Bishop’s Message for June 2009 – We Need a Covenant with Indigenous People
Bishop John McIntyre
We need a covenant with indigenous people.
As Christians committed to justice in the name of Jesus Christ, any issue that smacks of injustice must be roundly challenged. Recently it has struck me with renewed force that injustice will always issue from the denial of a people’s sovereignty. To deny sovereignty to another people is in essence to deny their humanity. And once dehumanised, people are inevitably violated.
Three situations in the current like of the world bring home starkly this truth: the violence in Sri Lanka; the violence in the Gaza Strip; and the renewed call for a treaty from some of Australia’s indigenous people.
In Sri Lanka, it is clear the refusal by the Sinhalese to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Tamils has led to the disastrous destruction of civilian life in uncounted numbers and with unrelenting viciousness and violence. Since the 1948 independence of the former Ceylon from the British Empire, Tamils have struggled for recognition in Sri Lanka. This climaxed in the attempt to declare a separate Tamil sovereign state in the 1970s as a way of affirmind their rights. Not only was this denied them, there has since been an ongoing campaign of repression against Tamils, culminating in the slaughter of who knows how many women, children and men.
Even now the military campaign is claimed to have ended there is no guarantee justice will be done in any way for them. If the track record of the current government is any measure to go by, Tamils in Sri Lanka will not be particularly hopeful.
The Gaza story is not dissimilar. Denied the right to a Palestinian state, the Palestinian people are easily dehumanised in their ongoing struggle for justice since being dispossessed by the British Empire, ironically in the struggle rightly to accord human rights by giving sovereignty to Jewish people, who were so horrifically brutalised during the Second World War.
One of the tragic parallels between the recent government violence in Sri Lanka and the Israeli violence in the Gaza strip has been the bombing of a hospital. This abhorrent act seems to epitomise the inevitable link between denying sovereignty and dehumanising those whose sovereignty has been denied.
But, lest we merely point the finger at others, let us not forget our own history of the denial of the sovereignty of the first nation of this country. It was not until the 1993 Mabo decision that any non-Indigenous institution of Australia recognised the presence, let alone the sovereignty of those who for 60,000 years prior had occupied this land. And even now we have not taken that final step which acknowledges the sovereignty of Australia’s Indigenous peoples by signing a treaty with them.
In my recent Synod address, I noted the call from Paul Briggs, a Yorta Yorta man, to revisit the matter of a treaty with our Indigenous peoples. It makes eminent sense now we have at last acknowledged the presence of sovereign peoples prior to our arrival in the Mabo decision, that we need to establish a relationship with them based on who they are as peoples. Historically and universally, the normal instrument to do this is to establish a treaty. That is true in nearly every other country in the wold apart from Australia when it comes to the relationship between Indigenous and occupying peoples.
As Briggs points out, the problem for Indigenous Australians at the moment is that their relationship with non-Indigenous Australians is defined in economic terms, largely through welfare payments. Whether we intend to or not, the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples tends to be defined in terms of welfare needs and welfare outcomes, stigmatising them as a whole and putting unreal expectations on their leadership.
Unless the basis of our relationship is built on a relationship of sovereign peoples, a relationship affirmed by treaty, there is little future for Australia’s Indigenous peoples as a whole coming to a place within the life of the nation where their true status as our first nation is honoured, and where their contribution to our future life together is fully enabled.
In the church we can show a lead in our response to the Indigenous people among whom we worship and on whose land we built our churches. The ecclesiastical equivalent of a treaty is a covenant. It would seem to me we would be well served to pursue with our Aboriginal sisters and brothers how we might engage in covenant with them and how this might symbolise our commitment to them as brothers and sisters in the journey of faith and life. Perhaps it would lust to us better knowing how to walk forward together in the ministry and mission of our churches across Gippsland. Certainly, I think it would remind us of our obligation to seek justice as an integral part of our service of God.
John McIntyre, Bishop of Gippsland