“Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language”: Language Revitalization, Reactionary Settler Colonialism, and Perpetual Genocide

Abstract

Indigenous people in settler colonies such as Australia, the United States, and Canada are currently engaged in a range of projects to revitalize their languages: to reclaim and restore them in the wake of colonial destruction. Such language revitalization is frequently met with fierce backlash. This article examines the relationship between language revitalization backlash and genocide. I argue that language revitalization is part of broader efforts by Indigenous people to reconstitute themselves as distinct groups in reaction to colonial genocides. Backlash against language revitalization can therefore be seen as one element of ongoing efforts to prevent this, leading to a set of social and political relations I call perpetual genocide. I explore the dynamics of language revitalization backlash and perpetual genocide through an analysis of more than 600 social media comments collected from Australia over 2022 and 2023—the opening years of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages—and identify three key themes in these comments: civilizational racism, English and white supremacy, and linguistic diversity as a threat. Based on this analysis, I argue that this backlash, and the perpetual genocide of Indigenous peoples more broadly, is driven by a structural arrangement I call reactionary settler colonialism, which is led by a right-wing vanguard but involves all settlers as implicated subjects. I conclude by discussing counter-genocidal praxis in relation to this formation.

Full text

For final published version see: https://doi.org/10.3138/GSI-2024-0011
“Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language”
“Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language”: Language
Revitalization, Reactionary Settler Colonialism, and Perpetual Genocide
Gerald'Roche'
Associate Professor of Politics, La Trobe University
Abstract
Indigenous people in settler colonies such as Australia, the United States, and Canada are currently
engaged in a range of projects to revitalize their languages: to reclaim and restore them in the wake of
colonial destruction. Such language revitalization is frequently met with fierce backlash. This article
examines the relationship between language revitalization backlash and genocide. I argue that language
revitalization is part of broader efforts by Indigenous people to reconstitute themselves as distinct
groups in reaction to colonial genocides. Backlash against language revitalization can therefore be seen
as one element of ongoing efforts to prevent this, leading to a set of social and political relations I call
perpetual genocide. I explore the dynamics of language revitalization backlash and perpetual genocide
through an analysis of more than 600 social media comments collected from Australia over 2022 and
2023—the opening years of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages—and identify three key
themes in these comments: civilizational racism, English and white supremacy, and linguistic diversity
as a threat. Based on this analysis, I argue that this backlash, and the perpetual genocide of Indigenous
peoples more broadly, is driven by a structural arrangement I call reactionary settler colonialism, which
is led by a right-wing vanguard but involves all settlers as implicated subjects. I conclude by discussing
counter-genocidal praxis in relation to this formation.
Key$words:$
Perpetual'genocide,'language'revitalization,'settler'colonialism,'reactionary,'Australia!
Endless Genocides

Some genocides never end; after they are perpetrated, they are perpetuated. While evidence of
genocidal violence is doctored and destroyed, perpetrators enjoy impunity, memory is distorted, victim
testimony is ignored and repressed, victors revel in the spoils, and a culture of denial takes root as repeated
assaults on survivors counter their efforts to reconstitute themselves as groups, socially, politically, culturally,
and economically. This article examines how such attacks involve opposition to the public use of Indigenous
languages, focusing on Australia.
More specifically, this article examines online backlash against Indigenous language revitalization.
Indigenous language revitalization refers to efforts to bring back a formerly suppressed language, which
either has a greatly diminished number of speakers, or which primarily exists in archival records.
1
Examples
discussed here include teaching Indigenous languages in schools, using Indigenous place names in the
mainstream media, and performing songs in Indigenous languages. As noted in the Routledge Handbook of
Language Revitalization, language revitalization often meets with “negative reactions or counter-
movements.”
2
Instances of such backlash have been documented and analyzed in New Zealand, Australia,
Ireland, Scotland, and China.
3
This article extends this prior work by arguing that this backlash is often part
of efforts to perpetuate genocide by deliberately thwarting efforts of the victim group to reconstitute itself in
the wake of destructive violence.
My argument assumes that genocide has been perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in Australia.
Although this genocide has been debated and denied, I affirm its reality on the following basis.
4
First, I note
that this claim is coherent with Indigenous political strategy since at least the early 1970s, with at least two
formal claims of genocide made by Indigenous activists in Australia since this time.
5
Second, as noted by
Eualeyai/Kamillaroi legal scholar Larissa Behrendt, the term genocide captures a central feature of the lived
experience of colonialism for Indigenous people in Australia.
6
Third, legal theorists have found sufficient
evidence to declare the impacts of colonialism genocidal.
7
And finally, there is also abundant scholarship
attesting to the genocidal nature of the European conquest of the Australian continent.
8
Although I build on these foundations that attest to genocide in Australia, my approach diverges in two
aspects. First, I move beyond the more common focus on frontier massacres and child transfer in discussions
of genocide in Australia,
9
to examine the issue of language revitalization and its suppression, which is rarely
considered. Second, unlike most of the commentators cited above, I assert that multiple genocides took place
in Australia, targeting individual Nations.
10
So, rather than referring to an umbrella genocide of Indigenous
people, I am referring more specifically to, for example, the genocides of the Wurundjeri, Gamilaraay,
Gadubanud, Bundjalung or Wakka Wakka peoples, and so on.

Taking the political strategies and lived experiences of Indigenous people into my consideration of
genocide, in addition to more traditional reflections on law and scholarship, is part of my broader
commitment to militant decolonial scholarship (i.e., research that aims to confront and undo the continuing
impacts of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and state violence that are currently embedded in the world
system).
11
As part of this broader framework, my approach to genocide rejects a narrow legalistic focus that
takes the UN’s Genocide Convention as the sole reference point for defining genocide. Instead, I base my
understanding of genocide on Lemkin’s original definition of genocide as a “coordinated plan of different
actions” that constitute a “synchronised attack” aimed at destroying human groups,
12
and on recent work in
critical genocide studies.
13
This approach enables me to attend to the dynamic, shifting, and covert nature of
genocidal violence, including perpetrators’ efforts to strategically adapt to static definitions of genocide.
I consider this article part of my ethical and political commitment as a non-Indigenous person living on
the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin federation. Although written from within this
specific context, my research aims to address the relationship between genocide and language revitalization
backlash more broadly, in a world where at least half of all languages are being subjected to eliminationist
projects and language revitalization work remains under attack everywhere.
14
To advance my argument, my article is organized as follows. First, I examine the relationship between
language suppression and genocide, advocating an approach that looks beyond the common framework of
cultural genocide to explore the complex and multifaceted relationship between genocide and language. In
doing so I develop my concept of genocide perpetuation. Following this, I look at the tropes, strategies, and
discourses of online backlash against language revitalization in Australia, based on an analysis of over 600
online social media comments collated during 2022 and 2023. I then discuss how these discourses contribute
to genocide perpetuation in Australia and unpack the complex structural drivers of perpetration. I conclude by
discussing the ongoing need to counter language revitalization backlash as part of counter-genocidal praxis
and explore the broader applicability of my arguments in contexts outside Australia.
15
Genocide, Language, and Genocide Perpetuation
Language is usually connected to genocide with reference to cultural genocide, which is typically taken
to mean the destruction of a culture, including language.
16
However, as noted by Patrick Wolfe, cultural
genocide is often deployed to denote something lesser than “actual” genocide wherein cultural genocide is not
“the real thing.”
17
The historical roots of this demotion lie in the drafting of the genocide convention.
Originally, Raphael Lemkin referred to cultural techniques of genocide, including the suppression of
language,
18
which manifests as changing place names and public signs from one language to another,

switching the language of official institutions such as courts, forbidding the use of languages in schools or
print media, and the destruction of libraries and archives. Whenever these actions were part of a broader plan
to destroy a group, they were genocidal. However, in “reducing genocide to law,”
19
some drafters of the
genocide convention separated cultural genocide out as a subtype of genocide, rather than a technique within
a coordinated plan. They then denounced it as illegitimate—“ … no one would suggest that to prevent an
individual from speaking his native language could possibly constitute homicide”
20
—and deleted it from the
convention.
21
Given this history, I reject the term cultural genocide and the implication that the suppression of
language is unrelated to genocide. Instead, my work is part of a project to rehabilitate the spirit of those who
defended this connection in the drafting of the genocide convention, as shown in the convention’s travaux
préparatoires.
22
Although many delegates changed their position on the issue as the debate evolved, at
various points we find numerous statements supporting the idea that suppression of language is integral to
genocide. For example, the Chinese delegate stated that the “ … suppression of [a group’s] language” was
one means of destroying a group,
23
and further argued that, “Although it seemed less brutal,” suppressing a
language “might be even more harmful than physical or biological genocide, since it worked below the
surface and attacked a whole population …. ”
24
The USSR’s delegate reasoned that “The concept of genocide
must also cover measures and actions aimed against the use of the national language …. ”
25
The Venezuelan
delegate declared that a “comprehensive” definition of genocide should include “prohibition of a language,”
26
and the Lebanese delegate argued that the convention should cover any act that “could cause the complete
and rapid disappearance of the … language … of a group.”
27
The delegate for Pakistan described “acts of
genocide” directed at Muslims in India, including a “heavy attack” on the Urdu language,
28
and Byelorussia
argued that the convention should target “actions aiming at the destruction of the language … of a group,” for
failing to do so “ … would be tantamount to stating in advance that crimes against the … language of a group
would remain unpunished.”
29
Whilst restoring the severed connection between genocide and language, we should also be cautious to
avoid collapsing language suppression onto genocide in ways that see them as essentially identical. This is
evident in work arguing that efforts to suppress minority and Indigenous languages constitute genocide within
the framework of the UN Genocide Convention, because they represent, firstly the forcible transfer of
children from one group to another (Article IIe), and also cause serious mental harm (Article IIb).
30
Support
for this position is typically signaled in the use of the terms linguicide or linguistic genocide.
31
While I think
that these arguments are probably legally correct, and therefore have potential utility, I also think that
equating language suppression with genocide limits our capacity to see more subtle and complex connections

between the two, and thus to understand how genocide is perpetrated and perpetuated in multiple ways in
relation to language.
Language is often used to identify people as members of a target group in genocide and other atrocities,
rendering them vulnerable to various forms of violence. For example, during the Cambodian Genocide,
members of the Cham group were identified by their use of the Cham language, and killed.
32
Tim McNamara
details numerous cases during the Holocaust where people were subjected to violence and killing, or escaped
them, on the basis of identities revealed by language.
33
In another case, journalist Nick Turse describes how
Dinka and Nuer militants in South Sudan identified and killed one another on the basis of language.
34
These
are all examples of shibboleths where linguistic information is used to reveal a person’s identity.
35
In
unlocking the deadly potential of shibboleths, language does not need to be banned or suppressed for it to
have a crucial role in genocide.
Critical approaches to genocide that have emerged in the past 30 years also help us see other
dimensions of the complex connections between language and genocide. Particularly significant are shifts in
how we perceive the pace and visibility of genocide and recognize the diversity of techniques that are used to
achieve it. Helen Fein, for example, speaks of “genocide by attrition” where victims die slowly from poor
living conditions, starvation, and disease rather than direct, immediate killing.
36
Similarly, Mark Levene
describes a “creeping genocide” of Indigenous peoples in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
37
Such
work has been bolstered by research on slow violence and necropolitics that examines how whole populations
are targeted for premature death by forms of violence that are difficult to perceive due to their temporal
nature.
38
My own work adopts this approach in exploring how the suppression of Indigenous and minority
languages leads to group-differentiated exposure to premature death.
39
Thus, although suppression of
language is often viewed as merely symbolic violence—an attack on value, meaning, and identity—I follow
Benjamin Mieches in emphasizing the bodily, material effects of such violence and the ways in which it
produces death without direct, immediate killing.
40
Language, therefore, can be incorporated into broader patterns of genocide in multiple ways. Language
can be suppressed in multiple contexts as part of a wider effort to destroy a group; it can be used to generate
deadly shibboleths that make individuals and communities available for destruction; and language
suppression can itself be a form a killing, through deliberate violence that contributes to a slow-moving,
invisible genocide. All of these are evident in the Australian context.
In a recent testimony to the Yoorrook Justice Commission,
41
Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong
academic, artist, and language reclamation activist Vicki Couzens referred to the suppression of Indigenous
language as “… a recognised strategic action or tool in the actioning of genocide. It is undertaken with

aforethought and intention as a key part of the colonial method of perpetrating and continuing genocide.”
42
The Bringing Them Home report on the forced removal of Indigenous children details numerous examples of
how Indigenous languages were suppressed, both by preventing intergenerational transmission via the
breaking up of families, and by preventing their use through informal bans that were enforced through
corporal violence.
43
Elsewhere, Yorta Yorta man David Tournier describes these methods: “they got whipped,
they got bashed, they got flogged” for speaking in an Indigenous language.
44
In one example of a violent
linguistic shibboleth, Wiradjuri journalist Stan Grant describes how his grandfather was imprisoned for
speaking the Wiradjuri language in public: “When he came out he refused to speak his language again.”
45
These techniques of violence through and against language demonstrate the ways in which language is
linked to genocide in the context of settler colonialism.
46
In countries such as Australia, the United States, and
Canada, settler colonialism has produced the highest rates of linguistic destruction on earth, far above those
found in countries that were colonized via indirect rule or exploitation colonialism (such as Indonesia, India,
Nigeria, or Zimbabwe).
47
In contexts where the colonizer comes to stay, an intense, multipronged assault on
Indigenous groups typically begins with massacres, land seizures, and the destruction of Indigenous political
systems and economic foundations, and then continues with techniques of biological absorption and cultural
assimilation, ultimately aimed at laying permanent claim to land through the elimination of the native.
48
Given that occupation is permanent, this program of elimination is a constant structural driver within settler
colonialism. This helps us explain why backlash takes place whenever Indigenous peoples attempt to
reconstitute themselves by countering any aspect of this coordinated plan of elimination: the legitimacy of the
settler colonial project rests on the constant perpetuation of genocide.
Genocide perpetuation, as I define it here, fits broadly within efforts to divide genocide into stages or
phases, beginning with Lemkin: “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the
oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”
49
As suggested above,
genocide perpetuation refers to efforts to prevent the victim group reconfiguring itself (socially, politically,
economically, and culturally) in the wake of a synchronized attack. Language revitalization is exemplary of
such processes, in that it seeks to undo the harm of genocidal violence in relation to language: the termination
of intergenerational transmission or massive reduction in the population of speakers.
50
The concept that comes closest to what I mean by genocide perpetuation is Henry Theriault’s theory of
genocidal consolidation. Theriault describes genocidal consolidation as taking place when “the state of affairs
that have resulted from the destructive phase [of genocide] becomes permanent and irrevocable.”
51
Theriault
sees genocidal consolidation as taking place over decades, “even centuries,”
52
and describes three distinct
consolidation processes. First is the integration of the victim group’s territory into the perpetrator state.

Second is the laundering of the victim’s wealth into the perpetrator economy. Third is the creation of
perpetual insecurity for the victim group, whereby “their identity as well as physical extension into the future
are continually in question and require endless focal effort that restricts actual recovery and development
beyond survival.”
53
Whilst sharing the features of chronic insecurity and continuing attacks on the victim group, my
concept of genocide perpetuation is distinguished from Theriault’s concept of genocidal consolidation by
lacking an implied genocidal terminus of “permanent and irrevocable” destruction. My differentiation
achieves two things. First, it highlights the non-teleological nature of genocide which, rather than moving
towards an end point, constantly works to maintain domination and reinstate the subjugation of victims. The
perpetrator must constantly work to defend the spoils of genocide and justify their historic and contemporary
violence. Second, genocide perpetuation also creates space to consider projects of resistance and the
possibility of the victim group’s reconstitution in the wake of destructive violence, a point emphasized by
numerous Indigenous activists, particularly those advocating Indigenous resurgence.
54
Having introduced the idea of genocide perpetuation, we may now return to the topic of language and
language revitalization, before proceeding to examine this study’s empirical materials. Within the framework
of genocide perpetuation, language revitalization represents an effort of victim groups to reconstitute
themselves after genocide; a sort of counter-genocidal praxis that undoes the harmful, destructive violence of
genocide and undermines efforts to destroy the group through a coordinated attack on its various facets.
Backlash against language revitalization, then, can be seen as an endeavor to undermine the reconstitution of
the victim group, to extend dominance, curtail self-determination, and maintain the victim group’s chronic
insecurity. Instead of genocide becoming a goal or end point, perpetuation shows how it becomes a set of
fundamentally hierarchical social and political relations, sometimes carried out through the most seemingly
benign acts, such as posting comments online.
Language Revitalization Backlash: A Reactionary Discourse
In examining the backlash against Indigenous language revitalization as an aspect of genocide
perpetuation, this article looks at social media comments collected from Twitter and Facebook in 2022 and
2023. These two years are significant in that they represented the opening years of the International Decade of
Indigenous Languages, and followed the International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019); similar negative
comments were observed in the lead-up to and during this year.
55
To better understand the rhetorical content and strategies of language revitalization backlash, I collected
only negative comments, which were harvested as screenshots from a total of 13 news stories. Since some

posts were duplicated across platforms, this meant that comments were harvested from a total of 15 posts (10
from Facebook, 5 from Twitter). These news stories dealt with a range of language revitalization initiatives,
including teaching Indigenous languages in schools, singing the national anthem in an Indigenous language,
giving a weather forecast using Indigenous place names, and the official Australian launch of the
International Decade of Indigenous Languages. A total of 660 comments were harvested, meaning an average
of 44 negative comments per post. Comments were organized thematically; here, after some preliminary
comments, I outline three major themes of language revitalization backlash discourse.
The backlash against Indigenous language revitalization in these comments generally takes the form of
disparagement and dismissal. Rather than advancing a critique, opposition is simply stated, often in the most
abbreviated form possible. The simplest way this is achieved is through reactions: 375 people expressed their
condescension for Indigenous language revitalization in 2022 when they reacted with laughter to a news story
about funding for Indigenous language education.
56
A single word rhetorical question appears frequently—
why?—calling into question the validity and significance of both language revitalization and efforts of
reconstitution by genocide survivors. Equally succinct are single word comments that describe language
revitalization, such as bollocks, bullshit, disgraceful, disgusting, dumb, garbage, joke, madness, nauseating,
shameful, stupidity, terrible, or vomit. Common emojis used in these negative comments include 🤡🤬😂 and
💩.
When comments do take the time to offer a substantive critique of language revitalization, they
typically eschew the strong sentiments seen in briefer comments. In contrast to the snide, dismissive vitriol of
shorter comments, more substantial comments typically advance their critique in what superficially appears to
be a less hateful manner, typically under one of three primary themes: modernity and civilization, the utility
of English, and the impracticality of supporting diverse Indigenous languages. As I explore later, this strategy
of veiling enmity in progressive rhetoric is a hallmark of reactionary discourses more generally. To see how
this works, we first look at the comments within each of the three primary themes.
Theme One: Modernity and Civilization
In opposing language revitalization, many commentators establish a schema that relegates Indigenous
languages to the past and sees efforts to integrate them into the present as harmful to Indigenous people. This
schema associates the present with a cluster of traits, including economic prosperity, technological
advancement, and expanding human interconnection and opportunity. As the following examples
demonstrate, Indigenous languages are seen as impeding access to all of these:
“It won’t help people make it in the real world.”

“It won’t help them achieve anything.”
“Most importantly, you’re not going to get a job with a language that nobody
understands.”
“How about teaching kids life skills that are actually needed: budgeting, taxes, how to
start a business, actual nutrition, etc.?”
“Really maybe try being an airline pilot flying into New York with your original
language.”
These commentators also claim that not only does language revitalization deny Indigenous people access to
all these things in the present, but it also represents a threat to Indigenous futures: “Indigenous languages are
unsuitable for today’s modern society and they don’t prepare anyone for the future, for the 21st century and
an increasingly globalised world.”
Although these comments may present a facade of concern via an appeal to utility and an inferred goal
of Indigenous well-being, often this effort fails due to an overwhelmingly patronizing and condescending
tone. Whilst maintaining the facade of concern, rhetorical questions and ironic declarations reveal an
underlying oppositional stance, targeted at delegitimizing language revitalization rather than helping
Indigenous people.
“That’ll be handy.”
“Gee, that will get them a long way in life?!”
“‘So can you do calculus? Or basic math?’ ‘No but I know a dead language that no one
uses.’”
And even the minimal fig leaf
57
of utility is often revealed to be a banner for assimilation: “That will help
them assimilate in the 21st century.” “And how will they assimilate into the real world?”
The flipside of this discourse that alienates Indigenous languages from the modern world is one that
attacks the Indigenous past. Such comments often bound across a chasm of non sequitur to shift the terrain of
discussion from Indigenous languages to Indigenous technologies, which are then derided to assault the value
of Indigenous people as a whole.
“Indigenous people built ABN (absolutely nothing).”
“They had a Stone Age culture.”
“They didn’t invent the wheel.”

Although irrelevant to the topic of discussion, technology provides a convenient avenue for commentators to
achieve their more substantive aim of inferiorizing Indigenous people. Occasionally, they also do this while
staying on topic, by demeaning Indigenous languages:
“Unsophisticated isn’t even half of it.”
“Conquered primitives have no written language.”
“All the different Stone Age tribes that lived here before white man could not write or
read they only had some screaming gibberish.”
The themes of language and technology are also sometimes brought together to create a logical trap that
excludes Indigenous languages from the present. On the one hand, commentators claim that Indigenous
languages are inferior because they do not have words for concepts such as nuclear physics and rocket
science. At the same time, they demean Indigenous languages for “making up” words for “car” and
“internet.” This powerful sense that Indigenous language cannot and must not reflect contemporary realities
takes its most extreme form in assertions that Indigenous languages are, simply, fake.
“Indigenous languages are based on hearsay, half of them are made up like welcome to
country, they were established during a drinking session around a fire.”
“Another complete fraud.”
Underlying all these comments is a discourse that I will refer to as civilizational racism. It is characterized by
the masking of racist enmity in a veneer of concern and expressed desire for collective progress. This façade
veils an ideological foundation in nineteenth century theories of race and stadial theories of evolution, which
justify and naturalize the genocide of Indigenous peoples as an inevitable consequence of progress.
58
However, it also seamlessly melds with more recent right-wing discourses that employ civilized as a marker
for that which must be protected and promoted, and uncivilized to label various racialized populations that
can be attacked with impunity.
59
Although speaking in publicly acceptable terms of progress, modernity,
utility, and civilization, these comments advance a claim that the destruction of Indigenous groups is
inevitable and their existence in the present can be nothing but a fabrication or a hinderance to progress.
Theme Two: English
A second major theme in these comments is the promotion of the English language. Sometimes, this
theme merges with civilizational racism describe above: “They need English not a language restricted to a
Stone Age vocabulary and concepts to be able to move away from abuse, idleness, squalor and government
dependency.”

More often, however, English is promoted through simple imperatives, like “English before the rest” and
“Speak English please.” These imperatives are often intensified with reference to necessity, simultaneously
implying that English fulfills some vital function that other languages cannot, while also advancing the idea
that the ultimate measure of any language is utility.
“The only language you need is English.”
“Indigenous people need to learn how to speak, read, and understand English.”
“Teach them English first … that’s the only language they need to get by in life.”
Occasionally, effort is made to enhance the legitimacy of such imperatives with reference to law or history,
even if it requires the commentator to contradict the fact that Australia has never had an official language:
“English is our official language and the only way these kids can participate in
mainstream Australia is to be part of it.”
“English has been the national language since Federation.”
“Their own language, since 1788, is English.”
“It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure all Aussies equally have opportunity to
learn the national language, which at present is English.”
In fact, the only thing that sanctions English as the language of Australia is nationalism.
“They live in AUSTRALIA, the language is ENGLISH.”
“One country, one language. It’s called English!!!!!!”
“English is our native tongue leave it alone.”
“🤮🤮🤮 we are all Australians and we speak English 🤬”
However, while English is promoted as the national and purportedly official language of Australia, it is also
seen as having much wider currency in assuring social mobility.
“English is an international language.”
“Guess what, English is understood the world over!”
“English is a common universal language.”
This effort to bestow utmost utility and value on the English language and to aggressively promote it in place
of Indigenous languages is ultimately an expression of white supremacy. In Anglophone settler colonial

contexts, the racialization of diverse peoples of European ancestry is carried out, in part, through their
assimilation to the English language, while at the same time the language is forced onto Indigenous people.
60
Because whiteness is formed in part through assimilation to the English language, white supremacy is now
maintained by the promotion of English Only movements that consider languages other than English an
invasive threat.
61
The English language is also used to sort safe and threatening bodies at the borders of the
state and its institutions,
62
while whiteness is in turn used as a proxy for determining how correct someone’s
English is.
63
Seen in this light, the promotion of English as a direct reaction to Indigenous language
revitalization should be understood primarily as the promotion of white supremacy and defense of white
privilege.
Theme Three: Profusion
A final theme that appears frequently in these comments is the profusion of Indigenous languages in
Australia. Even though the total number of languages on the continent plummeted from 440 to 123 following
colonization,
64
and despite national surveys showing a decline in the number of Indigenous languages still
considered strong (from 18 to 14),
65
commentators repeatedly refer to the large number of Indigenous
languages in the country. Frequent, and wildly variable, attempts are made to state the number of Indigenous
languages in Australia: 50, a hundred or so, over one hundred, quite a few, so many, 120, 150, 170+,
hundreds, up to 250, 250, 250 plus, 200–300, around 300, 300, over 400, 500, 547, 548, 600, 650, 700, 800,
900+, 1,000, thousands, 10,000, and so on. What is clearly important is the extent rather than the number;
profusion is the only fact that matters.
This focus on the profusion of Indigenous languages achieves three things. First, like concerns for
Indigenous economic welfare, the focus on diversity acts as a progressive fig leaf to cover up the underlying
goal of opposing Indigenous language revitalization. There is a tip of the hat to diversity—a classic
progressive prerogative—and even the odd attempt at expressing a desire for inclusion (more on this below).
But ultimately, mentioning diversity essentially acts as the “I’m not racist but” of backlash discourses. One
comment on an article about the national anthem being sung in an Indigenous language gives a particularly
clear example of how this works: “To do it correctly, shouldn’t it be sung in every one of the 250 known
Aboriginal languages? Otherwise, isn’t it disrespectful to the other 249 language groups?” A more aggressive
formulation of this sentiment shows that the aim here is not greater inclusion and more support for language
revitalization, but disparagement of Indigenous people: “You’ll end up with the other 249 whinging their guts
out!”

A second aim of this focus on profusion is to make all language revitalization seem poorly conceived,
while also suggesting that no amount of forethought and planning would help anyway. Some comments
emphasize the former: “How will this work? There are quite a few dialects so who decides which one? It’s as if all they have is
little brain farts, without thinking about what they’re actually saying!” The assertion that profusion makes language
revitalization impossible often comes with the same patronizing condescension we saw above.
“With something like 500 dialects, how can we possibly teach children any indigenous
language?”
“Do these teachers know all 170+ indigenous languages?”
“Interesting you are all going to learn over one hundred different speaks [sic].”
There is no serious effort to engage with the practicalities of language revitalization, only a haughty assertion
that diversity renders any efforts futile.
Finally, the profusion of languages is also combined with both civilizational racism and settler
monolingualism to argue that (national) unity is civilized, while profusion is primitive.
“They have about 547 different languages so it is only useful to a handful of people.
Who other than one’s tribe will understand what you sing or say?”
“600 tribes. 600 languages.”
“The Indigenous of Australia are a tribal people. Therefore many dialects.”
In all these comments, what the profusion of Indigenous languages really refers to is a threatening surplus.
This surplus threatens to overburden the educational system, undermine Indigenous welfare, cause conflicts,
and ultimately destroy national unity. In response to this, the comments imply a simple, stable solution:
sameness.
Language Revitalization Backlash as Reactionary Discourse
Before moving on, it is worth making a summative observation about these backlash discourses.
Although the examples provided and the three themes I have organized them into do not cover the full range
of content in these comments, they give a good sense of the discourse’s general tenor. In doing so, they
enable us to recognize the discourse as fundamentally reactionary in the following two senses of the word.
First, language revitalization backlash discourse is reactionary in the sense that it advocates for the
restoration of power to a dominant group who feels threatened by an expanding horizon of equality and
freedom. A key aim of language revitalization is to restore freedom of choice to individuals who have had it

systematically denied: the freedom to choose which languages they use in private and public. Reactionaries
see such increased freedom as a threat to their own power. These discourses therefore resound with “the felt
experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back,”
66
by denigrating Indigenous
people through civilizational racism, promoting white supremacy, and rendering Indigenous difference as
threatening surplus.
Second, this discourse is reactionary insofar as it consistently reproduces three core theses of
reactionary rhetoric as described by Albert Hirschman.
67
The first is the perversity thesis, which suggests that
“any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to
exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”
68
This thesis is reflected in the façade of utilitarian concern
seen in many comments, all variously implying that language revitalization will backfire on Indigenous
people, making their lives worse instead of better. The second is the futility thesis, which claims that
“attempts at social transformation will be unavailing … they will simply fail ‘to make a dent.’”
69
This is seen
clearly in the comments that point to the profusion of Indigenous languages to show that revitalization is
doomed to fail. The third is the jeopardy thesis, which holds that “the cost of the proposed change or reform is
too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.”
70
This thesis is reflected in comments that
portray Indigenous language revitalization as a threat to national unity, civilization, and progress.
But what does this reactionary discourse have to do with genocide?
Reactionary Settler Colonialism and Genocide Perpetuation
Posting comments on Facebook and Twitter is not genocide, even when those comments are hateful,
racist, and express a clear desire to dominate and destroy specific groups. It’s important to state this obvious
fact to head off bad-faith readings of my argument, and to move us closer to my key proposal that backlash
against language revitalization is an important component of genocide perpetuation in Australia. In order to
demonstrate this, we need to show that this backlash is part of a coordinated set of actions to destroy a group
and that it is linked to offline institutions and agents that weild power (not merely online commentary with no
significant impacts). These questions relate to the issues of intent and perpetration, respectively. Let’s start
with the second.
To understand how these comments connect to the real world, it is important to understand more about
who the commentators are and the views they hold. The reactionary nature of their discourse already suggests
that we are dealing with right-wing commentators. Other details of their discourse confirm this. One key tell
is their application of the label woke to language revitalization,
71
which they describe variously as woke
symbolism, woke nonsense, woke garbage, woke stupidity, woke idiocy, and woke retardation. Some

commentators blame “wokies” and “woke academics” for promoting language revitalization, while others
point the finger at “leftards,” “inner city leftists,” “cultural Marxists,” or the (nominally left-wing) Australian
Labor Party. This opposition to leftists and reactionary appropriation of the term woke further identify our
commentators as rightists.
In addition to who they blame and how they label, we can also see clear right-wing traces in what these
commentators promote. In addition to the (monoglot) nationalism discussed above, commentators also
promote (national) unity and oppose division—classical right-wing prerogatives.
“To divide and rule!!!!!! Communism.”
“Two languages, three flags, doesn’t add up to one Australia. We are united under the
Australian flag. &”
“Absolutely Disgusting One nation, ONE ANTHEM. One flag, respect those who
fought for the FREEDOM of ALL in this NATION. UNITED WE STAND. DIVIDED
WE FALL. 😳🥺🥵😓”
In defending national unity against the (leftist) forces of division, these commentators oppose language
revitalization as another addition to an endless onslaught of woke things.
“More ideas to divide the nation of Australia.”
“More division tactics.”
“More division. Again.”
“Will that be before or after gender study lessons?”
Backlash against Indigenous language revitalization, then, is part of a broader pattern of reactionary struggle
by rightists to maintain their privilege and power by opposing progressive social and political change. As I
explore further below, this in no way exonerates leftists from involvement in the genocidal dynamics I am
describing. However, at this point it is still necessary to dive further into the right-wing nature of this
commentary to explore its connections to real-world action and impact, and to thus understand how it is
perpetrated.
First, we need to consider how this backlash against Indigenous language revitalization is part of a
broader right-wing agenda opposing Indigenous self-determination and the reconstitution of First Nations in
Australia. One key example of this was the wave of denialism promoted by the Right in response to the
Bringing Them Home report and its finding of genocide, as detailed by Robert Manne in his essay “In Denial:
The Stolen Generations and the Right.”
72
Denial of genocide in Australia, more broadly, is frequently

championed by the Right. In academia this is typified by the work of amateur historian Keith Windschuttle,
who not only wrote a series of revisionist histories of Australian colonization, but also edited the right-wing
magazine Quadrant from 2007 to 2015, which has been a key venue for right-wing anti-Indigenous
commentary since the late 1990s. Another example is the work of the (now-defunct) Bennelong Society, a
right-wing think tank that promoted a return to the assimilationist policies of the early twentieth century.
73
Finally, it is also important to note the influence of right-wing actors on defeating the recent Australian
referendum that proposed revising the constitution and creating an Indigenous voice to parliament.
74
Individual commentators who oppose Indigenous language revitalization are embedded within these networks
of right-wing influence that powerfully shape public sentiment and government policy on a broad range of
Indigenous affairs in Australia.
Despite the clear right-wing basis of this language revitalization backlash, examining the social life of
this commentary compels us to widen our frame of reference when thinking about the dynamics of
perpetration. In a context where hate speech related to race, gender, and sexuality are routinely either
repressed or criticized, failure to do so in the case of language revitalization backlash creates an environment
of impunity. This impunity was upheld even in the years leading up to the International Year of Indigenous
Languages (2019), throughout that year, in the interim between 2019 and the start of the International Decade
of Indigenous Languages, and across the first two years of the decade (2022 and 2023). This sends a clear
message that Indigenous people can be publicly attacked if language is the primary focus of the vitriol. This
impunity, in turn, empowers these commentators to repeat and expand their efforts, and courts the risk that
online comments will spill over into real-world actions and lead to real harm. It also creates opportunities for
these commentators to align, refine, and expand their discourses, and potentially enables them to organize
politically, to form online friendships, create informal networks, and establish new platforms where backlash
against Indigenous language revitalization can be fomented.
75
And since these commentators are already
embedded within real-world right-wing power structures that actively mainstream right-wing projects,
76
these
language revitalization backlash discourses have real-world consequences, one of which is the chronic
underfunding of language revitalization in Australia,
77
another is the lack of adequate language rights
protections for Indigenous languages, both of which ultimately contribute to the ongoing loss of Indigenous
languages.
The free reign given to these discourses and their real-world implications suggests that we need to look
beyond the Right as perpetrators and consider issues of broader social responsibility. This necessity becomes
clearer when we consider the nature of settler colonial society. As Tony Barta argues,
78
settler colonial
societies are characterized by objective relations of genocide which, in the words of Jean Paul Sartre, involves
everyone in a “total struggle mounted by one nation against another.”
79
This puts all non-Indigenous people

in the settler colony in a position of genocidal complicity. As Clare Land notes, acknowledging and
addressing this complicity is thus a necessary step in forming relations of solidarity between settlers and
Indigenous people in the struggle for Indigenous liberation.
80
Failing to do so places those of us on the Left,
and those with more ambiguous political commitments, in a relation of implication with acts perpetrated by
the Right, a position “aligned with power and privilege without being … direct actions of harm,” by which we
“contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such
regimes.”
81
This, then, is the structure of perpetration in relation to Indigenous language revitalization backlash.
Individuals expressing right-wing views are the immediate perpetrators of this backlash. Their ideological
commitments and discourses are coherent with and embedded within a broader right-wing agenda that
opposes the reconstitution of Indigenous groups and any expansion of their current horizon of self-
determination. This agenda has the capacity to impact public perception and government policy. Furthermore,
the unimpeded circulation of language revitalization backlash discourses within settler-colonial society
implicates all non-Indigenous people in this dynamic. This combination of right-wing perpetrators within a
society of implicated subjects gives rise to what I call reactionary settler colonialism: a conservative
movement to limit Indigenous rights and defend settler privilege, to the collective benefit of all settlers
regardless of their individual politics or actions.
If the above establishes a relationship between reactionary settler colonialism and Indigenous language
revitalization backlash, what of its broader relationship to genocide perpetuation in Australia? To establish
reactionary settler colonialism as a driving force in genocide perpetuation in Australia, what remains is to
place language revitalization backlash in relation to a broader pattern of attack against Indigenous people in
Australia, serving to defend the privileges won through genocide and prevent the reconstitution of Indigenous
Nations.
To that end, it is crucial to note that the backlash against Indigenous language revitalization takes place
within a broader context of ongoing efforts to limit Indigenous self-determination in Australia, coupled with
persistent attacks on Indigenous people and communities. We can start to examine these by mentioning,
again, the recent defeat of a referendum in Australia to empower Indigenous people by giving them non-
binding input into political decisions that affect them via the creation of an Indigenous voice to parliament.
This is broadly coherent with a range of initiatives that reject Indigenous political projects to the benefit of
settlers, stretching from the failure to implement the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,
82
to the Victorian state government’s April 2024 rejection of recommendations
to address injustices against Indigenous people in the child protection and criminal justice systems.
83

Simultaneous to these refusals to listen to Indigenous calls for reform, Indigenous people are attacked in a
variety of ways: cultural heritage is destroyed, Indigenous people are incarcerated at rates far above the
national average, Indigenous lifespan is foreshortened through systemic racism, and the landscape, both
physical and social, is littered with monuments to colonizers.
84
In short, despite ongoing efforts aimed at
inclusion and increased visibility for Indigenous people in Australia, every day continues to be “another day
in the colony” for Indigenous people. As Munanjahli and South Sea Islander academic Chelsea Watego
describes it, “We still haven’t got our land back and they still don’t deem us worthy of the category of
human.”
85
To all of this, we can add one final note on the relationship between language revitalization backlash
and the perpetuation of genocide in Australia. Beyond situating it within a synchronized attack on Indigenous
peoples that aims to defend the spoils of genocide and prevent their reconstitution as distinct groups, it is
important to acknowledge that language revitalization backlash also kills. To understand how this works, we
return to the point already made above, that the suppression of Indigenous languages is associated with
group-differentiated exposure to premature death.
86
Part of the reason this happens is that language
revitalization has repeatedly been shown to have positive impacts on health and wellbeing. Literature on this
association dates back nearly 30 years,
87
and a recent review of this work “clearly indicate[s] that Indigenous
language use … has positive effects on health.”
88
Suppressing language revitalization, then, reduces
Indigenous life expectancy, and puts this backlash within the framework of genocide by slow violence.
Conclusion
The following quote, from a book published by right wing press Quadrant Books, demonstrates
succinctly many of the themes touched on in this article:
There is no proof that reviving Aboriginal language has a beneficial effect on
Aborigines. It may lift their spirits for a time, it may fascinate, but it will not unlock the
knowledge they need to gain a foothold in the wider community. Aborigines do not
need to revive dead languages … they need to learn English ….
89
Given that this book was published in 2022 and reprinted in 2023 and 2024, it also acutely demonstrates the
popularity of these reactionary discourses well beyond social media. The author is a former government
minister, former senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Institute for Public Affairs, ex-Commissioner
of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, lead campaigner for the voice referendum no
vote, and current chairman of Close the Gap Research,
90
an organization that advocates for Indigenous
welfare on the basis of “need, not race.” All this should encourage us to take seriously the way that language

revitalization backlash and reactionary settler colonialism’s broader project of genocide perpetuation are
peddled by influential actors in Australia.
In Australia and other settler colonial contexts, we need to counter language revitalization backlash and
oppose genocide perpetuation as part of a more general counter-genocidal praxis. There are many ways in
which the discourses of language revitalization backlash can be countered. The refusal of New Zealand’s
media watchdog to deal with complaints about the use of Māori language represents one such option.
91
Although a fuller discussion of the options is beyond the scope of this article, a range of political, legal, and
social options exist to limit the public circulation of backlash discourses and prevent them accumulating in
harmful, real-world impacts.
92
Fully supporting language revitalization, in turn, must be central to every effort
to promote a just post-genocidal transition where Indigenous peoples are able to fully reconstitute themselves
politically, socially, culturally, and economically as distinct groups.
As a final note, it is important to point out that the models developed here in relation to language
revitalization backlash, perpetual genocide, and reactionary settler colonialism do not apply outside the
context of settler colonial contexts like Australia, the United States, and Canada. We need a very different set
of concepts and practices to understand the relevant dynamics in other places. Of particular urgency is the
need to understand the drivers of genocide and the destruction of linguistic diversity in the post-colonial states
of Asia and Africa, which are home to the majority of people and languages on earth. This is the only way to
ensure that the International Decade of Indigenous Languages has a broad and lasting impact.
Gerald Roche is a political anthropologist, and is currently Associate Professor of Politics at La Trobe
University. His work focuses on colonialism, racism, the state, and language oppression. He edited the
Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization and authored The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet.
Notes
'
1
A relate d term is language reclamation, which refers more specifically to Indigenous-led efforts to assert self-determination and autonomy over their languages in
the wake of colonial efforts to suppress and eliminate them. See We sl ey Y. Leonard, “Framing Language Reclamation Programmes for Everybody's
Empowerment,” Gender & Language 6,2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i2.339. I primarily refer to language revitalization throughout this article because I
deal with work being carried out by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people within political frameworks that include both Indigenous self-determination and the
maintenance of existing liberal democracies.
2
Leanne Hinton, Leena Huss, and Gerald Roche, “Conclusion: What Works in Language Revitalization,” in The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization,
ed. Leanne Hinton, Leena Huss, and Gerald Roche (New York: Routledge, 2018), 495–502, 497.

'
3
See, for example Caoimhín De Barra, Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution (Dublin: Currach Books, 2019); Gerald Roche, “Linguistic Human Rights in Tibet:
Advocacy and Denial,” in The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, ed. Trove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Philipson (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022): 327–
40.
4
In addition to sources listed below, see also Tony Taylor, Denial: History Betrayed (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008); Dirk A. Moses, “An antipodean genocide?
The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 2,1 (2000): 89–106, https://doi.org/10.1080/146235200112427.
5
Sally Ghattas, “Black Power, Aboriginal Genocide, and the Politics of Identity,” Journal of Genocide Research 25,1 (2023): 1–23,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2021.1950288; Jennifer Balint, “Too Near and Too Far: Australia’s Reluctance to Name and Prosecute Genocide,” in Genocide
Perspectives V: A Global Crime, Australian Voices, ed. Nikki Marczak and Kirril Shields (Sydney: UTS ePress, 2017): 55–71.
6
Larissa Behrendt, “Genocide: the distance between law and life,” Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 132–47, http://dx.doi.org/10.22459/AH.25.2011.08.
7
Jennifer Balint, “Stating genocide in law: the Aboriginal Embassy and the ACT Supreme Court,” in The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land
Rights and the State, ed. Gary Foley, Andrew Schaap, Edwina Howell (London: Routledge, 2014): 267–82; Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing them
Home: Report on the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission, 1997).
8
In addition to sources cited elsewhere in the article, see Colin Tat z, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2017); Tom Lawson, The Last Man:
A British Genocide in Tasm an ia (New York: IB Ta ur is, 2014); Damien Short, “Australia: A Continuing Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research 12,1–2 (2010):
45–68.
9
Short, “Australia: A Continuing Genocide?”
10
Short, “Australia: A Continuing Genocide?”
11
Gerald Roche, “The Necropolitics of Language Oppression,” Annual Review of Anthropology 51 (2022): 31–47, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041420-
102158.
12
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New Jersey: Lawbook Exchange, 2005),
xi, 79.
13
Benjamin Meiches, The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2019); Zoé Samudzi, “Paradox of Recognition:
Genocide and Colonialism,” Postmodern Culture 31,1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2020.0028.
14
Gerald J. Roche, “The World’s Languages in Crisis (Redux): Toward a Radical Reimagining for Global Linguistic Justice,” Emancipations: A Journal of Critical
Social Analysis 1,2, article 8 (2022): 1–41, https://doi.org/10.26181/19720228.v1.
15
I take this term from War d Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1997).

'
16
For literature on the history and recent “return” of cultural genocide as a concept, see Leora Bilsky and Rachel Klagsbrun, “The Return of Cultural Genocide?”
European Journal of International Law 29,2 (2018): 373–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chy025. Jeffrey S. Bachman ed., Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and
Global Manifestations (London: Routledge, 2019).
17
Patrick Wol fe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8,4 (2006): 387–409, 398,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. For more on cultural genocide as a demeaned subtype of genocide, see Tama ra Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children:
Genocide, Indigenous Nations, and the Canadian State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2018).
18
Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
19
Payam Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law: Definition, Meaning, and the Ultimate Crime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012).
20
Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Web b , The Genocide Convention: The Travaux Préparatoires (2 vols) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1225.
21
This process is related in Gerald Roche, “Manufacturing Silence: Language Oppression, States, and the Drafting of the Genocide Convention,” Millennium: A
Journal of International Studies (forthcoming).
22
Abtahi and Webb, The Genocide Convention.
23
Abtahi and Webb, 736.
24
Abtahi and Webb, 1507.
25
Abtahi and Webb, 697.
26
Abtahi and Webb, 849.
27
Abtahi and Webb, 891.
28
Abtahi and Webb, 1298.
29
Abtahi and Webb, 1512–13.
30
For example, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Dunbar, Indigenous Children's Education as Linguistic Genocide and a Crime against Humanity? A Global
View (Guovdageaidnu: Gáldu, 2010).
31
Tov e Skutnabb-Kangas, “Linguistic Genocide – a Global Crime,” in Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek and
Fiona Greenland (London: Routledge, 2020), 58–75; Joshua James Zwisler, “Linguistic Genocide or Linguicide? A Discussion of Terminology in Forced Language
Loss,” Apples: Journal of Applied Language Studies 15,2 (2021), 43–7, https://doi.org/10.47862/apples.103419.
32
Ben Kiernan, “Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 20,4 (1988): 2–33,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1988.10412580.

'
33
Tim McNamara, “The Anti-Shibboleth: The Traumatic Character of the Shibboleth as Silence,” Applied Linguistics 41,3 (2020): 334–51,
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa007.
34
Nick Turse, Next time they'll come to count the dead: War and survival in South Sudan (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016).
35
Kamran Khan, “What Does a Terrorist Sound Like?” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, ed. H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V.
Kroskrity (2020), 398–422, 398.
36
Helen Fein, “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan: Links between Human Rights, Health, and Mass Death,” Health and
Human Rights (1997): 10–45, https://doi.org/10.2307/4065270.
37
Mark Levene, “The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A case study in the political economy of ‘creeping’ genocide,” Third World Quarterly 20,2 (1999): 339–69,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01436599913794.
38
Pauline Wak eh am, “The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the Long Emergency of Invasion,” Journal of Genocide Research 24,3
(2022): 337–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2021.1885571; Randle C. DeFalco, Invisible Atrocities (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022). Rob Nixon, Slow
Vio le nce and the Environmentalism of the Poor, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011); Philippe Bourgois, “Recognizing Invisible Violence: A Thirty-Yea r E t hn og r ap h ic
Retrospective,” in Global Health in Times of Violence, ed. Barbara Rylko-Bauer, Linda Whiteford, and Paul Farmer (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2009):
18–40.
39
Gerald Roche, “The Necropolitics of Language Oppression,” Annual Review of Anthropology 51 (2022): 31–47, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041420-
102158.
40
Benjamin Meiches, “On the loss of death: Necropolitics in the study of genocide,” in Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations,
ed. Caroline Alphin and François Debrix (London: Routledge, 2019), 51–67.
41
The Yoorrook Justice Commission (https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/) is a “formal truth-telling process into injustices” against Indigenous people in the
Australian state of Victoria.
42
Yoo r ro ok Ju s ti ce Co m mi ss i on , “Outline of Expected Evidence of Dr Aunty Vicki Couzens,” 28 March 2024, https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2024/03/BAL6.0001.0002.0001.pdf
43
Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their
Families (1997), https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/projects/bringing-them-home-report-1997.
44
Interview with David Tournier in Vicki Couzens, Christina Eira, and Tonya Stebbins, Tyama-teeyt yookapa: Interviews from the Meeting Point Project
(Melbourne: Vic tori an A bori gin al Cor pora tio n fo r L anguag es, 2014), 76.
45
Stan Grant, Tal ki ng t o m y Country (Sydney: Harper Collins), 8.

'
46
Malathi Michelle Iyengar, “Not mere abstractions: Language policies and language ideologies in US settler colonialism,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
& Society 3,2 (2014); Jane Griffith, “Of Linguicide and Resistance: Children and English Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Indian Boarding Schools in Canada,”
Paedagogica Historica 53,6 (2017): 763–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2017.1293700.
47
Salikoko Mufwene, “Colonisation, Globalisation, and the Future of Languages in the Twenty-First Century,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies 4,2
(2002): 162–93.
48
Wol fe , “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”
49
Lemkin 1944: 79.
50
This in no way implies that Indigenous people who speak English or other colonizer languages are in some way less Indigenous. As with many Indigenous
peoples elsewhere, First Nations people have created ways of maintaining their identities despite their languages and cultures being subjected to genocidal attacks.
Language revitalization thus aids in the reconstitution of the group in ways that are not limited to identity. This includes re-establishing relationships with country, as
explained by Aboriginal academic and educator Noeleen Lumby: “Our languages sit in a relationship to Country, and to understand and converse with Country, we
need to relearn our languages. This is our obligation and responsibility to our ancestors.” Noeleen Lumby, “The voice of country: Our obligation and responsibility
to listen,” in The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures, ed. Carlson Bronwyn, Madi Day, Sandy O’Sullivan and Tr istan Kennedy
(London: Routledge, 2022), 153–165, 162.
51
Henry C. Theriault, “Is denial the final stage of genocide? Consolidation, the metaphysics of denial, and the supersession of stage theory,” in Denial: The Final
Stage of Genocide?, ed. John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow (London: Routledge, 2021), 11–26, 19.
52
Theriault, “Is denial the final stage of genocide?”
53
Theriault, “Is denial the final stage of genocide?”, 20.
54
Robert Hudson and Shannon Wo od co ck , Self-determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation: The Keeping Place (London: Routledge, 2022).
55
Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy, “Indigenous language denialism in Australia,” Language on the Move (blog), 11 Nov ember 2020,
https://www.languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/.
56
The Australian, “Indigenous children will now be taught preschool in their own language,” Facebook, 13 July
2022, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10151817947394978&set=a.10150172022004978.
57
On the use of rhetorical fig leaves to launder hate, see Jennifer Saul, “What is happening to our norms against racist speech?,” in Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume 93,1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019), 1–23.
58
Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes (London: Granta, 2021). Patrick Brantlinger, Dark vanishings: Discourse on the extinction of primitive races, 1800–
1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2017).

'
59
Rogers Brubaker, “Between nationalism and civilizationism: The European populist moment in comparative perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40,8 (2017):
1191–226, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700. Jordan McSwiney, Eda Gunaydin, and Henry Maher, “Discourses of Western Civilisation in the
Australian Federal Parliament,” in Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia, ed. Evan Smith, Jayne Persian, and Vashti Jane Fox (London: Routledge,
2022), 218–34.
60
Sarah Dowling, “Elimination, dispossession, transcendence: Settler monolingualism and racialization in the United States,” American Quarterly 73,3 (2021):
439–60, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2021.0045.
61
Jane H. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Andrew Hartman, “Language as oppression: The English-only
movement in the United States,” Socialism and Democracy 17,1 (2003): 187–208.
62
Ingrid Piller, Hanna To rs h , and Laura Smith-Khan, “Securing the borders of English and Whiteness,” Ethnicities 23,5 (2023): 706–25,
https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211052610. Kamran Khan, “The securitisation of language borders and the (re)production of inequalities,” Te so l Qu ar t er ly 56,4
(2022): 1458–70, https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3186.
63
Vijay A. Ramjattan, “The white native speaker and inequality regimes in the private English language school,” Intercultural Education 30,2 (2019): 126–40,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2018.1538043. Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019). Jane H. Hill,
“Language, Race, and White Public Space,” American Anthropologist 100,3 (1998): 680–89, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680.
64
The figure of 440 comes from Claire Bowern, “How many languages are and were spoken in Australia?” in The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, ed.
Claire Bowern (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2023), 56–64. The figure of 123 comes from AIATSIS, Third National Indigenous Languages Survey (2019),
https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/current-projects/third-national-indigenous-languages-survey/NILS3-online.
65
These figures come from the First and Third National Indigenous Languages Survey. AIATSIS, First National Indigenous Languages Survey (2005),
https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/nils-report-2005.pdf, and AIATSIS, Third National Indigenous Languages Survey.
66
Robin Corey, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 4.
67
Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, and Jeopardy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).
68
Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, 7.
69
Hirschman, 7.
70
Hirschman, 7.
71
On the rise of online anti-woke discourses, see John Postill, The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars (New York:
Routledge, 2024).
72
Robert Manne, “In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right,” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).

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73
Dominic Kelly, Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia (Melbourne: La Trobe UP, 2019).
74
Jeremy Wal ke r, “Silencing the Voice: The fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s campaign against constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia,” Cosmopolitan
Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15,2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v15.i2.8813.
75
For an examination of such dynamics within the global Right, see Lydia Khalil, Rise of the Extreme Right (London: Penguin, 2022).
76
Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Wint er, Reactionary democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream (London: Ve rs o B o o k s, 2020).
77
Ahmar Mahboob, Britt Jacobsen, Melissa Kemble, and Zichen Catherine Xu, “Money for language: Indigenous language funding in Australia,” Current Issues
in Language Planning 18,4 (2017): 422–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2017.1331497.
78
Tony Barta, “Relations of genocide: Land and lives in the colonization of Australia,” in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass
Death, ed. Michael N. Wallimann and Isidor Dobkowski (Wes tp or t: Gr ee nwo od , 1987): 237–52.
79
Jean Paul Sartre, “Genocide,” New Left Review 48 (1968): 12–25, 14.
80
Clare Land, Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles (London: Zed Books, 2015).
81
Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019), 1.
82
Thalia Anthony et al., “30 years on: Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations remain unimplemented” (working paper, Centre for
Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), Australian National University, 2021).
83
Dechlan Brennan, “Disappointment as majority of Yoorrook recommendations rejected or not implemented in full,” National Indigenous Times, 3 April 2024,
https://nit.com.au/03-04-2024/10614/disappointment-as-majority-of-yoorrook-recommendations-rejected-or-not-implemented-in-full.
84
Bronwyn Carlson and Te rr i Farrelly, Monumental disruptions: Aboriginal people and colonial commemorations in so-called Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal
Studies Press, 2023).
85
Chelsea Wat ego, Another Day in the Colony (Queensland: U of Queensland P, 2021), 205.
86
Roche, “The Necropolitics of Language Oppression.”
87
Michael J. Chandler and Christopher Lalonde , “Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada's First Nations,” Transcultural Psychiatry 35,2 (1998):
191–219, https://doi.org/10.1177/136346159803500202.
88
D. H. Whalen, et al., “Health Effects of Indigenous language use and revitalization: A realist review,” International Journal for Equity in Health 21,1 (2002):
169, 9, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01782-6.
89
Gary Johns, The Burden of Culture: How to Dismantle the Aboriginal Industry and Give Hope to its Victims (Quadrant Books, 2022), 420.
90
See more about Close the Gap Research at https://closethegapresearch.org.au/about#gary-johns.

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91
Broadcasting Standards Authority, “Complaints that are unlikely to succeed,” https://www.bsa.govt.nz/complaints/complaints-that-are-unlikely-to-succeed.
92
Gerald Roche, “Don’t read the comments: The backlash against Indigenous language reclamation in Australia,” Meanjin 83,2 (2024): 80-89.