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Across the Pacific Ocean, in Canada or ‘Turtle Island’ as it is also known by many of its Indigenous inhabitants, a horror has been unfolding. It started at a the former residential school in Kamloops, British Colombia where, via the use of ground penetrating radar technology, the remains of at least 215 Native Canadian children were found buried in mass unmarked gravesites. This school ran for 85 years, was part of compulsory government programs to forcibly assimilate these children, and was administered by the Catholic Church.
It is no coincidence that white ‘settler’ theology in this country has barely begun to engage with Indigenous people. Arguably, it has only begun to do so because the Indigenous citizens of the churches have begun to cast off the imaginative shackles made for us by our white gubbas and find our own voice.
Due to the impacts of colonisation which have led to everything from loving intermarriage to acts of sexual violence, most Aboriginal people have non-Indigenous relations. Most of these people have, at some time or another, experienced racism within their extended family.
Three plover chicks prow Torkina Park, parents at their helm: their heads alert, their eyes sails. If these were waters, the kookaburra in the grevillea branches above would be a shark.
Canberra has a reputation for being banal, bureaucratic and the 'bush capital'. But come 2020 it was in the news for being the city with the worst air quality in the world. What followed were four days of intense heat, sunless mornings, Blade Runner sky hues and warnings to stay indoors as much as possible. But movement is life.
Whiteness — some days it's like a light mist constantly hanging around yet going mainly unnoticed as it stealthily seeps into one's pores. Other days, it hits you like a cascade, or a tsunami of whiteness. Tuesday, observing the news, felt more like one of the latter.
When Jacinda Ardern uttered the words 'They are Us' in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, a powerful vision hovered over the impending debates on the meaning of what had happened. Something hitherto invisible came into view and was repudiated: a conceptual structure underlying the operations of social power.
People have always had issues with my name. They don't pronounce it properly, or want to give me a nickname, or straight up make jokes out of it. I've lived a life of people telling me my name was too different, too hard. One afternoon at the office of my real estate agent, whiteness once again wanted to erase my name.
We all need a bit of weird, turning chops orange or making ice-cream out of beetroot. So I aspire to be a paperclip - that touch of menace as I approach a putative community of sheets despite all their disparate hate and flimsy promise ... A golden paperclip because a psychologist once said I was gilt-ridden.
I hung out with a group of Indian-Australians while I was a university student who called themselves 'curries', but the unspoken camaraderie that ensued from this self-identification stood in stark contrast to that time I was called a 'f***ing curry' by a passing car full of white people.
The world is often characterised as porous and easy to manoeuvre in this age of unparalleled technology and a globalised economy. But it's only ever been this way to people who have a combination of a particular passport and cultural heritage, particularly in settler colonial nations such as Australia.
It's entirely possible that reconfiguring our relationship with First Nations peoples, even centralising it, would give us the language and impetus to reconfigure everything else, including the way we resolve conflict, think about the environment, and make decisions about vulnerable members of society.