Categories of Race in Australian Indigenous Peoples

This paper seeks to detail the ways in which, in Australia, rulers sought to shape conduct among racialized parts of the population by seeking to governmentalize the category of race, producing and managing 'mixed race' groups with specific effects for their communities, their children and their descendants. Liberal forms of government, including authoritarian forms of governing, were mixed with forms of bio-politics in ways that produced devastating effects on cultural and family ties into the present. The paper examines these sociological and historical events in the context of current escalating rates of incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia.