Cultural Guardianship and Contested Belonging: Rethinking Lateral Violence Through Aboriginal Identity in Tasmania

Lateral violence is widely used to describe harm within Indigenous communities, but the concept assumes that the people involved recognise one another as members of the same group. This article asks what happens to the concept when that recognition is itself contested. Drawing on forty-one semi-structured interviews with Tasmanian Aboriginal descendants, this article has three objectives: to describe the forms identity policing takes in Tasmania, to identify the historical and institutional factors that produce it, and to introduce cultural guardianship as a way of understanding it. In a setting shaped by genocide, passing, cultural disconnection and uneven documentary records, participants described having their Aboriginality questioned, often by other Aboriginal people. In response, I developed the concept of cultural guardianship: a protective stance from which a person may understand identity policing as defending community and identity, while the person targeted experiences it as exclusion, aggression or violence. Cultural guardianship does not displace lateral violence; it extends the analysis to situations where group membership is disputed. Experiences in Tasmania demonstrate how colonial regimes of classification continue to shape conflicts over recognition, and how protective intent and harmful effect can coexist in the same act.