From Cyclonious’s The Revival comes his video Invasion Day. This video is about the settler colonial polity of Australia. Not only does the track discuss the settler colonial invasion, but it paints a picture of the quotidian experiences the Indigenous people of Australia are having. Before someone points to “successful assimilation” in Australia, one must understand that assimilation still serves the geopolitical goal of the settler society not the Indigenous.
In the book Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century edited by Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, they make the same analysis in a quote from Patrick Wolfe, “Extermination and assimilation, he states provocatively, were two sides of the same coin: both aimed at protecting culturally (and not simply racially) white character of the population, and utterly destroying the indigenous world. Settler colonialism, then is not the past—a violent but thankfully brief period of conquest and domination—but rather the foundational governing ethic of this ‘new world’ state. Or, as Wolfe most succinctly puts it, ‘[t]he determination “settler—colonial state” is Australian society’s primary structural characteristic rather than merely a statement about its origins. …invasion is a structure not an event.'”(pg.3)
With this understanding, it is a foregone conclusion that the only project which can create justice for Indigenous people in Australia is a decolonization project that includes the restoration of sovereignty as a goal.
Check out our two part dialogue with Cyclonious about his album The Revival available in our store. (Part 1 and Part 2).
