Black Power, Aboriginal Genocide, and the Politics of Identity

ABSTRACT In 1970, five Indigenous Australians petitioned the United Nations on behalf of the Aborigines Advancement League, charging the Australian Government with “genocide.” Rather than assessing the applicability of “genocide,” as a scholarly and legal concept, to Indigenous history, this article explores how these historical agents not only conceived of genocide, but how and why it was employed at this crucial moment in Aboriginal activist history. Taking the notion of discursive slippage as a source of generative change, it argues that the AAL’s claim to genocide was dependant on the rise of Aboriginal identity politics at the turn of the 1970s. The article suggests that this slippage between Indigenous identity politics and genocide generated notions of a collective psychological consciousness that encouraged the growth of radical Aboriginal politics. Methodologically, it treats these petitioners – and the range of activists and thinkers who are drawn into the web of our analysis – as intellectuals who conceived of genocide in a profoundly radical way to appeal to the global language of atrocity at the UN. The article draws primarily on archival material from the Office of Aboriginal Affairs, complemented by files from the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Both archives have preserved material authored by the activists themselves, while opening a window into the state’s perception of them and the knowledge that they produced. The article also draws on concurrent writing and publishing, authored and published by Aboriginal peoples, to access their thinking in the flourishing intellectual context in which Aboriginal genocide discourse emerged. Reframing the traditional source base of intellectual history, this article positions the 1970 utterance of genocide as a profound insight into an emergent Indigenous intellectual history and global discourse around rights to demonstrate the rich Aboriginal stories and discourses held in colonial archives.