'Staying with the State': prefiguring capacities for change within Indigenous social policy

This chapter argues the importance of ‘staying with the state’, of understanding its presence ethnographically, from within the thick of prosaic settings. It takes as a core problem that remediation efforts in Indigenous social policy are continually ineffective, despite the enlarged bureaucratic presence in everyday Indigenous affairs. ‘Staying with the state’ clearly borrows from Donna Haraway’s ‘Staying with the trouble’ (2016), and her call to actively resolve the ecocidal challenges we are surrounded by, even as we cannot propose mastery over the challenges we face. Understanding the omnipresence of bureaucratic formations in Indigenous-other relations in under continuing liberal settler occupation in Australia requires a similar analysis of the human-made governance systems we are embedded within. This is not a naïve call which ignores the military-industrial interests which state-driven policies best serve, or the potential for harm within interventions intended for good. Instead, I argue for a foundational relationship between Indigenous social policy effects and military-industrial interests, as these wend through everyday settler colonial life. As imbricated processes, administrative violence, bureaucratic inveiglement, and militarily-defended extractivism underpin liberal settler continuance. Even so, given settler-colonial norms are not disappearing from policy foundations any time soon, I explore what might be demanded from the settler state in the here and now.