The name is absent

129

in the end, were crushed, and the continuing passive resistance
which both permitted survival and permitted a covert means of
rejection of white people.

(ɪɪ), Cultural resistance

(a) Adaptation

The Aboriginal people were a subject people forced to adjust
to white dominance. Some groups of Aboriginal people preserved
traditional structures by adapting to circumstances through covert
resistance.

Tonkinson (1974) describes how, at Jigalong, missionaries
*

were suffered. The Aboriginal people preserved their way of
life through adopting a stance of non-communication, a policy
of passive resistance.

Much of the anthropological literature is devoted to a study
of this process of adaptation. However, in situations where
the contact with white people was more prolonged, passive resistance
took the form of internalisation of a negative identity.

4b) Internalisation of negative identity

Lippmann documents the continuing resistance of Aboriginal

people to white dominance.

Though they could be said to be defeated in a military
sense, in spirit they never have been. They became
masters and mistresses of passive resistance and
have remained so. They instituted a regime of non-

co-operation, of silence, of lying and deliberate
ingratitude. Examples of small-scale defiance and
affronts to middle class mores in order to outrage
their captors were frequent and often successful
(Lippmann, 1981:28).

These measures of covert resistance acted not only to reject
white society; the Aboriginal people, as a form of protest, internalised
the negative identity offered to them by white society.

Fink speaks about alcoholism and of the institutionalization
of negative typifications as a form of resistance.

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