On Talking about Indigenous Gambling and Economic Development in Australia, the US and Canada

Rights, Whiteness and Sovereignties

Abstract

This essay examines gambling as one thread of a broader fabric of economic relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. How do these relationships shape the ways gambling is promoted, experienced, regulated and talked about in Australia?; what are the implications of this for the governmentality of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians?; and how are political and cultural processes of racism and white possession involved in and reproduced through these relationships? What follows is a comparative analysis of discourses on Indigenous gambling in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. The aim of this comparison is to imagine alternative figures, which might inhabit the intersection of Indigeneity and gambling, to that which currently prevails in the national imagination: the Indigenous problem gambler and target of practical reconciliation policies.