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Is identification as indigenous as lax in Australia as it is in the US? I saw this article on the "first indigenous female surgeon" in Australia awhile back and it made me wonder exactly what they consider indigenous over there.
It's unclear.
In practice, the dominant line is that you don't need to prove Aboriginality, and that it's deeply racist to start quizzing people about their ancestors. Past that, there is a three-part test - 1) be of Aboriginal descent, 2) identify as Aboriginal, 3) be accepted as Aboriginal by your community. But all three criteria there are extremely questionable and sometimes tautological.
We often hear a comparison with New Zealand, but a key difference is that the Maoris in New Zealand have their own de facto government and leadership structure. At the time the British arrived in New Zealand, there was a reasonable degree of social organisation among Maoris. They weren't all united, but there were leaders who could be negotiated with, and who for their part recognised the need to come together and organise a leader who could negotiate on their behalf with the British crown. Moreover, today there are Maori authorities who are able to self-police. This is important because there are specific political rights attached to being Maori. I understand that Native American tribes are similar in the US - they have their own recognised governing authorities and they can be very strict about who counts as a tribal member, including policing false claims.
There is no recognised pan-Aboriginal authority in Australia, and 'traditional leaders' is an extremely woolly category. At the time of colonisation, there were no Aboriginal nations, but rather there were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely fragmented language and tribal groups, with minimal political organisation. It is not like the Maori or the Iroquois. So Aboriginal leadership needs to be confected.
Part of the issue is that, well, to over-generalise for a moment, you have two broad camps of Aboriginal people in Australia. The first is in remote communities, especially in the NT or in bits of rural Queensland or WA. These people are usually of almost exclusively Aboriginal descent, they're politically voiceless, and they often suffer crushing poverty and have other terrible outcomes. The second, however, are in the major cities. This group is almost entirely mixed-race, often with less indigenous background than European, and their life outcomes tend to be comparable to that of the general Australian population. Many just pass as Anglo, often because that is in fact the majority of their ancestry. This person, say, looks indistinguishable from any other Anglo woman. (The Palawa are an interesting example because they're an ethnic group that exist exclusively as mixed-race. There are zero fully Palawa people left.) Not all are like that, but you can still see an obvious gap between people like this (very striking if you compare her to her mother) or this and, say, these people or this.
The second, urban group, however, has a much stronger political voice and is significantly more outspoken. People in the second group are sometimes very good at leveraging the first group's very real issues into activism for Aboriginal people in general, and because they're the better-educated, more politically-engaged group, they tend to capture the lion's share of benefits for Aboriginal people.
But this leads to claims like e.g. "two people born in the same hospital on the same day, one is ATSI and the other isn't, and the ATSI person has ten years less life expectancy" - statistics that only work by virtue of grouping people with average life expectancy in a category with people with terrible life expectancy. There's a two-step like this that can be done whenever necessary, because the category 'Aboriginal people' is too broad in practice to usefully group people.
I would not be surprised if there's a similar gap like this in the US, with a distinction you can draw between Native Americans on reservations and Native Americans who are more integrated with the rest of society?
This was my impression too, but recently I was looking at the NAPLAN results* and I was surprised at how poorly Indigenous students** actually did. For every test I looked at, Indigenous major city students did significantly worse than even Non-Indigenous very remote (for both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous the percentage "passing" decreases from major city to regional and further again to remote). More specifically the below percentages include students who were "Strong" or "Exceeding" (and excludes students in the other categories of "Developing", "Needs additional support" and "Exempt").
Year 3 (approx 8.5 years old) Numeracy scores
Indigenous major city - 37.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50.3%
All the other grades and subjects showed similar results, e.g.
Year 9 (approx 14.5 years old) Reading scores
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
Unrelated to this thread, another possibly surprising result from NAPLAN is that students with a language background other than English (LBOTE) (either the student or parents/carers speak a language other than English at home) do better than non-LBOTE on every single test at every grade level, including English/Language arts (e.g. 71% vs 56.5% in grade 3 spelling). Based on Australian demographics, many LBOTE students would have Asian ancestry.
In less surprising news, boys did better than girls at numeracy (e.g. 67% vs 62.1% in grade 3), girls did better than boys at English/Language arts (e.g. 71.4% vs 62.4% in grade 3 reading), major city kids did better than very remote kids (e.g. 69.5 vs 50.3% in grade 3 numeracy for non-Indigenous), and kids with at least one parent who have a bachelor did MUCH better than kids where the highest level either parent had achieved was grade 11 (e.g. 79.6% vs 31% in grade 3 numeracy).
*NAPLAN is "a series of tests focused on basic skills that are administered to Australian students in year 3, 5, 7 and 9." On that page, click "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness"
** Defined by NAPLAN as "one who identifies as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin", therefore presumably including the mixed-race city dwellers.
Ah, good call. Thanks for looking up the data and keeping me honest.
I'm not particularly surprised by LBOTE results - statistically most LBOTEs are likely to be immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants, which is a group that's going to be selected slightly more for talent. I'm not sure I'd attribute it mostly to Asian background, or at least, certainly not East Asian background. These are NSW figures from 2021, and on page 4 they have a chart of non-English native languages. The biggest single one is actually Arabic, and Indian languages are overall more common than Chinese languages. I don't know whether you included Indian when you said 'Asian', but certainly for me, when I hear 'Asian' I think Chinese or East Asian, and those are very different cultural spheres. At any rate, the LBOTE/non-LBOTE gap is quite small and equalises or reverses in a few domains, so I'm not too stressed about it. Immigrants usually do slightly better on most metrics just from selection effects, and Australia's immigration process prioritises the skilled and successful.
On Aboriginals specifically... so the regions do worse than the cities on every metric. I can't see how to cross-reference indigenous status with urban or regional status on the website, but I suppose I can get an inkling of it by comparing NT indigenous figures (which will be mostly regional) with ACT figures (which will be urban). The NT indig-non-indig gap is significantly larger than the ACT gap on every metric, often twice as large, which seems consonant with the idea that regional Aboriginal people are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals - though even urban Aboriginals are still doing worse than urban non-indigenous people.
So I accept correction on the claim that the urban indigenous cohort generally have similar outcomes to comparable non-indigenous people. They are generally better-off that indigenous people in the regions (as this summary notes, p. 8-9), but still lagging behind non-Aboriginal people.
You're probably right that selecting immigrants who are skilled is a better explanation for LBOTE doing better than non-LBOTE.
Yep, it's hard to navigate and I stumble upon it accidentally from https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/naplan-national-results the bubble "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness". Definitely remote are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals.
Percent strong or exceeding for Year 9 reading:
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Indigenous inner regional - 29.9%
Indigenous outer regional - 25.1%
Indigenous remote - 15.7%
Indigenous very remote - 8.5%
Non-Indigenous major city - 68.3%
Non-Indigenous inner regional - 57.2%
Non-Indigenous outer regional - 55.3%
Non-Indigenous remote - 55.7%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
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American here, I'd say that is the case here.
The US is a little different because unlike Canada and Mexico/Central America there are almost no purely American Indian peoples left. Even in deepest reservation land in Oklahoma everyone has some European ancestry.
There are some fully native people in Alaska and and there are a handful in Hawaii (in the 1950s it was estimated that maybe 10,000 Hawaiians were of pure native descent), but in the 48 states I don’t think there are any (well, maybe one or two, but you get the point) 100% native Americans, whereas there are (as the previous user said) still aboriginal Australians with zero European admixture.
If you look at old 19th century photographs of many American Indian tribes in the Southwest (many in the rest of the country had already largely assimilated) there are pretty much no people with that full phenotype alive today in the continental US.
I think this is not true out west -- definitely in the eastern states there was substantial intermixing, but given that the Western tribes were mostly only crushed a few years before being put on reservations, I'm not sure when the mixing would have taken place? Prior to the reservation system it would have been pretty limited due to the generally tense (up to extremely hostile) relationship between settlers and settl-ees, and afterwards interbreeding with reservation Indians was pretty uncommon both due to geographical concerns and people being quite racist.
Unless your definition of 'full phenotype' is unusually fussy, I'd be surprised if folks like this were not substantially descended from pre-Columbian bloodlines -- and you see folks like that everywhere in the rural west.
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There are pure blooded Sioux and Navajo left. You’re right that the typical casino Indians are all heavily mixed, the majority are white-passing and are mostly European by ancestry, and their organizations are dominated by 90% white types. But you’re overstating it immensely- the reservations in South Dakota and some in New Mexico have pure Amerinds.
I'm not saying they're all heavily mixed or white-passing, I'm watching Reservation Dogs now and there are clearly cast members who are of predominantly (although far from entirely) Amerind descent (although some are actually native Canadian, perhaps tellingly). But are you sure there are 100% pure Sioux left? Are there DNA results from currently alive (and not extremely elderly) people that confirm this? I'd be very surprised, but I'm willing to concede if there are.
Don't have any genetic tests, but I have unusually large amounts of exposure to both the Sioux and the Navajo reservations through work.
Pure-blood natives are rare, but they do exist. Somewhere around 1/100 maybe. They're usually easy to spot in that they speak very differently (not sure how to describe this, it's like they struggle with making certain sounds and so replace them with similar but different sounds) and look quite different (similar to the Aboriginal examples above)
Additionally, they're all quite old, and will be gone within a few decades. None I've known were married to a pure native.
Unlike with whites, no one I've met seems to care about this racial mixing. Most see it as a cultural identity more than a blood identity (though non-zero blood relation is typically a requirement, and some have stricter rules)
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It's one-drop. I suspect at least a little part of why it's one-drop is because the old classification is kinda inextricably linked with the Stolen Generations (between 1905 and the 1970s, there was a policy of bringing "half-caste" i.e. mixed-race children up white rather than leaving them in Aboriginal camps, which was a pretty-good idea in principle but was done with abusive boarding schools; lately, people have started calling this "cultural genocide", because of course they have).
Of course, when I say they're overrepresented both the numerator and denominator there are one-drop, so that's not a lying statistic. I suppose I could try to work out statistics for full-blooded Aboriginals (there still are significant amounts of them on the mainland, particularly in the Northern Territory, although there are zero in Tasmania), but since all the official statistics are one-drop that would be hard.
Aren’t the full blooded aborigines mostly living in reservations so you can just add up the numbers?
No. There's plenty of proper blackfellas in urban areas.
A new wave arrives with each well-intentioned but ham-fisted curtailment of civil liberties in an aboriginal community (eg alcohol bans, opal petrol, and don't get me started on the fucking Cashless Welfare Card)
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A lot of them are, but AIUI there are still quite a few in the Northern Territory outside of the official reservations; it was never that heavily colonised.
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I do wonder if many white Americans might start trying to establish some sort of Native American identity ala Elizabeth Warren. The collapse in white identification in the U.S. census from 2010->2020 shows that this process might already have started, as people realize a need to have some plausible other race to avoid the worst discrimination. Native American would be the best choice if you could get it - as it seems to be on top of the dejure privilege hierarchy right now.
Apparently, Native American tribal membership often goes back to registers made by the U.S. government in the 1800s. If your ancestors are on that list, you're in. If not, you're out. But the lists were never that accurate and many people were left out who shouldn't have been. Add 150 years, and we have the curious case of 90% white tribe members barring Natives with less admixture from the tribe in order to prevent dilution of casino money.
Hasnt this occurred in Canada in a huge way? The indigenous population surged between 2000 and 2020, this is an example from the (official) Statistics Canada website:
Those are chareidi/amish tier birth rates if you’re talking organic growth; indigenous Canadians aren’t that fecund, it’s pretty much all whites deciding to identify as natives.
In Canada there was an issue where the feds were trying to minimize the number of official Indians (because they are a federal responsibility), and had policies like "Indian father, white mother" --> Indian, but vice versa and you were denied status.
This was recently reversed, so there may have been a surge of metis (not the same as Metis, which is even more complex) people (who may or may not look kinda white, but are usually at least recognizably mixed) becoming officially recognized. I think they are even doing this a few generations back, so somebody who had a white grandmother --> mixed father with Indian wife living on the rez would now be recognized, which seems fairly legit.
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Unless you’re trying to claim benefits from the government off of it, no one will actually stop you from just calling yourself an Indian. Is Australia the same way?
In Australia it's potential illegal to even question someone's claim of Aboriginality.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatock_v_Bolt
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Right, there's also the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. She had an indigenous great-grandmother, and so via this 1/8th connection she became the "National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador for Tennis Australia." "I'm a very proud Indigenous woman and I think that for me taking on this role is something very close to my heart. I'm very excited," she said about this.
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