Pre-Colonial and Frontier Economies 7 What can the pre-colonial and frontier economies tell us about engagement with the real economy? Indigenous life projects and the conditions for development Nicolas Peterson Department of Archaeology and Anthropology Australian National University Recent writing on development coming from North America makes a distinction between Indigenous life projects and development projects. ‘Indigenous life projects’ refers to the desires of those Indigenous people who seek autonomy in deciding the meaning of their life independently of projects promoted by the state and market, and to people developing their own situation-based knowledge and practices in the contemporary world. As formulated by Mario Blaser (2004), these can involve partnerships and co-existences, where such are not denied by the encompassing society, and involve continuously emergent forms and resilience on the part of the Indigenous people. Such life projects in Indigenous Australia are rarely spontaneously or comprehensively formulated but rather partial, reactive to government policy and often internally contested, especially across the generations, within even the smallest communities. If elicited in responses to inquiries, their formulation is usually ad hoc and, if they are self-conscious and coherent, they are frequently formulated in a Christian context. Nevertheless, the drive to establish outstations is certainly one of the more widespread and easily identifiable of Indigenous life projects in remote Australia. A recurrent emphasis in almost all Indigenous life projects, even if the meaning is unclear, is with holding on to ‘culture’. The currents from the wider world surrounding the formation and instantiation of such life projects are complex and often contradictory. Holding on to culture can be challenged by the emergence of consumer dependencies and autonomy in deciding the trajectory of life projects may run up against many government policies and external pressures. Indigenous acceptance of a lower standard of living (for example, by operating in a hybrid economy, Altman 2001) 1 as the cost of increased autonomy and residing at valued remote places, can be politicised by others, resulting in unsought intervention. If the health and educational statistics are too discrepant from national standards, protest from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal supporters of Aboriginal rights, and even the international community, may result in demands for action by the state, regardless of local opinion. 2 The vulnerability of the state to accusations of discriminatory or inequitable treatment of the Indigenous minority, and the moral hazard for the state that is always present in even the most generous self-determination, means that some external pressures on Indigenous life projects are unlikely to go away until such time as people approach regional statistical equality and ultimately become no more dependent on the public purse than other people in the region. 3 It seems inevitable that in achieving such a situation, work, mainly in the form of selling labour, is going to be the lot of Aboriginal people as it is for the population at large. Most government-initiated development projects, Indigenous community plans, and statements of community needs, take the requirement for employment as a, if not the, central issue in a better future for remote communities. Currently this