What is the answer? The core truth is that the Voice is not about race. It’s about indigeneity. What’s the difference? Race is about skin colour. Indigeneity is about first peoples. Australia is home to various races but has only one first people.
And the indigenous people of Lapland, the Sami people living in the northernmost realms of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, suffered a similar experience of dispossession at the hands of Scandinavian settlers, as my colleague Rob Harris wrote this week.
“Who would say to the Sami of the Arctic Circle or the Maori of New Zealand that their status is based on race and not that they are native to their homelands?” Pearson said at the 2019 Garma Festival.
As Noel Pearson has said in years past: “If we were in Lapland, we would be blond and blue-eyed and we’d still be Indigenous.”
It’s easy to conflate race and indigeneity. So while it may be “shit”, it’s clever shit. Because the difference is profound yet can appear subtle. It’s also a “rancid dishonesty”, according to Pearson. But why is it important to distinguish between the two? Simple. Indigenous Australians suffered uniquely. So they deserve unique redress. Hence the Voice.
Their unique suffering? They were dispossessed of their ancestral land. And with it, they were dispossessed of the very right to exist – under the legal doctrine of terra nullius.
Indigeneity is “the ancestral bones in the land, that is the source”, Pearson has said. “At the core of all Aboriginal customary law, you find these elements – the ancestral tie to the land. The person born from that land, who remains attached to the land, and whose spirits will one day return to it. I would venture to say that these ideas are universal to all indigenous conceptions of relationship to their country, the world over.”
It’s a concept that conservatives might recognise in the words of the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous definition of society as “a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”.
www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/how-could-the-voice-be-racially-divisive-when-it-s-not-about-race-at-all-20230913-p5e4bn.html
