L'aborigène, la race et l'État. Débat sur les minorités et hégémonie nationale en Australie

Résumé En

Aboriginality, Race and the State: The Minority Debate and National Hegemony in Australia. A. A. Yengoyan. This paper examines the status of Aboriginal Australians in relation to post-contact history and the development of the national Australian State. Traditional Aboriginal essentialisms of blood and land persist across this time span and define critical arenas in which cultural, economic and political aspects of the contemporary minority debate occur. The long standing silence on the role of the Aboriginal populations within this history of Aboriginal and European contact is being broken by both Aboriginals and scholars. It is argued here that blood (race), and the spirituality which Aboriginals endow to place and space—land—are traditional cultural foundations that provide the basis of Aboriginality as an ideology and a highly visible political culture. Blood is a pivotal, essential and irreductible factor in what constitutes Aboriginality; land is the source of all being and existence, and the return to ancestral lands and tracks is vital for all Aboriginal peoples. Thus, land rights issues and policies, most recently the "Marbo " decisions, are at the center of the assertion of Aboriginal identity and political activism and are manifest at local, national, and global levels, and it is local essentialisms, such as blood and land, which cement and bind societies to their past and define their future.