The Pintupi Nine

December 23, 2014 9:08 AM

In the 1950s, to clear an area for missle testing, the Australian government forcibly resettled a number of nomadic Aboriginal families. One was overlooked --- continuing to roam the desert without contact with any other humans, until 1984.
posted by Diablevert (11 comments total)

There are enough violations of the Prime Directive here that I would expect the Starfleet Board of Inquiry would find enough evidence for several courts martial.
posted by koeselitz at 9:28 AM on December 23, 2014 [4 favorites]

I love how it was tasting the sugar that convinced them to stay in the settlement. Just underscores how powerful refined carbs are to human biology.
posted by genmonster at 9:47 AM on December 23, 2014 [4 favorites]

This is a really interesting story, but I hate how it promotes the myth that non-industrial cultures were frozen in amber for tens of thousands of years.
posted by wintersweet at 10:24 AM on December 23, 2014

I would love to see a movie about their experiences.
posted by Soliloquy at 11:19 AM on December 23, 2014

I'd really like to know what the "lost brother" thought about their new life, in his own words.
posted by psoas at 11:22 AM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Just as a footnote, this family gets a brief mention in one of the most well-known ethnographies from the 80s: Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. But I think the argument of the book was mostly based on earlier work, not anything to do with these folks in particular.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 2:59 PM on December 23, 2014

'This bloke is white, this one,' I thought. 'He is white, this bloke.'

I'd love to show Warlimpirrnga a north-living Scandanavian. White Aussie blokes are brown by comparison to my northern ancestors.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:04 PM on December 23, 2014

This is a really interesting story, but I hate how it promotes the myth that non-industrial cultures were frozen in amber for tens of thousands of years.
posted by wintersweet at 1:24 PM on December 23

I agree that it was really interesting. How do you mean the last part? (Genuinely curious!)
posted by rock swoon has no past at 8:53 PM on December 23, 2014

In the article, there are bits like this: "If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived for 40,000 years, just ask Yukultji. She stepped into the 20th Century just 30 years ago." I think practically speaking people can see that's neither strictly accurate nor even necessarily a valid analogy. But it could be misleading given not just historical events but also ecological events that occurred on such a large timeframe. Some common questions to ask are whether folks living in marginal environments would have done so in the past with the same circumscriptions, with the same challenges, for the same reasons, and with what degree of fidelity to the reproduction of their social/cultural practices, though I have no idea how much of that is relevant in this instance.

But it's also a bit exoticizing/othering to describe living people that way and tends to make them into somewhat obscure objects of imagination and fantasy in a way that's not entirely awesome. It seems like this family was connected to historical phenomena at least in that they had connections to other Pintupi folks, fit in just fine when they rejoined everyone, and were evidently unremarkable enough to just be mentioned only in passing in an ethnography about their larger society (not sure). Of course, that's still an interesting story, and it constitutes most of what the article reports on. The classic text on this is Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other. It's pretty academic stuff, but apparently he wrote a brief retrospective on his book a few years ago. Just skimming it, "No regrets" seems to be the takeaway.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:12 AM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, here we go. Fred Myers, author of the ethnography linked above, did write an article on the Pintupi Nine. If you skip the theory stuff that addresses what were then current issues in anthropology, I guess it's basically an argument about not framing this as a "first contact" story, because it's all of a piece with stuff the Pintupi in general were already involved in.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:46 AM on December 24, 2014

What Monsieur Caution said. I was looking for a name and examination of this fallacy, but I'm traveling and I'm sick, so it still hasn't come to me. Many people do, though, genuinely think that aboriginal/native peoples who don't live in houses with modcons are living exactly the same way their distant ancestors lived. That's patronizing, exoticizing, belittling, dehumanizing nonsense. It dredges up a whole bunch of weird beliefs: that the March of Progress only leads to a certain/correct kind of society and technology, that perhaps some groups are just naturally more intelligent/ambitious/adventurous than others, etc. etc. It also ties into some false dichotomies about modern vs. primitive, and so on. I hope that made a little sense.

Sorry to digress from the main topic!
posted by wintersweet at 9:20 AM on December 24, 2014