Following Jesus in Invaded Space

Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land

Chris Budden

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781606086087
  9781498253468
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876739
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Christianity is never just about beliefs but habits and practices-for better or worse. Theology always reflects the social location of the theologian-including her privileges and prejudices-all the time working with a particular, often undisclosed, notion of what is normal. Therefore theology is never "neutral"-it defends particular constructions of reality, and it promotes certain interests. Following Jesus in Invaded Space asks what-and whose-interests theology protects when it is part of a community that invaded the land of Indigenous peoples. Developing a theological method and position that self-consciously acknowledges the church's role in occupying Aboriginal land in Australia, it dares to speak of God, church, and justice in the context of past history and continuing dispossession. Hence, a "Second people's theology" emerges through constant and careful attention to experiences of invasion and dis-location brought into dialogue with the theological landscape or tradition of the church.

part one

Context and Theological Method

Introduction to Part One

To describe the context is to name the relationships, beliefs, and practices that mark our life, and the narratives and rituals that construct and justify the world. It is to name who we are and from what place we tell the Christian story. When we describe the context we are constructing and not simply recording our history. Our view of what happened in the past depends on where we are in the present. The questions we ask, the issues we name, the events we see will be shaped by our social location and power.

In this section I want to name the relationship that exists between First and Second peoples, a relationship built on a history of invasion, dispossession, and dis-location, and a present experience of marginalization. I also want to speak of the way in which that history has been explained and justified, and what that does to present relationships.

The church and its theology have the task of telling a story that leads to human wholeness and flourishing. Thus an important issue about context is where wholeness is denied, and what part the church has played in that denial. I want to name the ways in which the church has helped explain and justify history and social experience in this place. I want to name the way we have constructed what is “normal,” and by implication, to ask whether such telling about the world will endure the scrutiny of the gospel.

What follows is the story of a people dispossessed; shunted to the edge of society by a history of stolen land, massacre, segregation, assimilation (and stolen children), abuse of the law and imprisonment; and continuing marginalization in health, housing, employment, and education. It is the story of a church that sat with empire and often did its theology more as a servant of the state than of the suffering Christ. It is about the story that justified and justifies the society: terra nullius that meant people were not here; racism that made people not people, and invisible; and of the claim of benevolence, superiority, and civilization. It is about the way in which the white world and church saw themselves as normal, and barely thought about the way they assumed others should be like them.

There is a danger that, in seeking to understand history and modern social reality we make people into one mob and see everything in term of one model like the “dispossession-resistance model,”1 or paint Indigenous people only as victims. It is clear that everyone is not the same, and that there were a great variety of responses across the country. It is also clear that, whereas authors from among Second peoples tend to stress the violence and dispossession, Indigenous authors often stress “the themes of initiative, courage and cultural survival.”2 That is, we need to be careful even when writing a sympathetic history that we do not make it our history in which Indigenous people are victims and passive participants. We should not make even well-intentioned history a colonial act of claiming the past for ourselves.

Yet neither should we forget that, whatever choices Indigenous people made in the face of invasion and dispossession, it was in the face of invasion, dispossession, and most importantly, a conflict-ridden context marked by “intersecting and differential power relationships of class, race, culture, economy and the ‘complex circuitry of domination.’”3 I tell the story in the following chapters to remind Second peoples that the present reality for Indigenous people is not always one filled with the choices and opportunities they enjoy, but one shaped by a dominant and oppressive society of which they are a part. It is a world constrained by dispossession, racism, poverty and marginalization; a world that serves the needs of the dominant society, and which the church needs to challenge.

Chapter 1 is the story of invasion and dispossession. Chapter 2 speaks of the social construction of reality, and the way invasion has been fitted into the European world. In chapter 3 I suggest what theology is, and how we might actually go about the task of reflecting theologically in particular contexts. My methodology has been shaped by the context in which I live, just as my reading of the context has already been shaped by my theological assumptions.

1. The term comes from Bob Reece, “Inventing Aborigines,” in Chapman and Read, eds., Terrible Hard Biscuits, 28.

2. Isabel McBryde, “Perspectives on the Past: An Introduction,” in Chapman and Read, eds., Terrible Hard Biscuits, 6.

3. Bill Thorpe, “Frontiers of Discourse,” 44. Thorpe offers a helpful critique of the foundations of this sort of historical revisionism that over stresses co-operation.

1

The Context

Location and Dis-Location in Indigenous Space

Introduction

The primary defining context for those who live in Australia is invasion.1 Invasion is about land and country, social location, power, place in the world, and meaning. It is about the place of nations in the world. The violence that accompanies invasion is a reminder of the defeated people’s place in a new world. Colonial invasion is essentially about the claims of a nation to occupy land that has been the home of indigenous people. It removes people’s rights to control of land, economy, political life and religious story, along with language and worldview. Colonial invasion disrupts worlds, and the story that explains the world.

By the very nature of invasion it is land that is the most contested point of the relationship between two people. Land holds and makes meaning. It is social location, economic base, a site for political and civil life, a place for sacred sites and their attending stories. This was as true for the people of Israel, as it was for the British invaders, and as it was for Indigenous people. To be removed from land, to be deprived of access to place, is disruptive in a multitude of ways.

Invasion and colonial expansion has to do with relations at the frontier and at the centre. David Chidester suggests that frontiers are not lines or boundaries or borders, but “a region of intercultural relations between intrusive and indigenous people.”2 I would suggest that it is at the frontier, at the point where control is most contested that the relationship is most abusive and yet, paradoxically, also the most “co-operative” and possible because the invaders need the indigenous people. In those places where the frontier has been closed—at the point of invader hegemony and the establishment of control—the invader has no need of indigenous people, and they are segregated and pushed to the very margins of life. Now they can be “protected” and converted and made to disappear culturally.

The European invasion of Australia was a violent clash between two complex and sophisticated cultures that was won by the people with most numbers and the greater military strength, a people who had honed their techniques in the stealing of the lands of people in India and the United States.

The Indigenous peoples of Australia were a people whose culture, language, traditions, and ways of living varied between the various clans and tribal groupings. They were a people with complex social and political structures, trade routes across the country and into parts of Asia, who had recognized ways of allowing people onto their land for specific purposes, who cultivated and farmed the land and sea, who were nomadic in some places and quite settled in others, and who lived in simple humpies, or large tree-bark huts, and in large dwellings made of stone, timber, and turf. They stored grains in stone silos, smoked excess eels and stored them for future needs, and tended acres of gardens. They possessed the oldest languages in the world, the first art and dance and, possibly, the first boats.3 The language that was used to describe the colonial situation—e.g. terra nullius (literally “empty and unoccupied”), primitive, and uncivilized—were not factual...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Context and Theological Method
• Introduction to Part One
• Chapter 1: The Context
• Chapter 2: Fitting Invasion and Dis-Location into the European “World”
• Chapter 3: Theology as the Art of Naming Where God Is
• Part 2: Issues in Contextual Theology
• Introduction to Part Two
• Chapter 4: Does God Actually Matter?
• Chapter 5: Justice, Order, and Humanity
• Chapter 6: The Practice of Being Church
• Chapter 7: Reconciliation, Covenant, and Treaty
• Postscript
• Bibliography