Indigenous Pacifics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xix, 231 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7265-6.
In Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission, Laura Rademaker explores the role of translation in the interactions between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries and local people living in the Groote Eylandt archipelago in North Australia in the mid-twentieth century. The author argues that translation allows cross-cultural communication, but it can also be a tool to resist and contest claims of authority and legitimacy. Translation creates slippages and gaps in meaning that allow mistranslation and misinterpretation, which the Anindilyakwa people used to strategically manoeuvre in relation to the missionaries (3). Rademaker’s poignant and sometimes unsettling account of cross-cultural exchange reflects her ability and willingness to go beyond binary descriptions of the missionary-Indigenous encounter; it analyses the complex interactions created by people living in and around the mission station who were “both embedded in and … generative of” social relations (Paige West, Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, xv). This book provides insight into Australian history, colonialism, mission history, translation, and religion.
Rademaker opens her analysis with an example of mistranslation that helps frame her argument. The example she narrates is of the arrival of the first CMS missionary to encounter Anindilyakwa people in 1921. She relates how he came into the camp singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” As he greeted the people living there, he encouraged them to join him in singing the song, and asked for a spontaneous translation of the words into the vernacular. Reportedly, after he mimed the word “me” in the song, the people told him the Anindilyakwa word for “chest hair,” and he continued singing “Jesus loves my chest hair.” He later described this meeting as a humorous anecdote and example of how cross-cultural communication can go awry. However, it could also be seen as an example of the type of ambiguities that can arise as part of translating meaning from one language and way of life to another (1).
Rademaker organizes the book chronologically, while also pointing out the important concepts, events, and directions that emerged over time between the missionaries and Anindilyakwa people. Beginning with the history of Christian missions in Australia, her account focuses mainly on describing the interactions that arose after CMS missionaries established the Angurugu Mission Station in 1943. In the mission’s early days, the missionaries saw their ability to explain the Christian message as tied to the Indigenous people’s cultural assimilation to white Australia. In this project, they were supported by the Australian government. However, cultural assimilation impacted many aspects of Anindilyakwa life, such as their language, which was integral to their identity and connection to the land and their ancestors. As Rademaker says, “For Anindilyakwa people, the Anindilyakwa language was irreplaceable. Groote Eylandt’s songs, stories, and ceremonies belonged in Anindilyakwa from ‘the old days,’ and Anindilyakwa belonged in the mouths of its people” (59–60). The missionaries changed their approach in the 1970s, when they decided that they could best communicate their Christian message through the “heart languages” of the Indigenous people (127). They turned to linguistics to learn the vernacular, create an alphabet and literacy materials, and communicate their message to the Anindilyakwa people.
The later chapters reflect prominent areas of translation and mistranslation in the interactions of missionaries and local people: experiences of listening to others, attempts by missionaries to assert the legitimacy of their language in written form, the missionaries’ decision to interact in the vernacular (seen as beneficial by many missionaries and Anindilyakwa people, but also resisted by some), perceptions of authentic conversions (which often ignored how the Anindilyakwa had creatively and innovatively reworked Christian ideas into their own spiritual expressions), and the place of singing in Anindilyakwa appropriation and translation of the missionaries’ songs into local expressions that helped them “find new meanings and create Anindilyakwa Christianities” (170).
I found this book noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, Rademaker has produced a detailed and nuanced ethnographic account of the Anindilyakwa and missionary encounter. She not only interviewed and interacted with the Anindilyakwa people, but also gathered ethnographic data from current and former missionaries and government representatives. Making use of these diverse sources, Rademaker wove together the multiple narratives of the Anindilyakwa people and speakers of other languages of northern Australia, the missionaries and their supervisors in other places, and Australian government representatives.
Secondly, Rademaker eschews a purely “clash of cultures” explanation of the interaction between missionaries and the residents of Groote Eylandt (11). As she notes:
The dynamics of settler-colonialism must be recognized, but they do not explain everything. Overdependence on binaries—whether of colonizer and colonized, Aboriginal religion and Christianity, evangelists and evangelized—can limit the subjectivity of Indigenous people to either victimhood or resistance … and can cause us to overlook the variety and complexity of relationships and exchanges. (11)
The missionaries and the Anindilyakwa people impacted each other in ways they did not expect. In Rademaker’s view, the people she discusses were embedded in “a structural logic of settler-colonialism” who also “operated simultaneously with mutual agency and diversity” (11). In choosing to frame this situation in terms of translation and mistranslation, Rademaker describes “how colonizers and colonized … operated in dynamic, creative, sometimes even productive engagement with each other” (11). As Rademaker puts it, “Instead of a ‘colonization of consciousness,’ the mission was a site of dialogue, of cross-cultural flows, as Anindilyakwa people and missionaries each appropriated and translated the ideas and symbols of the other” (178). Within a context of unequal relationships, the Anindilyakwa people and the missionaries lived in a constant state of translation as they interacted together and influenced each other (xii).
David Troolin
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
Summer Institute of Linguistics, Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea