Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention by Tess Lea (review)

Abstract

I policies were pigs, would they run “rampant” (11) like a drove of “feral” (12) swine, uprooting the picturesque plantation rows of archival orders? What if policies were “vicious” (12) Tasmanian tigers? Would they bare “fierce” (11) fangs made of file cabinets? Policies could also be botanical. But if that were the case, which plant would they be? A shrub? A tree? A medicinal herb?—it’s doubtful. But perhaps policies would resemble Queensland’s invasive rubber vine—“tangled, verdant” and “overgrown” (12)—choking the life out of “neglected” (11) ecological registries. Or are policies more humanoid? Could we imagine a tribe of pre-contact policies gathering together late at night: they encircle a “primitive” (11) spreadsheet; a witchdoctor pounds a “barbarous” (11) whiteboard; “savage” (11) signatures link arms with dotted lines, all dancing in tandem with the vibratory thump of primordial pen strokes? The whole psychedelic scene ripples with “an ambient saturation that works its way into and out of human and nonhuman lives” (12). These adjective-laden questions—which are derived from Tess Lea’s list of synonyms for the troublesome word “wild”—work with surreal aesthetics to rehash the title of Lea’s book, Wild Policy. Such surreal questions performatively reenact Lea’s introductory claim that the word “wild” describes policymaking far better than it describes Aboriginal lifeways. In this sense, the questions above extend Lea’s critical gestures. They poke fun in a serious tone. They wag their tongues at the stodgy formality of policymaking by asking surreal questions about the prehistoric mythologies of policy beings. The title of Lea’s book, reverberating with this surreal line of playful inquiry, “inverts” (12) the terminological tendencies