"Reconcilation, indigeneity and postcolonial nationhood in settler states" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Studies in Social Justice, 2018
This article examines the British colonial theft of Indigenous sovereignty and the particular obstacles that it presents to establishing just social relations between the colonizer and the colonized in settler states. In the first half, I argue that the particular nature of the crime of sovereign theft makes apologies and reparations unsuitable policy tools for reconciliation because Settler societies owe their very existence to the abrogation of Indigenous sovereignties. Instead, Settler states ought to return sovereignty to the land's Indigenous peoples. In the second half of this paper, I take up some of the practical questions of how this might be done and anticipate a number of objections. Giving up sovereignty would not mean dispossessing the millions of colonists who currently reside in these countries of their homes and propertybut it does mean rethinking the constitutional makeup of a country and how that serves to benefit the different peoples who make their homes there.
In Australia, dominant framings of indigenous recognition are bound up with the politics of reconciliation, wherein the recognition of Aboriginal difference is seen as part and parcel of the process of reconciling indigenous and settler Australians as equal parties in the nation. It is this focus on ‘building national community’ that has compelled some of the most strident critiques of reconciliation, with a number of critics arguing that community is a conservative trope employed to absorb – and thereby render impotent – indigenous difference and political claims. Reading through the 2008 Stolen Generations apology, I suggest that while such critiques offer an important caution to the possibilities of reconciling community in settler colonial contexts, ‘national community’ need not be seen as an inherently conservative and assimilatory motif. Like Andrew Schaap’s (2004) distinction between ‘reconciliation as ideology’ and ‘reconciliation as politics’, ‘nation-building’ may be either ideological or political, but it is not necessarily one or the other. While the apology is now widely-agreed to have only been a partial act of recognition, failing in its mandate in many instances, I argue that its failings were not rooted in its foregrounding of the ‘reconciled’ national ‘we’. To the contrary, I argue that the apology’s failings were tied to the fact that the Australian state was portrayed as a neutral arbiter in the relations of recognition – when in fact it, like all states, has a deep investment in the processes of identity-making. In this regard, it is not the employment of nation as a rubric for community-building that compromised the apology as an act of recognition, but rather the unwillingness or inability of the Australian state to tussle with its own identity as part of the reconciliation process.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN SETTLER STATES
The Routledge Handbook of Self-Determination and Secession, 2023
Indigenous peoples, sometimes known collectively as the “fourth world,” have endured hardships during centuries of colonialism. Currently, 40% of the world’s countries contain Indigenous nations, who collectively comprise 476 million people, or 6% of the global population, and 19% of the extreme poor (World Bank 2022). While Indigenous peoples have been systematically marginalized in settler states, they have organized collectively to promote their inherent rights, domestically, across borders, and internationally through regional organizations and the United Nations. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007) is a testament to many decades of deliberation, negotiation, and consensus decision-making, laying out a minimum standard of Indigenous rights. This chapter focuses on western settler states: Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand (collectively the CANZUS states). While self-determination and independent sovereign statehood often flow together, this Westphalian option is rarely requested by Indigenous peoples. Rather, the UNDRIP facilitates alternative expressions of self-determination that comprise (inter alia) forms of internal autonomy, input into decision-making within the state, the right to free prior and informed consent, treaty making and full participation in international organi-zations, and freer movement across state borders. The UNDRIP can play an important role in guaranteeing these and other inherent Indigenous rights, if it is recognized and implemented by settler states.
Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2005
The prevalence of ‘scientific’ racism and social Darwinism in white colonial nations in the late nineteenth century ensured that indigenous peoples were regarded as an alien ‘other’ to national identities based on racism and progress. This outlook gradually changed over time with the aid of socio-historical understanding developed by indigenous and non-indigenous revisionist historians, academics and activists, which sought to explain past and present indigenous/settler relations by placing white colonial nation-states within a critical account of colonialism and racial discrimination. As white settler nations gradually began to accommodate a plurality of ethnic cultures and in that sense become more multicultural, politicians sought to construct national identities based on the imagery of ‘harmonious multiculturalism’. In settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, a significant political obstacle to this was the continued disquiet of indigenous populations. The emerging post-colonial challenge for politicians in such societies was to find a way to include indigenous people in the cultural fabric of the nation which would seem fair and appropriate and therefore serve a legitimising function for the settler state. Recently the now popular peacemaking language of ‘reconciliation’ has been the preferred rhetorical device for this endeavour in Canada and most notably in Australia.1 The aim of this paper is to outline why two dominant understandings of reconciliation as an outcome that have emerged from post-conflict reconciliation processes would be inappropriate goals for a process concerned with genuinely legitimising an internal colonial situation.2 It begins with a general introduction to the concept of reconciliation, discusses the context-specific problems with the dominant understandings and concludes by suggesting an approach to reconciliation which would genuinely decolonise an internal colonial situation.
Foreword to _Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence_
https://www.dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous Elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 formal acknowledgement of a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization. Contributors. René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile
Settler Colonialism and the Consolidation of Canada in the 20th Century
Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, 2016
From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, settler colonialism in Canada has been characterized by the ongoing consolidation of state sovereignty around its assertion of radical underlying title to Indigenous lands. Accordingly, Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism has focused to a significant extent on the state as the central apparatus of colonial imposition and dispossession. From court cases that have challenged the legal basis of Canada's definitions and justifications of territorial sovereignty to iconic struggles over land between Indigenous people and state policing and military forces, the institutions and apparatus of the state have been a major focus of resistance and negotiation. Most Indigenous peoples understand state governments to be a primary source of colonial suffering, giving rise to the question, 'Is the Crown at war with us?' Likewise, in the face of resistance, settler Canadians have traditionally looked to governments to 'fix' what has come to be known as the 'Indian problem'. While it is undeniable that the Canadian state has been a primary opponent of Indigenous peoples throughout the twentieth century, in this chapter we demonstrate that settler colonisation has been driven cooperatively by non-state actors working in partnership with the state or, in some cases, prefiguring state law and policy by preemptively claiming land and infringing on Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood. We identify and examine three key domains of settler colonialism within Canada: the state, the public and corporate-institutional partnerships. Within these domains, we find three specific processes of settler colonialism: the transition from a state policy of assimilation and erasure to one of multicultural 'recognition' and management of difference , the intensification of resource extraction and emerging narratives of 'development', and state-church partnerships leading to the implementation of the Indian Residential School system.
Anti-racist attempts to conceptualize Indigenous decolonial justice are preoccupied with the contested relationship between immigrant settlement and Indigenous self-determination. In the process, an ethically and politically driven practice of implicating immigrants onto the settler colonial project has emerged. Paying particular attention to the emerging concept of ‘immigrant settlerhood’ as a sign of severing of political economic considerations from theories of settler nationalism, I advocate for a comprehensive and concrete analysis that does not lose sight of the capitalist colonial project of simultaneous dispossession (of Indigenous people) and precarious incorporation/resettlement (of immigrants). Next, since notions of sovereignty primarily enact the conditions for exploitation of immigrants and impale them onto the settler project via anti-racist claims, I reflect on ‘no border’ politics as a conceptual tool for confronting settler colonialism. Finally, considering the centrality of land/place in Indigenous self-determination I reflect on the possibility of a ground between Indigenous rootedness and diasporic placelessness. This essay thus makes an attempt to conceptualize an anti-racist politics that could meaningfully respond to the settler colonial project of simultaneous recruitment/resettlement (of immigrants) and dispossession (of Indigenous people) without casting social justice demands of Indigenous peoples and migrants as inherently oppositional.
The Nation-State Law: Negotiating Liberal Settler Colonialism
Critical Times, 2021
In this intervention, I situate the Nation-State Law within the context of law- making in Israel, reading it in relation to Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948), the Law of Return (1950), the Citizenship Law (1952), and the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992). In doing so, I make the argument that the Nation-State Law should be read as part of a wider history of negotiating a liberal Israeli settler colonialism—a term coined by Shira Robinson. I offer a reading of the Nation-State Law that demonstrates how racial liberalism—liberalism that, in the context of settler colonialism, has been predicated on colonial and racial (and gendered) exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples—in its different iterations stands at the heart of the Israeli settler-colonial project. I argue that the Nation-State Law, like Israeli law more generally, reflects a continuous process of reconciling a desired form of Israeli racial liberalism with settler colonialism. The racial hierarchy enshrined in the Nation-State Law is thus neither an anomaly nor an aberration: it is integral to an Israeli racial liberalism endemic to the settler-colonial project.
Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation
2016
With this book, Edmonds reconfigures reconciliation and provides a riven space of possible new futures. She brings together a telling, transnational panopl y of performances, art and actions that reveal the powerful and enduring effects of these mostly Indigenous acted and inspired events. There is a profound purpose here: to reconsider the rich history of defiant and conciliating acts within colonialism and to create a space for a different order of national justice. A paradigm changing contribution to postcolonial thinking.