Chapter 1
Introduction
Making the invisible visible: the city as a critical space of Indigenous resurgence and community development
Seventy-five years ago, First Nations peoples began a significant post-war period of relocation to cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand.1 The relocation period was a turning point in history – it was a period of rupture and a critical narrative site of Indigenous recovery and resurgence (Furlan 2017, 10). First Nations peoples came together in American, Aotearoan, Australian, and Canadian cities – restoring their capacity to be responsible for their future, creating new diasporic communities, complicating what it means to be ‘Indigenous’, and unifying as self-determining peoples to seek solutions to their own problems (Ahmet 2001; Heritz 2013, 43; Furlan 2017).
The city as the terrain of persistent settler colonialism was contested through Indigenous struggles for life projects, land, the right to the city, and self-determination. Transformative Indigenous social movements endeavoured to actualise a right to the city and further the rights of First Nations peoples to cultural resurgence in cities through the creation of self-governing, community-based and community-owned First Nations organisations. A strong base of community organisations were created in cities – the Phoenix Indian Center, the Oakland Intertribal Friendship House, the Chicago American Indian Centre, the Awabakal Cooperative, the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre, and the Manukau Urban Maori Authority and Te Whanau O Waipareira in Aotearoa New Zealand, to name a few.
Indigenous resurgence in cities was a practical, grounded mode of being and resistance (Simpson 2011, 17; Furlan 2017; Elliot 2018, 64). Indigenous social economies arose out of a process of renewal of culture and community life in cities and through the formation of communities of association, Indigenous institutions, and social infrastructure. Many cities in Australia, America, Aotearoa, and Canada now have well-developed Indigenous institutions and social infrastructure: 13 Indigenous organisations established in the city of Newcastle; 16 in the suburb of Redfern in Sydney’s inner west; 20 in the cities of Brisbane, Chicago, and the region of Western Sydney; 25 in Vancouver. These are Indigenous institutions that operate as a loose confederation of multiple Indigenous social, health, employment and training, educational, transport, justice, cultural and recreational utilities and assets. Indigenous institutions are powerful symbols of Indigenous agency, resistance, and recovery.
The Awabakal Cooperative located in the Australian city of Newcastle is a powerful symbol of this period of rupture, recovery, and resurgence. The city of Newcastle, like the cities of Auckland, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, Phoenix, Sydney, Toronto, and Vancouver, became a place where First Nations peoples with different life stories relocated to and engaged in the renewal of Indigenous life projects and new visions of the world (Blaser 2004). Post-World War II relocation saw First Nations peoples move to specific localities in cities, such as Little Earth in Minneapolis, the Block in Redfern, and Uptown in Chicago. In other cases, communities of association in cities like Newcastle and Oakland were not located within a specific clustered residency or neighbourhood but somewhat widely scattered and came together at meeting places. The ‘glue’ that held First Nations peoples together in cities was the formation of community-based and community-owned organisations that served as the heart of newly formed communities of association (Putnam & Feldstein 2003). It was a ‘movement moment’ in which First Nations peoples organised themselves in collectives, networks, and created nested hubs of Indigenous organisations in cities.
In Newcastle, Kooris found a way of moving away from assimilatory practices, mainstream service delivery, and government and faith-based intervention. Kooris established an Indigenous economy of care and wellbeing in this city. Kooris were doing business in a way that reflected culturally inherent philosophical contexts, restoring Indigenous forms of governance. Indigenous social relations, governance, language, culture, and cultural identity were at the heart of community development in this city. Empowerment, self-determination, and improved community wellbeing followed.
Today, longstanding Indigenous institutions, communities of association, and community development in cities face new challenges. First Nations peoples, whose home-place has been in the suburb of Uptown on the city’s waterfront North Side district in Chicago for the last 70 years, are now dispersed across the city. The American Indian Centre has been pushed out of the prime city locality by encroaching gentrification after operating out of the former Masonic temple for 50 years (Lee 2016, 1). The same is happening in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. Sixteen Indigenous organisations remain in Redfern, including the longstanding Aboriginal Legal Service and Aboriginal Medical Service established in the 1970s as mechanisms through which Kooris living in Redfern and Waterloo accessed self-determination and their right to the city. Redfern is the locality of the well-known urban Aboriginal enclave ‘the Block’. At its peak, 40,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lived in Redfern (Latimore 2018). Today, there are 284 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in the suburb of Redfern (ABS 2016).
The highly successful Intertribal Friendship House in the American south-western coastal city of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area, the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, and the Awabakal Aboriginal Cooperative in the Australian south-eastern coastal city of Newcastle are the exception. The Awabakal Cooperative has managed to maintain its place in a central locality on the thoroughfare of the inner-city harbourfront suburb of Wickham in the reclaimed industrial dockland area. It has occupied this locality for over 30 years. The surrounding area, including the inner-city industrial harbourfront, has renewed and gentrified around it. The cluster of motor mechanics workshops, semi-industrial businesses, and corner pubs have been demolished and replaced with modern apartment blocks. The Awabakal Cooperative retains its central locality between the three suburbs where most Kooris live, which are Carrington (7.2%, n = 138), Mayfield (4.2%, n = 393), and Waratah (4.5%, n = 204).2 While these locations have all undergone processes of gentrification and urban renewal, the demographics of these suburbs have not yet drastically changed.
If poverty were suburbanised relocating social housing tenants, as in Chicago and Redfern, and now in Vancouver and Oakland, the effect would be devastating. First Nations people living in Carrington have formed a community in itself. The suburb is designed like a country town with a main street that houses residents, and retail shops and services have that small-town community vibe – everyone knows everyone. First Nations artist, Uncle Billy Lamb, lives in a semi-detached social housing terrace on the main street. Uncle Billy, a proud Wiradjuri man, is the heart of the Carrington community. He is involved in the Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council. He knows all that is going on. He keeps the community informed, sharing news, looking out for everyone. Most of the day he sits on his porch, now often with his young adult granddaughter, doing artwork or sounding rhythmic beats on his didgeridoo, yarning with residents as they pass by. He painted the mural at the local public school, and his artwork is displayed on the brick wall of a local shop along the southern boundary of his small front yard. All over the walls of his home are artwork that are a testament to his talent. While Carrington once housed the Texas Shanty Town and a mix of the destitute and lower working class, the demographics of Carrington are changing. It has a rich collection of historical buildings and housing architecture that is highly sought after, making it a prime location for gentrification and Indigenous displacement.
While this form of Indigenous relocation and displacement associated with gentrification has not occurred in Newcastle, a new politics of non-recognition means that the Awabakal Cooperative faces other challenges in the neoliberal age. The Awabakal Cooperative finds itself marked today not as a successful self-governing Indigenous institution but as an Indigenous social service organisation. Today, differences exist over the way governments and communities see the role and responsibilities of Indigenous institutions in cities. Governments simply see Indigenous institutions as providing culturally appropriate services for First Nations peoples. What remains hidden in plain sight is their societal function as a social and political apparatus through which much of the social processes of Indigenous resurgence and survivance have occurred in cities. Today, the struggle for self-determination in Australian, Canadian, Aotearoan, and American cities plays out through First Nations people’s efforts to sustain their own institutions.
White intrusion – co-location in a mainstream social service system
It is the building and space it operates out of, rather than its locality, or place in society, that symbolically reveals a great deal about the Awabakal Cooperative’s marked invisibility in the city today. The Old Wickham Infant School is a simple yet imposing two-storey heritage building constructed in 1892. The Romanesque style architecture references Victorian gothic influences. It has decorative polychromatic brickwork, and a bell-cote roof.
A mainstream charity organisation owns the far more extensive, more imposing historical public school next door. It is a two-storey Edwardian red brick building with its decorative polychromatic brickwork and curved roofline, high brick gables, copper-roofed ventilator towers, arched porches, brick and wrought iron fence, and wrought iron art nouveau gate. It accommodates homeless and at-risk youth studying or training in the greater Newcastle region. The mainstream charity bought the building from Newcastle City Council for one dollar in 2012.
Co-location calls to mind the history of white intrusion – from the state to faith-based organisations to social workers – in the lives of First Nations peoples. White intrusion is one of the many reasons that Kooris set up self-governing organisations in Newcastle. Through their organisations, First Nations peoples found ways of sidestepping the white welfare system and creating small-scale versions of their ideals in the cities of Auckland, Brisbane, Chicago, Newcastle, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and Vancouver. In the past era of state recognition, First Nations organisations in cities became important expressions of Indigenous agency, empowerment, autonomy, and self-determination. They intended to do business their way, following the needs of local First Nations peoples. This intent differed from how the state, professional experts, and faith-based organisations have historically perceived their needs.
Co-location signifies how the Awabakal Cooperative now competes with mainstream, not-for-profit, faith-based organisations to deliver services to individualised disadvantaged ‘Indigenous citizens’ in the era of neoliberal poverty governance. Neoliberal poverty governance, particularly Closing the Gap and overcoming Indigenous disadvantage as a racialised project, has been given limited sociological consideration in Australia (Walter 2009; Howard-Wagner 2017), but it is explored in detail by sociologists and philosophers in the United States, particularly in relation to the intersectionality between race and poverty governance in the neoliberal age (Winant 1994, 2004; Wacquant 2010; Soss, Fording, & Schram 2011; Mills 2015). American scholars show the persistent power of race in poverty governance in the neoliberal age (Soss, Fording, & Schram 2011).
Subjugation of Awabakal sovereignty
The façade of the building and its white history also render invisible the Awabakal significance of the site. It sits about 200 meters from a historical Awabakal gathering place used as late as 1852, known now as the ‘Wickham Corroboree ground’.3 Its invisible coexistence alongside this significant history signifies the invisibility of Awabakal history. The history of the tradition...
