BioMed
Watego joins memoir and argument to examine how colonial institutions, racism and deficit narratives enter Aboriginal bodies, work and public health.
An institution can bring Indigenous people in to teach about Indigenous matters while quietly expecting them to help colonisers feel good about being colonisers. Their presence becomes a site of absolution for the institution and its students. They are asked to decorate white knowledge and affirm white belonging, not to change either.
Black people in the colony are not permitted to speak freely and truthfully about the violence done to them. Legal threats such as defamation can be used to block criticism, and the real offence is suggesting a white person is racist. So the punishment falls on the person who names the harm, not on the harm.
Being Black, in the capital-B sense, means both recognising the racialised place society has assigned you and refusing it. It also includes those who have been haunted by that place.
A society that imagined Indigenous peoples as destined to die out is answered by assuming the opposite. The aim is a Black life that presumes a Black future, forever, set on Black terms and on Black land.
The idea that Australia has left its colonial past behind is false. The land question was never resolved, settlers keep benefiting, and colonial violence happens every day and everywhere. Part of that violence comes from well-meaning liberals who override Black independence and sovereignty.
When policy sets out to close statistical gaps, Aboriginal people get cast as the problem to be fixed through more state control and surveillance. The same accounts cast the outside experts who write them as the solution, so the colonial system producing the harm drops out of view.
Black stories are expected to give colonisers a place to feel condescending sorrow for a supposed plight, not solidarity. When a story does that work, it confirms the teller as a victim. The audience gets to feel compassionate while changing nothing.
Waiting for recognition or rescue from colonial institutions puts your future in their hands. Acting as sovereign, on the basis that sovereignty was never given up, means living now on your own terms. It does not wait for permission.
Fighting back still lets the coloniser set the terms of the fight. Standing your ground means holding your position in academia, courts and media. It relies on ongoing strategies for living, not on one-off solutions.