Catherine Koerner

Indigenous relations and wellbeing: the intersectionality of gendered violence against Indigenous women, media diversity, age & dis/ability, incarceration of Indigenous women, men and children, poverty/wealth, climate action, race, class, gender, LGBTIQ+. This chapter argues that Indigenous relations and the well-being of people, animals and the environment are the hallmarks of authentic reconciliation. However, currently, all the well-being indicators are the worst in the world for Indigenous Australians, with increasing and not decreasing environmental destruction, gendered violence against Indigenous women and children, and species extinction accelerating. Reconciliation and life itself cannot succeed while aggressive capitalist and assimilative policies continue. This chapter looks at the shameful state of Australia over the past 30 years of reconciliation processes, including increased Black deaths in custody, increased child removal, a disproportionate increase of incarceration of Indigenous women, men and children and environmental catastrophes. The chapter turns to Indigenous people's solution, which is presented as an invitation motivated by loving care for Australians to walk with First Nations toward Voice, Treat, and Truth, as articulated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The time is now to enact in its entirety the solution to Australia's hard problems.

This is the second of two chapters drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants at two locations in Central Queensland, Australia. This chapter elucidates strategies of reconciliation identified in Central Queensland. In terms of education, the chapter elaborates the legacy Indigenous women in particular, within Higher Education such as Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Professor Bronwyn Fredericks, challenging the Academy as a white colonial structure. The chapter identifies two processes for reconciliation. The first being the personal process required for every Australian to become conscious of their attitudes and beliefs about First Nations peoples. Understanding a shared history of First Nations and non-Indigenous peoples that translates into action within one's everyday work and private life. The personal is political. The second encompasses socio-political processes for Reconciliation.

This chapter turns to in-depth interview fieldwork with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in two locations in Central Queensland, Australia. This data seeks to understand how Indigenous and non-Indigenous Central Queenslanders understand reconciliation during their interviews in 2001. The interviews are in the social and political environment presented in the previous chapter on the stolen generations and Indigenous over-incarceration and deaths in custody. The in-depth interviews flesh out current debates and show differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous conceptions of Reconciliation and the diversity of views within each group. Most First Nations were unconcerned by the name given to the process. They preferred to talk about the coexistence of diverse groups as a long-standing strategy to retain peaceful relations among Indigenous living on this continent. Indigenous people highlight actions over words. Culture is understood as dynamic and ever-changing, adapting to white presence and urbanisation that acknowledges the changes and impact of non-Indigenous occupation without being trapped in a polarised definition of what is and is not traditional. Indigenous participants stress that Indigenous people need to be at the decision-making table of any process concerned with their lives and land and that non-Indigenous people need to be educated about their white privilege and raced structures that need transformation. Non-Indigenous participants did not see reconciliation as a process for their own transformation but rather as good for Indigenous people's identity. They focused on the apology for assimilative policies that produced the stolen generations. The chapters talk about both personal and social (including political and economic in the social sphere) change. The chapter examines white privilege and identity.

With the pluralist understanding of the intersectionality of oneself in relation to diverse situated knowledge and the relationality of oneself to all things for identity and well-being to flourish ascertained in the previous two chapters, this chapter places intersections of all struggles for justice on Land as sovereign ground of First Nation being. All things must put themselves in a proper intersubjective relationship with Indigenous sovereignty. First Nations Standpoint Theory, Critical Discourse Theory and Life Narratives locate one on Indigenous sovereign ground. Using ethnography and auto-ethnography to enact transformative intersubjectivities in relationship with Indigenous lands, I use Harraway's Situated Knowledge to interrelate life narratives with landmark reports of escalating violence against women and children (Robertson, 2000), youth homelessness (Burdekin Report; Bringing Them Home Report); stolen generations, The Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody; The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence Report, Mabo and Wik decisions, women's access to education. I interrogate my personal and professional life work as a community activist in youth, race, class, homelessness, dis/ abilities, environmental, LBGTIQ+ and gender struggles to end gendered violence against women and children. Life stories, Royal Commissions, politics and my white queer woman subject position are all presented as ethnographic data for analysis.

This chapter continues to draw on life story narratives from my white Australian family to understand oneself and one's family at the intersections of environment, race, gender, class, history, economics, poverty and colonisation in Australia and globally. The historical narratives locate the context of contemporary Climate action, Black Lives Matter and Me Too people movements. Diverse and macro tapestries imagine the subjectivities of the future in relational coexistence with Indigenous sovereignties. I seek a more profound understanding of the identity of oneself and the nature of reality: space, time, matter and consciousness. This chapter examines Foucault, Quantum Mechanics, Indigenous Standpoint Theories and Buddhism for plural ways of understanding the self, the nature of reality, and the multiple paths to nonviolent interdependent ways of being in Australia and internationally. The chapter engages with historical contexts, social relations of power, colonisation, and anti-colonialism and the theories underpinning such identities' development. It outlines the social constructions of social identities, tearing out the matrix of power relations, especially in the context of the scientific approach, often used to negate qualitative methods of inquiry to reduce legitimate authoritative research into merely the physical science, evidenced today by the demolition of arts and humanities vis-àvis technological science in universities of neo-liberal nations such as Australia. The chapter proposes a contemporary understanding of ourselves, space and time.

This Chapter centres on Australian continental and global environmental and climate catastrophe alongside the world's worst statistics for gendered violence against Indigenous women in relation to Indigenous sovereignty. Urging to follow Indigenous people's solutions provided and not a return to pre-COVID-2019 pandemic disparities normalcy that led to black deaths in custody notified by the global (global simultaneously localised in different places) Black Lives Matter movement. This Chapter purports pluralist worldviews as coexisting together, such as Western Academy, Classical Buddhist, First Nations Standpoint Theory and Critical Discourse Theories (including Feminist and Critical Race and Whiteness Studies), as a non-universalist and undisciplined (meaning this book sits across multiple disciplines rather than neatly wedged into merely one) book of situated knowledge. Buddhist, First Nation, Western Scientific and Critical Discourse Theories show different world views of relations to the self and others. Where the scientific approach has artificially categorically separated knowledge, other approaches, including within science like quantum mechanics, place the researcher (observer/subject) in relation to the object (all phenomena) observed and the knowledge thereby ascertained. Interrelated knowledge has always been proper for First Nations and Buddhist worldviews. This Chapter, therefore, brings the writer/observer's life story narratives into the study data. It introduces critical ethnography-including multiple histories leading Indigenous policy and Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in the land now called Australia-and auto-ethnography as the qualitative method best suited for this research project.

A key intervention in the growing critical literature on race, this volume examines the social construction of race in contemporary Australia through the lenses of Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and whiteness. Informed by insights from white Australians in rural contexts, Koerner and Pillay attempt to answer how race shapes those who identify as white Australian; how those who self-identify thusly relate to the nation, multiculturalism, and Indigenous Sovereignties; and how white Australians understand and experience their own racialized position and its privilege. This “insider perspective” on the continuing construction of whiteness in Australia is analyzed and challenged through Indigenous Sovereign theoretical standpoints and voices. Ultimately, this investigation of the social construction of race not only extends conceptualizations of multiculturalism, but also informs governance policy in the light of changing national identity.

Koerner, C. (PhD, 2011) Beyond a white Australia? Understanding race, multiculturalism, Indigenous sovereignty and Australian identities, Springer Publications, Australia
(Full copy of thesis available at: https://theses.flinders.edu.au/view/94c99681-c26f-46fd-98b3- e0aa3db00d5a/1)
The social construction of race has been central in the debates about Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. The relationship between sovereignty, nationhood and whiteness is of central concern to this book. There are two underlying premises to this study. The first is that Indigenous people conducted their sovereignty prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 1770’s. The second is that Indigenous people did not cede sovereignty, which continues to this day. This book is an empirical critical and discursive analysis of the narratives of Australia at the time of the Howard Era, as a settler society, and its colonial legacy as a ‘white Australia’. This book argues that Australia has protected its white sovereignty through four key points. First, that the Australian nation has been produced as a racialised entity with whiteness as the hegemonic, or dominant norm which shapes white power and privilege in Australia; second that multiculturalism in Australia has been used as a framework to deal with difference within which race is obscured; third that white Australian discourses of nation and identity are limited in their ability to be located in Indigenous sovereignty; and finally, that discourses of multiculturalism and Indigenous sovereignty are rarely addressed in a coherent and simultaneous manner resulting in what I call the ‘great divide’. This book seeks to understand how whiteness, as the hegemonic norm, prevents non- colonial Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations in the everyday lives of white Australians. The literature in the area of critical race and whiteness studies predominantly focuses on discourse analysis and only a small group of researchers apply the theories to empirical research. Further, the literature on multiculturalism and the literature on the area of Indigenous sovereignty have historically been separate areas of research that are based in metropolitan areas. The researcher conducted in-depth guided interviews with 29 adults who self-identified as ‘white Australian’ in order to analyse the key discourses of race and to understand the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia at a particular social, historical and political point in time. This research makes a contribution toward meeting these gaps in the critical literature on race and the construction of everyday whiteness in Australia.

Review(s) of: Beyond white guilt : The real challenge for black-white relations in Australia, by Sarah Maddison, Allen and Unwin, 2011, 240pp, $27.99 (paperback); Unsettling the settler state: Creativity and resistance in indigenous settler-state governance, by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg (eds); The Federation Press, 2011, 256pp; $49.95 (paperback).

Within modern nations, unresolved violence toward minority groups without equality before domestic law is a significant issue often without local resolution. While an international problem of human rights that causes millions of people into forced migration every year, the events leading to displacement are widely varied in their local socio-legal circumstances. This paper is driven by original qualitative ethnographic research with Ahmadiyah members in NTB Provence Indonesia: a minority Muslim group with religious rulings (fatwas) against them in many Muslim nations. This paper considers the systematic socio-legal construction of Ahmadiyah as a deviant Muslim sect by hard line Sunni majority Muslim groups and the challenge for pluralism and religious freedom in the secular and democratic nation of Indonesia. In the socio-legal context of national and local laws against Ahmadiyah, the paper examines ten cases of public violence without due process between 1998 and 2011 where more th...

Review(s) of: Beyond white guilt : The real challenge for black-white relations in Australia, by Sarah Maddison, Allen and Unwin, 2011, 240pp, $27.99 (paperback); Unsettling the settler state: Creativity and resistance in indigenous settler-state governance, by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg (eds); The Federation Press, 2011, 256pp; $49.95 (paperback).

This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word “land” to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word “land” as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and ...

The national narratives that construct asylum seekers as illegal immigrants in Australia were protected and contested during the term of the former Howard Liberal government. This paper explores how white possession is reinforced in everyday speech about asylum seekers. To do this, it draws upon an empirical study conducted in rural South Australia with people who identified as “white Australian”. The study consists of 28 in depth semi-structured interviews conducted in 2003. The paper will firstly locate the interviews in the sociopolitical context of the former Howard Liberal government’s policies and key events such as the Tampa incident. In doing so, the paper adds to the small body of Australian sociological empirical research that investigates everyday practices of whiteness. The paper identifies discourses about refugees, border security and the “war on terror” that reinforce Australian discourses of white possession. The paper critiques the racialised privilege in discourses...

This paper considers the complexities of „everyday understandings‟ of multiculturalism as a discourse to deal with racialised difference. The paper is based on one of the author‟s doctoral researchi which analyses the complexities of how whiteness and race are socially produced and lived in regional Australia. Drawing on a set of qualitative interviews conducted in South Australia with 29 people who self-identity as „white Australian‟ we consider the social and political history of a „white Australia‟ continues to inform the terms of multiculturalism for these people. We argue that this reflects the ways that state multiculturalism manages diversity and obscures the language of race. As a consequence the white national identity remains raced without an everyday vocabulary to deal with it.

This chapter will address four key issues. First, cultural identities are socially constructed. Second, the national discourses racialise cultural identities. This discussion includes an examination of the debates in the literature about moving ‘beyond race’. The third argument is that liberal multicultural discourse on sameness and difference is the historical backdrop to the construction of identity in liberal democratic societies. Fourth, cultural identity is constructed on the ground of Indigenous sovereignty in the context of Australian invader society. This chapter provides a critical literature review on the racialisation of cultural identities. The chapter considers the critical race and whiteness literature to examine what is known about racialised identities.

The Inspire Peer Mentor Program (Inspire) operates of Flinders University in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, and has received funding from the Department of Family and Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA). The experience gained during the past three years has indicated that a mentoring program between the University and schools located in its local region, which includes key areas of low socio-economic status, can be a major form of community engagement for Higher Education. Inspire received a commendation in the recent Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) Report (2006) as a strategy for community engagement. This article is written in two sections. The first will use the experience gained from Inspire to discuss the Higher Education sector’s involvement in school-based mentoring programs as a strategy for community engagement. Catherine Koerner’s analysis of the literature on mentoring, finds that mentoring programs can be an effective intervention with com...

… educators need to approach learning not merely as the acquisition of knowledge but as the production of cultural practices that offer students a sense of identity, place, and hope (Giroux 1992, 170). In this chapter, and using the Inspire Mentor Program as a point of reflection, we begin by discussing an Indigenous community partnership with a university, established to provide non-Indigenous mentors with cultural education and to work with Indigenous senior school students to increase their retention rates. The goal of the Inspire Mentor Program is to increase retention rates in a low-socio economic area near Flinders University in South Australia. We then discuss the pedagogical approach that is applied to re-engage Indigenous students in education. We address how the pedagogical approach is implemented to program design and practices in addition to the cultural education training to non-Indigenous mentors in Inspire and we refer to the model that has been developed to reinforce Indigenous young people’s connection with their community and Elders as a crucial component of their participation in formal education. This chapter is multi-voiced, hence in places the “we” speaks from an Indigenous standpoint and in others from a nominally white standpoint, but always in a relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. The first section addresses the protocol to locate us as both authors and as the people involved in developing and implementing the partnership.

Since 2003, when the Solomon Islands ethnic conflict ended some of the Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands (RAMSI) aid agenda has been rectifying damage done to families and child care so that the nation’s future citizens are untroubled by trauma. Part of the Australian UNICEF (Pacific) to assist the Solomon Islands Government to develop systems that will ensure the protection and care of children. UNICEF and a range of other child - protection focussed NGOs comprise a significant presence in Solomon Islands and as they are well staffed and well resourced they appear to have significantly greater impact on the development of child-welfare than does the less well resourced Social Welfare Division (SWD) of the Ministry of Health. This powerimbalance has significant implications for the development of independent democratic nationhood. An important national agenda relating to families and the care of children is being determined by bodies that are external to the national gover...

This paper critically examines the way that whiteness impedes a non-colonial present between many white  Australians with Indigenous Australians. It draws upon an empirical study with self-identified rural white Australians to explore multiple locations of whiteness and the complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their land rights and sovereignty. Additionally the paper explores the counter-narratives developed by a number of participants who articulate a relationship with Indigenous sovereignty. These narratives counter the centrality of whiteness and openup the possibility of future relations that are non-colonial.

The focus of this chapter is to examine social construction of a contemporary nation. This will first allow us to comment on the racialised discourse that produces a white Australia and second further contextualise the question ‘How do rural people who identify as white Australian think about race and Australian identity in the context of Indigenous sovereignty in their everyday lives?’ Part of the answer to this question requires an exploration of the social construction of the nation. This chapter argues that there is a simultaneous history of the oppression of Indigenous Australians and Oriental others through racialisation.

This chapter discusses Aboriginal policy and in particular, the federal Aboriginal policy and legislation of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) and the contemporary extension termed ‘Stronger Futures’ until 2020. The NTER is significant because the then Howard Liberal Coalition and successive federal governments legislated and intervened in the Northern Territory that is, a democratically self-governing territory but not federated state. This chapter also examines in detail how empathy and compassion is witheld from those racialised as ‘Other’ or ‘Outsiders’ because of the white patriarchal capitalist possessive logic underpinning federal Aboriginal policy written by hegemonic identities.

Indigenous curricula content, including particular narratives of Australian colonial history are highly contested in contemporary Australia. How do white Australians understand Australia’s colonial past and its relevance today? An empirical study was conducted with 29 rural Australians who self-identified as white. Critical race and whiteness studies provided the framework for analysis of the interviews. I argue that they revealed a delimited understanding of colonial history and a general inability to link this to the present, which limited their capacity to think crossculturally in their everyday living - activities considered crucial in the contemporary move to Reconciliation in Australia. The normative discourse of white settler Australians to be ‘Australian’ is invested in the denial of Indigenous sovereignty to protect white settler Australian claims to national sovereignty. The findings support arguments for a national curriculum that incorporates Indigenous history as well a...

Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.

... Solomon Islands Neo-colonialism/Foreign Aid Evidence of neo-colonial processes in Solomon Islands is spread across a diversity of observations. Firstly, contemporary visitors to Honiara will notice the significant presence of RAMSI staff in and around the capital. ...

... The following section will briefly outline some key events including the Tampa incident, mandatory detention centres and “lip sewing” in order to provide a background to the events discussed by the respondents in this study. Page 2. KOERNER: WHOSE SECURITY? 2 ...

This paper argues that Darwin’s work relied upon patriarchal white assumptions of entitlement to knowledge, their objects and the processes of knowledge production. It assumed an objective observer and fashioned their conquest of knowledge, knowledge production and the objects of knowledge to fit patriarchal white supremacist views. I posit that this materialist view has been promulgated as the only legitimate view, despite being debunked within quantum physics and quantum cosmology, and has led us to these dark times. The consequences risk the future of the planet and all its sentient inhabitants. However, Charles Darwin also posited in his meticulous observations that evolutionary development depends on ever-widening
circles of compassion as the deepest primal instinct of all creatures – a view shared by First Nations peoples, such as Indigenous Australians colonised under Liberal/Neoliberal regimes and Tibetan (and others) colonised under Communist regimes. Neoliberalism has increased the intensity of consequences in Australia; however, this paper argues that the concept of a shared origin is the fundamental error about the nature of reality presented in metaphysical realism in triad with extractive possessive consumerism. The latter prioritises economic growth and
hedonism and values only external happiness rather than a Eunomia understanding of wellbeing, where Eunomia refers to a general sense of inner wellbeing not caused by perceived external stimuli. CRAWS scholars can draw on ever widening circles of compassion as First Nation and critical ally scholars, educators and activists, to reorient our past understanding and present mindful embodiment for a fiercely
compassionate future.

Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.