“Erasure as Solidarity”: Black Peoples Union’s Keiran Stewart-Assheton on Settler Left Paradigms

Founded on this continent in 2022, the Black Peoples Union is an Indigenous political organisation that’s “working towards building a pan-Aboriginal movement in Australia, so that we can fight for our self-determination and our sovereignty”.

But due to the BPU’s rejection of the constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, which was a position that became known as the “progressive No” vote, the First Nations group came under the attack of certain leftwing activist organisations that deemed its position not divisive and wrong.

The most prominent figure amongst the “progressive No” camp, however, was Senator Lidia Thorpe, as she considered what the 2023 Voice referendum was offering was a body that, while made up of First Peoples, would only be permitted to comment on policy areas deemed solely to affect Aboriginal communities, while the government would have no obligation to act on its advice.

Senator Thorpe and many other First Nations people rejected the Voice, as a distraction from the more robust measures of holding truth-telling commissions and the establishing of a treaty or treaties, whilst the Black Peoples Union called for “the formation of a Union of Indigenous Nations”.

Yet, following the referendum, the criticisms of the positions being advocated for by the BPU have continued to be attacked by leftist and socialist activists online, and this is especially in regard to the analyses of the settler colonial nation of Australia being raised by Wani-Wandi man of the Yuin Nation Keiran Stewart-Assheton.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to Black Peoples Union founder and former president Keiran Stewart-Assheton about the underlying Eurocentric principles and assumptions that settler leftists are operating under, and why these criticisms of his positions aren’t being made in a similar manner when these same individuals are engaging with Palestinian or West Papuan political positions.

Keiran, over the last couple of years, you’ve been engaged in a debate around concepts in respect of how certain local leftist and socialist groups are operating in the local setting, as you’ve identified an issue with the Eurocentric ideological frameworks that influence how individuals are perceiving and understanding social justice issues within the context of so-called Australia.

So, whilst these social justice activists are often mobilising in respect of the same issues and rallies that the Black Peoples Union is too involved in, when it comes to social justice for the First Peoples of this continent, you’ve identified an issue underpinning their support.

What is this underlying issue you’ve been calling out? And what are the resulting consequences of these self-proclaimed allies operating from these foundational ideas?

The fundamental issue that I have been calling out is that the so-called left in this colony, whether they be socialists, anarchists or progressives, all operate from an inherently Eurocentric ideological base that cannot and will not lead to First Nations liberation.

Their frameworks are not neutral. They are shaped by the same colonial paradigms that gave birth to the settler colonial state of Australia itself.

These groups don’t centre First Nations sovereignty. They obscure it. They replace the question of land back with workers’ rights under capitalism.

They reduce our fight for decolonisation to a footnote in their broader campaign for reforms, within the very system that continues to occupy and exploit our lands, and worst of all, they present this erasure as solidarity.

They claim to be comrades while refusing to challenge the legitimacy of the Australian state, which is occupying us. They speak of justice while defending or appealing to the so-called constitution, the courts and the colonial law.

They parade First Nations slogans at events like May Day, while voting for the very same parties, like Labor or the Greens, that fund our dispossession, police our communities and selloff our lands.

This is colonial chauvinism in progressive clothing. These settler-led formations confuse the masses. They act as gatekeepers deciding which Indigenous voices should be heard and listened to, and which shouldn’t.

They mislead our youth. They co-opt our struggles and turn them into recruitment drives for their parties. They platform compradors putting token Black faces into white spaces, and they marginalise radical sovereign voices who reject assimilation.

And above all, they assert some apparent right to their very own little piece of our occupied lands.

By refusing to relinquish their Eurocentric ideologies, they ultimately serve the interests of the settler state, consciously or not, and as seen time and time again, when push comes to shove, their loyalty lies not with the sovereignty of this continent’s occupied nations, but with preserving their relevance within colonial structures.

During the debate around this subject, certain leftists have been raising the point that they consider Australia to have developed into a sub-imperial power and then this point appears to override the nation’s status as a settler colonial state.

So, how does this shifting of the perception of what the Australian state is change the debate? What are the implications of the focus on being a sub-imperial state, while deprioritising the settler colonial reality that has long been impacting First Nations people?

What is happening here is a deliberate reframing or in some cases, a confused one, where settler leftists shift the analysis from settler colonialism, which requires land back and the end of the colony to sub-imperialism, which conveniently keeps the colony intact, and at best, only critiques its external actions or even makes excuses for them as actions subservient to the US.

But people need to understand that settler colonialism is not an event in history, but rather it is an ongoing structure. It is a structure that seeks to destroy and then permanently replace the Indigenous population, with settlers and their descendants.

This kind of colonisation, settler colonialism, stands in contrast to other forms of colonisation, which sought to keep the Indigenous population mostly intact to exploit as a cheap workforce, such as the colonies that were seen in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s across the continent of Africa, where colonises maintained a minority of settlers and a majority population of Indigenous people.

Now, anyone who is familiar with the history of this occupation here can see the settler colonial process in action, through events like the biological and chemical weapons that were initially used against us, such as the smallpox outbreaks and the arsenic and strychnine contaminations of our water supplies, which was followed by the Frontier Wars, the concentration and deaths camps, the Stolen Generations and forced assimilation policies.

This is a colony who first tried to murder us off and then tried to rape the Aboriginal out of us. We are still here though.

I’ve heard arguments made that since federation, Australia is its own entity, separate from the British Empire, but even if this were true, when Australia is a system run by and for settler colonists and their interests, it is still by definition, a settler colony.

But regardless of that fact, Australia is still very much tied to the British Empire, and we need only to look at the Constitution to see this is the case.

The Constitution itself is a British Act of parliament. The introduction still asserts the supreme sovereignty of the Crown, and this is upheld in practice through processes, such as legislation requiring royal assent to be passed, and through powers, such as those held by the governor general, who represents the British Crown, and these includes the ability to sack the elected Australian prime minister.

On top of all of this, the Crown itself still retains the power to dissolve Australia’s parliament altogether, if it chooses to.

But this is not to say that Australia isn’t in its own right an imperial player on the world stage. Settler colonialism here and imperialism abroad aren’t mutually exclusive, but rather we understand it to be the opposite.

Of course, a system that occupies, exploits and oppresses people here to extract resources would inevitably turn its gaze abroad, once it had developed the power to do so.

I argue, however, that Australia isn’t just some sub-imperial power acting as an attack dog for the US. Instead, it is an attack dog for western imperial hegemony in general, as evidenced by the ADF’s role in supporting the occupations of other imperial powers, such as France.

But even more than that, Australia is in its own right an imperialist monster. And I want to talk about this in two ways.

Firstly, Australia enacts imperialist systems of domination against the 250-odd occupied nations of this continent. People often forget that we are not a conquered people. We are an occupied people.

Systems of colonisation and imperialism nearly always overlap, and when we assess the actions of the Australian imperial government and its various economic and cultural institutions, we see these same imperialist tactics employed against our communities, as we see deployed against the broader Global South.

This is especially in the areas of economic manipulation and cultural pressure. But this occurs even in the form of military intervention, such as the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which saw miliary personnel and equipment rolled into First Nations communities across the Top End, with the intention and result of massive landgrabs for resource extraction under the guise of protecting women and children.

Today, Australia profits by around half a trillion dollars per year from stolen mineral exports from this continent alone.

Now secondly, Australia enacts imperialism for its own agenda and gains across much of the Global South. We know Australia is a primary aggressor, holding many of the local Pacific nations hostage through economic and militarised domination.

When we view the continent of Africa, we find it is Australian mining corporations who are currently leading the mass theft of African resources, with more than 170 Australian mining corporations operating in at least 35 African nations, which is more than any other colonial or imperialist western power.

In fact, when we access the level of imperialist extraction across the world, what we actually find is that per capita Australia likely enacts more imperial domination and resource theft across the globe than the US, it is just that the US has a population size over 13 times that of Australia.

But make no mistake, if Australia had the population, and the resulting military scale of the US, based on its current patterns of extraction and domination per capita, it would likely be the most aggressive imperialist power in the western bloc.

So, to address your question, I would say that the claims being made in the mainstream discourse are a complete misanalysis of the actual situation at hand.

Now, whether this analysis stems from ignorance, opportunism or deliberate ideological obfuscation, the result is the same. It derails our struggles, and recentres what should be a movement for Indigenous liberation into just another Eurocentric campaign for control over colonial machinery.

What I have noticed with these debates you’ve been having online is that when Australia is being asserted as a sub-imperial power over and beyond being a settler colonial country, this focus on the sub-imperial paradigm seems to be applied in a manner that serves to level the playing field that settlers and First Peoples find themselves on in regard to state oppression. 

Yeah, it is this whole flattening of struggle, and at the end of the day, we know that not all struggle is equal.

To put it in terms of a metaphor, a stubbed toe is not the equivalent of a broken leg, which is also not the equivalent of a murder, which again is not the equivalent of a genocide.

People try and flatten all these forms of struggle into a horizontal level, and the result is that it very much obfuscates our cause for sovereignty and our cause for liberation from the colony.

You also used the term occupied. Occupied is a term that is being used regularly and without much dispute in terms of Palestinian people.

So, what is the difference between Palestinian people being occupied in their own land and that of the First Peoples of this continent being occupied here? Is there a difference?

The primary difference is 175 years. It is just that Australia’s occupation began 175 years before Israel’s occupation began. But we see that it is much the same. The two places have the same sort of histories, in terms of colonising steps and processes.

If you look at the early occupation of Palestine, we see that Israel has come in, displaced people, they’ve murdered people and set up their own towns and cities. The same exact thing happened here, only 175 years earlier.

And even today, as Uncle Robbie Thorpe says, Australia is just like a big West Bank. In much the same way that our people are still subjected to apartheid here, it is very reminiscent of the apartheid that is still happening in places like the West Bank.

So, for us, we don’t see much of a difference, except for the fact that we are a lot further ahead in time.

I ask that question because it’s fairly easy to say that Palestinians are an occupied people, but there is resistance to saying that the First Nations people of this continent are occupied peoples. 

Yeah, and it really boils down to this whole normalisation of the Australian colony as being a legitimate entity.

They don’t want to refer to us or see us as occupied peoples because then it draws into question the legitimacy of the Australian state and all the settler colonisers that live here.

I can recall reading a post written by a left-wing commentator in respect of comments you’d made about migration, and they’d called out your use of a term to refer to migrants, which was in no way a slur, but they considered it to be the type of language a right-wing commentator might use.

This stood out as, regardless of the words you were using, you were speaking as an Aboriginal person and from an Indigenous understanding and way of being that precedes the imposition of the terminology and frameworks the commentator was calling you out in regard to.

So, how does the imposition of the European political understanding, including the left/right political binary, impact the advancing of First Nations struggles in settler colonial Australia?

The posts and articles you are referencing here are perfect examples of settler colonial institutions and their lackeys engaging in bad faith in First Nations theoretical discussions.

The original comments I made regarding migration to this colony were very much made in regard to Australia’s mass migration from places like Europe, and Europeans from other failed colonies, such as Zimbabwe and South Africa.

When we look at the stats what we see is that UK-born residents of this continent alone, outnumber First Nations people. When we expand this to Europeans in general, and include their descendants, you find that around three-fifths of the population on this continent came from Europe.

The process of colonisation, that is to say, the process of the replacement of the Indigenous population with a foreign population of settlers, is still very much continuing and the impacts on us as First Nations people perpetuate.

So, we are increasingly being disenfranchised out of the democracy, by being relegated to a smaller and smaller percentage of voters and workers.

Now, when these so-called progressives analyse conditions in other colonial occupations, such as French-occupied Kanaky, they understand the Kanaks frustration, which grew out of the Macron governments choice to grant voting rights to a wider cohort of settlers in Kanaky, because this was further disenfranchising the Kanaks voting power.

Likewise, when sovereignty is invoked in Palestine, it is seen as principled, but when it is invoked on this continent, it is seen as apparently divisive.

These so-called progressives understand sovereignty, and the sovereign right of border control, when it comes to places like Palestine, and Israel’s illegal occupation and control over sovereign lands.

Yet, when the citizens of the occupied nations of this continent state that they should rightfully have control over their sovereign borders, these bad faith actors recoil with such distain at the mere idea of such a thing happening, despite the fact that we are nowhere near any reality, where the occupied nations of this continent would exercise such a right.

This is nothing short of a racist kneejerk reaction towards Aboriginal sovereignty.

Further to this, the claim was being falsely made about me wanting to restrict migration of people of colour from the Global South, who are fleeing imperial conquests for their own health and safety, which is nothing short of the work of projection of Euro-colonial values by these same individuals making these false claims.

Locking up people of colour at the border based on their ethnic identity is currently, and has always been, a western European value, and a way for Europeans to maintain their cultural and economic hegemony.

Now, in regard to the left/right binary that exists in places like the Australian colony, we know that these binaries still exist within the frameworks of European ontologies and epistemologies, which is to say that they exist within the context of European knowledge, understanding and experience of the world.

As the saying goes, left-wing or right-wing, it is still the same bird. In this context, that bird is settler colonialism and its Eurocentric understanding of the world.

When someone interprets decolonial theory and discussions around Indigenous sovereignty through this lens, they are doing themselves a disservice and will inevitably arrive at incorrect conclusions.

Again, whether this is bad faith engagement taken wilfully or through one’s own incompetence, no doubt varies from individual to individual, but regardless of whether it is wilful or incompetence, it still has that same result of flattening the interpretations of decolonial theory into a western Eurocentric framework that’s incapable of interpreting what we are actually saying.

European leftist political thought embraces materialism, this is in terms of equitable distribution of material wealth, but it goes further to its ontological understanding of the nature of being.

Indigenous ways of being and thought have a much different understanding that goes beyond the material.

Does the left’s prioritisation of materialism cause conflict with local Indigenous understandings, when it comes to social justice critiquing or mobilising? And what sort of implications does this have for First Nations struggles if allies and supporters dismiss knowledge and understanding that doesn’t adhere to their paradigms?

The Left’s prioritisation of materialism and their explicit focus on economic exploitation and their resulting class reductionism have grave impacts for our movements.

As decolonial theorists, we subscribe to an intersectional analysis of oppression, but further than that, we analyse much more than just our economic and material conditions, we analyse the conditions and reality of the world as a whole.

Indigenous ontologies don’t just look at the material conditions of our economy, they take a wholistic approach with the way we interact with the world around us, both in terms of ourselves, each other and our communities, but also, in terms of the way in which we interact with the natural world.

The result of this prioritisation of materialism by the so-called Left here is that we have a left that is either incapable or unwilling to reckon with itself and its role in occupation here.

But we have to remember that at the end of the day, this colony is filled with racists. I don’t say this metaphorically. I say this factually.

In 2020, the Australian National University concluded a decadelong study into anti-Indigenous bias. This study involved some 11,000 participants and it found that three in every four people here held negative biases towards us and anti-Indigenous views in general.

This study also found that these views and biases weren’t restricted to people with conservative politics or belonging to a specific age bracket or ethnic group, but this bias was spread across all age brackets, all genders, ethnicities, all occupations, education levels, localities and political leanings.

So, this colony has a horrific problem with racism. And this issue can’t and won’t be addressed through some industrial actions or even through a settler-led revolutionary movement that seeks to dismantle capitalism, while maintaining colonial domination of our occupied nations, and in fact, what we often see in practice is the so-called progressives exercising all manner of covert and paternalistic patterns of racism towards our communities, our struggles and our endeavours.

Further to this, we often see that those who focus solely on economic movements rooted in materialist frameworks, centre class struggle and workers’ rights in ways that erase the primacy of land, ceremony and cultural-continuity in Indigenous resistance, leading to fractured alliances and co-option.

We often see the undermining of Indigenous leadership by refusing to engage with nonmaterial dimensions of First Nations struggle, such as our lore, our songlines and our custodial responsibilities.

In this regard, settler leftists position themselves as arbiters of what is apparently real or strategic, while sidelining Indigenous-led visions of justice.

The consequences of this, of course, is that so-called allies often only show up for campaigns that align with materialist frameworks, and in doing so, they abandon Indigenous communities in struggles for sacred sites, for cultural practices and cosmological sovereignty, all of which are essential to Aboriginal survival and resurgence.

At the end of the day, we know that without our ontologies, epistemologies and holistic views being centred, we will continue to see much of the same issues persisting post-revolution, whether that be issues like anti-Indigenous racism within the colony or whether it be issues like the continued destruction of the natural environment and climate by people whose fundamental relationship and understanding of the land prevents them from ever being able to steward it in a healthy and sustainable fashion.

Their shallow environmentalism fails because it treats the land as a resource, not as kin, and because they refuse to engage with the knowledge of our people, which we have accumulated over the last 80,000 years or more.

This is knowledge that has produced cultural and political systems that have proven themselves to be truly sustainable, which is something no European cultural or political system can lay claim to.

Lastly, Keiran, you frame these disconnects between European leftist misconceptions regarding Aboriginal social justice struggles as bad faith engagements.

Does this imply that they serve the settler colonial project? And if so, where does this place this situation at present, and how do you consider it could be improved?

Absolutely, bad faith engagements serve the colonial project, but whether they realise it or not is a different question.

Now, when settler leftists misrepresent, dilute or deliberately misunderstand our struggles, they are not acting in political neutrality or ignorance, they are defending their place within the colony.

These bad faith engagements aren’t just frustrating miscommunications, they are ideological reinforcements of settler dominance.

If our liberation requires the dismantling of the very systems that give them their comfort, land and power, then it is easier for them to coopt, mislead or marginalise us, than to materially support our sovereignty.

Now, this leaves us in a position where we have to be cleareyed about the limitations and dangers of leftist alliances.

Not all solidarity is genuine. Too often we are expected to play symbolic roles in someone else’s class narrative, where land back and cultural continuity are falsely seen as distractions, as being divisive or as being liberal identity politics.

The way forward doesn’t lie in appealing to the Left to do better, in my opinion, it lies in building and strengthening our own movements rooted in Country, culture and kin and forging relationships of solidarity on our terms.

If settlers want to support us, we welcome that and encourage that. But it needs to be done in a way that settlers decentre themselves, materially and ideologically, which means stepping back, showing up when asked, supporting our work without trying to steer it, and above all, recognising that liberation on this continent must be led by First Nations people or it will never truly be liberation, it will just be a continuation of the settler colonial project with some rebranding.

Main image of Keiran Stewart-Assheton speaking at the microphone taken by photographer Matt Hrkac