Open Letter to Government regarding ‘Welcome to Country’ (the acknowledgement of Original People)

I submit that the concept of Original Ownership, or any statement implying that Aboriginal Australians as a race or ethnicity have a superior social status or value to other Australians, is an expression of nativist supremacism, a core feature of Nazi ideology. I will provide evidence to support this comparison and plead for you to discontinue reinforcing these harmful ideas, not only because they are an implicit endorsement of the ideological foundations of Nazism but because they preclude all migrants and their descendants from ever fully belonging in this country. The sense of racial exclusion and devaluation is pervasive and insurmountable. There are no possible conditions that could make nativist supremacism morally acceptable; if something is wrong in principle then it is wrong for everyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason.

My approach is not merely to critique nativist supremacism but to replace it with a higher sense of unity: All humans share the same ancient ancestors, we are all related, we are all the original owners of the Earth. Reason unites us.

1. The Nazi Analogy

The ideology of Aryan Nazism evolved as an indigenous rights movement, deriving national identity from the claim that Germans were the original indigenous people of the European continent, culturally, ethically and spiritually inseparable from their ‘sacred’ home environment (the Blood & Soil doctrine). Having originated as an indigenous people, argued Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, “Germans needed uninhibited nature reserves to keep their spiritual and cultural features alive”.

Nazis “understood their ideology as the application of natural law”, which made it imperative “to observe the practices and history of Indigenous peoples (Naturvölker)” and protect them from forceful assimilation as “the most noble of all creatures still living in their original state”. The alleged duty to nurture indigenous cultures was associated with the Nazi belief in a bond “between the cultural understanding of the Indigenous peoples and the Germans’ own supposed indigeneity." (Usbeck 2013)

Another useful article explores the esoteric roots of nativist supremacism in Nazi Germany, which emphasises the premise of Original, Root races being created by God, while other races were regarded as not God’s creations, therefore deficient in moral status.

For comparison, I present an extract from the manifesto of the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation, an Indigenous activist group at the forefront of the nativist sovereignty movement. "Man’s Ancient customs state, that flesh and blood man was divided by the Creator into nations and tongues. The Original nations, a creation of the almighty Creator, were Crowned by the hand of the Creator and granted the ownership and custodianship over Terra Australis by him. Proof of this dignity is the acknowledgment by all the Nations of this planet, that we are the unquestionable first and Autochthonous Nations of Terra Australis. We the Original Tribes, by divine right, are the Creators' assigned owners and legal guardians of Terra Australis and have been since time immemorial. Autochthony, being our Holy mandate - the divine testament of our inheritance - the confirmation of our Royal rule of this, The Creators land Terra Australis."

Any kind of “holy mandate” tribal-nationalism is normally classified as right wing extremism.

2. Black and Red flag, and the esoteric Sun-Symbol

The black and red flag is a common Nazi symbol, signifying the ‘sacred’ connection/relationship of blood/race to soil/land (analogous to Aboriginal interpretation of the same colours, in identical arrangement), and is still in use by contemporary neo-Nazis. 

“Red and black are the colours of the Bandera Wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The flag symbolizes blood and soil, and was adopted by that organization in 1941, along with an explicitly totalitarian program. The black-and-red banner is a symbol intimately connected with the most radical Ukrainian right-wing tradition,” Per Anders Rudling, a historian of nationalism.

The next exhibit is a black and red flag, bearing the logo and initials of the NSB (National-Socialist Movement) in the centre. "The colours black and red were the favourite colours of the NSB. The same two colours were popular with the National Socialists in Germany and represent their Blut und Boden theories."

It is notable that the specific orientation of the Nazi swastika is an ancient symbol of the sun, and is still interpreted as such by resurgent Nazi movements: “with our thought and soul given to the black and red banners, with our thought and soul given to the memory of our great Leader, we raise our right hand up, we salute the Sun…”

3. Permanent Exclusion and Collective Imputation of Guilt on Migrants

According to Reconciliation Australia, the demand for "reconciliation" extends to all non-indigenous people. No distinction is made between non-indigenous entities that historically benefited the most from colonial exploitation vs settlers who were themselves chiefly exploited, between entities that committed crimes vs those who respected indigenous people as moral equals. The most glaring omission in this discourse is what do post-colonial migrants, many of whom escaped democidal regimes, have to reconcile about with indigenous people? The expectation to “reconcile” devalues and arbitrarily stigmatises all migrants and their descendants. The said omissions suggest that the term "reconciliation" is a misnomer, used in bad faith; the implicit purpose of the exercise is to secure an inalienable, superior moral entitlement for the native race. This is inconsistent with the professed purpose of national unity and equality. "A reconciled Australia is one where our rights as First Australians are not just respected but championed in all the places that matter…" writes Kirstie Parker – Board Member, Reconciliation Australia. Mutual respect for human rights and reciprocity of moral obligations is not enough to satisfy "reconciliation"; a commitment to the priority of the native race and culture is demanded from every other race and culture. The stated criteria of reconciliation are self-centred, arbitrarily discriminatory on the basis of race or origin, inconsiderate of differences between non-indigenous histories, and therefore also supremacist.

4. Beyond Native vs Alien

“It is a deeply human trait to identify with a homeland or a home tribe, to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and to vilify outsiders as enemies (Culotta, 2012; Davis, 2009), but whether this innate tendency to draw boundaries between in-groups and out-groups and then to discriminate across them is helpful or harmful when applied to other species is questionable. The incendiary allegation is that the concept of nativeness itself ‘really amounts to a form of racism, almost an ecological fascism’ (Trudgill, 2001, p.680), and that pro-native policies are xenophobic, redolent of Nazi horticulture (Brown & Sax, 2004, 2005; Coates, 2011, 2015; Gröning & Wolschke-Bulmahn, 2003; Katz, 2014; Peretti, 1998; Theodoropoulos, 2003). In environmental discourses, human and biotic communities are conflated in myriad ways, especially in relation to the intertwined and co-rooted ideas of nature, native and nation (Head & Muir, 2004; Smith, 2011; Warren, 2011). All three rely heavily on the fiction that these concepts are given, not constructed (Biermann, 2016), and all have close linkages with identity (Fall, 2014a; Olwig, 2003). As Antonsich (2020) shows, ideas of nativeness and alienness have developed in conjunction with the nationalization of nature and the naturalization of nation, with consequent conflation of ecological and political nationalistic narratives. Framing alien species as immigrants has been a common metaphor since Elton (1958), and there are undeniable rhetorical parallels and cultural/psychological entanglements between anti-immigrant and anti-alien species discourses, each being framed in terms of native purity being contaminated by illegitimate newcomers (Caluya, 2014; Frank, 2019; Inglis, 2020; Stanescu & Cummings, 2017b; Subramaniam, 2017). Such parallel arguments against alien people and non-human alien species are mutually reinforcing (Sinclair & Pringle, 2017). Explicit comparisons between ‘foreign’ species and ‘othered’ humans are not only commonplace but have become integral to biopolitical governance, exemplified by President Bush’s relocation of staff responsible for invasive species management to the Department for Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks on the USA (Steer, 2015) and Australia’s ‘Safeguarding Australia’ policy which aims to protect the nation from terrorism, crime, invasive diseases and pests (Caluya, 2014). Branding invasive species as security threats to the ‘pure’ homeland (e.g. Simberloff et al., 2020) reinforces the nativist foreigner-as-threat imagery which pervades the invasion biology literature (Fall, 2014b; Katz, 2014; O’Brien, 2006; Subramaniam, 2017). The selection of the date of European colonization as the defining temporal threshold of nativeness (e.g. 1492 in the USA, 1788 in Australia) embodies a further subtle form of racism by implicitly classing indigenous peoples as sub-human, belonging to wild nature not human civilization (Head, 2012).” https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1140055153

5. Conclusion

Being a first generation migrant, an outsider, I am privileged for not being a victim of decades of indoctrination to nativist supremacism that most Australians were subjected to. The moral wrong of nativist policies is so explicit, the similarities to Aryan Nazism and to its rhetoric of "blood & soil" is so obvious and easily verified that it hurts to watch this unfolding in my new home. I can only try to explain, unmask the underlying problem.

I hope this communication will help you understand and correct the misguided endorsements of nativism.