> the denial of the “developmental gap” between Indigenous peoples and European societies

the mob who washed up on Australia's shores and spent the next two centuries embarked on a futile attempt to eliminate the locals certainly exhibited extreme social development issues, that's for sure, and have been in denial ever since.

> Being hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist, these societies ... were and still are also based on kinship-based reciprocity.

not in Australia, where kinship-based reciprocacy occurs within a framework of women's business and men's business,

kinship-based reciprocacy becomes skewed when socially challenged communities in which the men boss over the women prohibit equitable organisational behaviour.

> First Nations need to accelerate their cultural evolution into modernity.

what pretentious nonsense. the problem for First Nations peoples is the introduced not their own kind.

it's the introduced peoples who need to accelerate their cultural evolution into modernity by mandating equity in governance with provision for women's and men's legislatures.

superior material culture is no advantage in the hands of the socially naive.

I haven't read this book yet but I'm a bit wary of stark oppositional poles like “critical eye rather than a bleeding heart” and "the problems afflicting First Nations are more cultural than political".

In my experience, either/ors are often shallow and ultimately unhelpful. Critical analysis divorced from empathetic sensitivity can be barren. Likewise a 'purely' political analysis without taking account of culture can miss important contextual considerations.

For example, I wonder how the authors deal with the relationship between culture and politics in the case of residential schooling or internment of Indigenous Canadians?

The opening paragraph and its subsequent elaboration are ludicrous--a straw man used to avoid discussion of serious issues; a concatenation of points all rejected on the basis of the distortions introduced into some. This is ideology in practice.

Um Whistler, I think the pretentious nonsense is coming from your pen - especially the notion of "governance with provision for women's and men's legislatures". It's ludicrous to say the least.

We have to get away from the doom-and-gloom mind-set, even though it has served many people in the Industry so well, and will do so for a long time yet. Instead, let's think of a very broad spectrum of Australian Indigenous situations, from the most horrific and remote, to the most positive. And of course, the same in Canada.

Positive, what positive, you ask ??!?? For instance, there are now (after barely twenty years) nearly twenty four thousand Indigenous university graduates - one in every twelve Indigenous adults. In 2007, a thousand Indigenous women graduated across Australia (actually 1,068) while the median graduate age-group contained only three thousand Indigenous women across Australia, urban and remote. Notionally then, one in three women graduated, and this will continue, and improve, in the lead-up to 2020, by which time there will be 50,000 Indigenous graduates. Is that success ? or is it somehow 'bad' ? If it's 'bad', then let's not gammon about Closing the Gap - if university graduations are 'bad', then the Gap is 'good' - schadenfreude 'Leftists' and the Industry cannot have it both ways.

Incidentally, a record 9,370 Indigenous people were enrolled in the latest year of data, 2007. Since 1990, more than sixty thousand Indigenous people have been enrolled at universities, one in five Indigenous adults. Not all Indigenous people want to sit on their arses in the dirt and whinge about the past. Many acknowledge the past, realise that it IS the past, pick themselves up and get on with life in a wicked world.

1."a concatenation of points all rejected on the basis of the distortions introduced into some."
2."Critical analysis divorced from empathetic sensitivity can be barren. Likewise a 'purely' political analysis without taking account of culture can miss important contextual considerations."
Please explain.
Blair Bartholomew