White teachers and the ‘good’ governance of Indigenous souls: white governmentality and Ernabella Mission (1937–1971)

Abstract

This paper develops out of research concerning the place of white teachers and social constructions of ‘white good’ in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands. Here I focus on an era known as the Ernabella ‘mission days’ (1937–1971), a time when Presbyterian missionaries are typically thought to have provided the Anangu people of the region with an environment in which they were ‘free’ to remain ‘traditional’ and take or leave the gift of Western education; Anangu is the name the Indigenous people of the region use self‐referentially. Adopting a genealogical standpoint I interrogate the implications of these claims for Anangu, highlighting ways that Anangu education is nowadays shaped through reference to a golden past. Drawing on memoir and official correspondence, my focus is the white mission teacher’s negotiation of discourse and entanglement in reproductions of race. I suggest that discourses of whiteness and progressivism are central to the making of a ‘good’ white missionary teacher at Ernabella. Within the logic of these discourses, identity is conceived as essential and the ‘goodness’ of the Ernabella missionary settles quickly into truth. To trouble these relations, I disrupt binary tropes of good or bad whites upon which the white missionary’s benevolent moral status frequently relies. Far from ensuring more freedom, this research suggests that the Ernabella missionary was implicated in extending a system of disciplinary control over Anangu bodies, minds and souls, and in securing the racial order through habitual recourse to hegemonic whiteness. I argue that more detailed historical analyses of ‘white good’ are required if the past is to provide a rigorous basis for rethinking the present.

Keywords:

• Anangu education
• white teachers
• goodness
• whiteness
• identity
• genealogy

Acknowledgements

Thanks must go to Dr Ben Wadham, Professor Kay Whitehead and Andrew Miller for valuable advice during the draft‐writing process. The author is the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award.

Notes

1. See for example Brock (2007); Duguid (1940–1941, 1941, 1946, 1951, 1954, 1963, 1972); Edwards (1982, 2004); Edwards and Underwood (2006); Folds (1989); Iversen (1999); Iversen and Thomas (1996); Johns (2006); Kerin (2005, 2006); Lawson (2004); Lines (1975); MacGill (1999, 2008); Penny (1976); Pennycook (2002); Riphagen (2005); P. Russell (2000); Schulz (2007); Shepherd (2004); Tedmanson (2005); Toyne and Vachon (1984); Wallace and Wallace (1977); Yengoyan (1969).

2. For example, Ernabella woman Makinti Minutjukur (2006, para. 6) writes, ‘For the first 35 years we built our community, supported by the Presbyterian Board of Mission. The mission respected our culture and our traditions. It offered medical help and education, with no conditions attached’.

3. Tourist teaching is often used twofold: to capture a culture of high turnover of white staff in remote regions, and to emphasise the means by which white teachers reproduce the relations of race through ‘performing’, or deploying, whiteness. See for example, Harper (2004); Hickling‐Hudson (2003); Hickling‐Hudson and Ahlquist (2003a, 2003b, 2004); Hoffman (1996); Reyes and Bishop (2005).

4. In positing an ‘autonomous chooser’ (Fitzsimons, 2002; Marshall, 1996a, 1996b; Peters and Marshall, 1996), this perspective constructs an individual who is at the mercy of unconscious internal desires but also capable of self‐directed intervention. This image of the Cartesian self maps onto psychoanalytic conceptions of identity, which, increasingly in the modern and postmodern era, direct individuals ‘to a set of normative behaviours institutionally prescribed by the discipline of psychoanalysis’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006, 21). Within the logic of psychoanalysis, if Anangu individuals appear unable or choose not to be ‘normatively’ self‐determining, according to normalised ‘white’ ideals of ‘sobriety, duty, modesty and so forth’ (Rose 1996, 133), they are hence considered to be ‘deficient’ and to reflect a deviation from the white ideal.

5. Kerin (2006) undertakes a thorough analysis of this claim.

6. According to Kerin (2005, 85.4), Duguid was responsible for ‘rescuing’ several half‐caste Ernabella children in this way.