ABSTRACT

A people's silence only supports lateral violence, alienation and bullying that helps maintain a culture of fear. This silence becomes acceptance and allows abuse to continue unchallenged until lateral violence can flourish into full-blown physical violence. Aboriginal political activism has traditionally been an extremely varied political force utilising a considerable number of strategies and campaigns, which ultimately meant getting people out on the streets. The nonsense of Indigeneity labelled within the universities of Australia and throughout the Western world was quickly denounced as absurd by those who attended reclaiming their Aboriginality. In the Australian context, the sense of belonging, home and place enjoyed by the non-Indigenous subject – coloniser/migrant – is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of rights under international law. It is a sense of belonging derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital; and mobilises the legend of the pioneer, the battler, in its self-legitimisation.