White Paternalisms, Authenticities, and Deficits: Visitor Responses to Indigenous Cultural Tourism in Australia’s Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

This article uses ethnographic methods such as visitor interviews to explore how whiteness and race-based stereotypes operate as established norms within the discourses of some visitors who travel to protected areas such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory to encounter Aboriginal cultural heritage. Some visitors’ ideas of Aboriginality are associated with narratives of authenticities and deficits, arising in the assumed right to judge and classify Aboriginal peoples that is a prerogative of whiteness. However, the idea of authenticity does not only manifest in culturally damaging ways in the Indigenous tourism context. As a concept with multiple dimensions, it also encompasses visitors’ desire for Indigenous cultural tourism that is authoritative because it is developed, delivered, and controlled by Aboriginal peoples themselves. Authenticity can thus have a decolonizing impetus by supporting the role of Aboriginal peoples as the authorities on their own lives, cultures, and histories