Ben Silverstein – författare

This open access collection explores the many ways in which Indigenous and descent communities in Africa, Australia, and the Pacific form connections with the deep past by engaging with their material heritage. Featuring nine chapters and six responses by leading and emerging international archaeologists, historians, museum researchers, and museum practitioners, all of which are designed or co-designed in collaboration with Indigenous activists and knowledge holders, the book makes space for different concepts of time and history, as well as for diverse ways of talking about and using the past in the present. Together, these reflections speak to how the actions and legacies of collectors and researchers have affected and continue to affect Indigenous relationships with the deep past,. Ultimately, it points to how such work can better shape opportunities for people today to engage with the material traces of their ancestors. For its timely interventions into the key concerns in museums and heritage theory and practice, this is a go-to resources for researchers, postgraduates, and practitioners interested in Indigenous studies, heritage studies, and postcolonial studies.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian National University.

In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory. By the late 1930s, Australian settlers were coming to understand the Northern Territory as a colonial formation requiring a new form of government. Responding to crises of social reproduction, public power, and legitimacy, they re-thought the scope of settler colonial government by drawing on both the art of indirect rule and on a representational economy of Indigenous elimination to develop a new political dispensation that sought to incorporate and consume Indigenous production and sovereignties. This book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in a broader governmental context.