KIM SCOTT's That Deadman Dance (2010), by the authors’ own admission at the end of the novel, is a part-fictional, part-historical account of relations between the whites and the Noongar people during the early settlement era (the first decades of the nineteenth century) in Albany, Western Australia. The relationship, as stated in the novel, began on a note of friendship, camaraderie, and naïve, open acceptance. But, such an approving companionship eroded owing to the colonizer's racist bigotry, assimilationist tendencies, and capitalist exploitations. Further instrumental in creating an irreparable rift in the relationship were the greed that sprang from the ideologies of making a modern white nation and the repressive state authorities who institutionalized coercive methods to control “native problems” (a phrase habitually used by white colonizers of Australia to refer to the unwanted Aboriginal presence in the expansion of frontier settlement). The novel is also about the struggle of the Noongars, who from the beginning try to hold tight to their culture and ethnicity while sampling Western ways. The Noongars in the novel take recourse to and adopt appropriative methods when the gross, violent program of promoting the white nation-state slowly marginalizes them; as a result, the Noongar bulwark their identity against the white outsiders. Scott documents the Noongars’ desperate efforts to survive culturally and maintain an ethnic identity and ethnic nation within the foundation period of a white modern nation.