claim. We justified this theologically, and now we have to ask about our theological heritage. Can we as church recognise our past, particularly in mission? Can we learn a new story of Jesus in this land that will help people actively engage with society, and honour both ancient traditions in this land and the story of Jesus? How does the church provide real support financial and people - to develop Indigenous theology? Indigenous theology is not just theology for First Peoples. It is not a special kind of theology, a quaint sort of theology alongside real theology. It exists to challenge all theology. vi. A sense of injustice and grievance runs very deep for many First Peoples. Their history and their lives, their ability to talk about family, where they are from and who they are connected to remain shaped by very painful history. There is still a need to hear and honour history as a foundation for present and future relationships not to put the history away, but to see how it shapes now. Could the UCA set this as a real priority, with special interest in the local church s history with First Peoples? vii. A constant struggle in Australia has been the struggle to belong in the face of pressures to exclude. The thing is, of course, that this is a struggle to belong to a nation and a church established by Second Peoples. Sovereignty challenges the continuing colonial nature of church and 10

11 society. Sovereignty affirms Aboriginal identity, and the inherent right to negotiate a place. While the establishment of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress is an important expression of the Uniting Church s commitment to the self-determination, the question is whether that is enough. Is it time to move to another stage in the journey, one where people sit down and re-negotiate the shape of the church that affirms equality, distinct Indigenous identity, and autonomy, as well as reciprocity, relationships, and respect? Can we as church revisit the way the UCA was formed without First People s voices, and renegotiate what it means to be an Australian church? viii. The Church relied on the Doctrine of Discovery and on the Evangelical understanding that the church had a mandate to convert all the world as justification for entering this country. Sometimes it said that the church was the new Israel, and had a right to drive out the people of the land the Canaanites. Sometime the church said that the land was waste, and God expected people to till and keep it. The Assembly has repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. Good Biblical interpretation will not support the earlier biblical claims. This raises very real questions about the Church s theological reason its God reason for being here. The church needs to think about this foundational question. ix. To honour people s sovereignty might make the church reflect on the way it does mission, and what it means to wait for others to invite us to share our story. It might lead to greater commitment to learn the story of sacred life in this place, and what that means for the gospel; and for support of Indigenous theology. It might wonder about how God s sovereignty was exercised in this place, and how that challenges the way mission theology often assumes the mandate it claims for itself. What could we do as Christians to ensure some of these conversations happen? In brief, the overall question is: Can the church be legitimate in this place without it negotiates its very nature and faith claims anew in the face of us recognising that our original assumptions were wrong? Chris Budden 30 June 2017 chrisb-uaicc@nat.uca.org.au 11