A young Aboriginal has blasted the Acknowledgement of Country and claimed they are ‘made up’ and not representative of Indigenous Australian culture.
Kiescha Haines Jamieson was asked on TikTok whether the formal observation is an ‘actual traditional practice’ or if it is a ‘modern white savior thing’.
‘It is a made up protocol by Reconciliation Australia,’ she claimed on Thursday.
‘It’s not culture. It’s not our way.’
Acknowledgement of Country is a relatively recent practice, emerging during the 1990s in what the Keating Government called ‘the Reconciliation Decade’.
A series of organisations were introduced to help advance Indigenous-state relations in Australia and the practice was formalised through one of those branches.
Yawuru man Pat Dodson, a former Labor senator, was chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, which helped bring this about.
‘The work of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) encouraged strangers to recognise country, then, as people got stronger, the welcome developed,’ he said.
Acknowledgement of Country is delivered by non-Indigenous people or organisations to recognise traditional owners.
It differs from a Welcome to Country, which is a ceremony that is performed by a traditional owner to formally welcome visitors to their land.
Ms Jamieson said the Acknowledgement has now been ‘institutionalised to make people think that it is our culture’.
Some social media users agreed with Ms Jamieson and questioned why they were being practised.
‘It’s made up protocol,’ one user said.
‘Finally someone with the guts to tell the truth,’ a second said.
Others disagreed and defended the Acknowledgement of Country.
One commenter said it is a traditional thing for their mob but ‘not as grand as it’s shown on TV’.
Kiescha Haines Jamieson was asked on TikTok whether the formal observation is an ‘actual traditional practice’ or if it is a ‘modern white savior thing’
‘It’s not really a welcome, it’s more like [a] way to notify the spirits and ancestors that mob are travelling,’ they said.
Another added: ‘You don’t speak for all mobs and you don’t speak for mine.’
Yawarllaayi/Gomeroi elder Barbara Flick Nicol told NITV in 2020 that there has been a protocol for thousands of years among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to welcome and acknowledge visitors.
‘It’s always been something that we did as a people, understanding and observing the fact that when you are in somebody else’s country, that you acknowledge them,’ she said.
Ms Flick Nicol, who has worked within the Aboriginal health and legal fields for years, said she remembers councils started raising the Aboriginal flags in council officers after the Mabo decision in 1992.
‘I noticed that in NSW people started to formally acknowledge traditional owners when they held meetings or conferences,’ she said.
‘That was when it became really the thing to do.’
Much of the criticism around Acknowledgement and Welcome to Country ceremonies centres on people seeing them as subversive, an attempt to undermine modern Australia and non-Indigenous people’s place in it.
Much of the criticism around acknowledgement and Welcome to Country ceremonies centres on people seeing them as subversive (stock image)
But former federal politician and Wiradjuri woman Linda Burney, who was a member of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation when the Acknowledgment was formalised, said in October that its growth was organic.
‘It wasn’t strategised or planned. Once it got out to civic life it was something that people saw as an important way to tell the truth of the Australian story,’ she said.
‘Some years down the track it became a very formal part of Australian life, being done at gatherings of big corporations, union gatherings, religious ceremonies, and all parliaments across Australia.’
Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung man Tiriki Onus, who leads the Wilin Centre at the University of Melbourne, said the acknowledgment ‘helps us to reconcile some of the more unsavoury parts of our shared history’.
‘The act of acknowledging country and seeing oneself as part of the stories of the place can contribute a lot the society we build going forward,’ he told the ABC.