The Absurd Proposition of Aboriginal Sovereignty (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reconciliation, Aboriginal Rights and Constitutional Paradox in Australia
Austl. Feminist LJ, 2001
As Australia celebrates the centenary of the Federation of its colonial states to form a Commonwealth in 1901, the status of its indigenous peoples remains a constitutional paradox and a moral flaw at the heart of the nation. Australia is unique among former British colonies in never ...
Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Democratic Paradox
The politics of radical democracy, 2009
Against Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe insists that there is no necessary conceptual relation between democracy and human rights but only a contingent historical relation. Moreover, these principles are fundamentally irreconcilable: while democracy presupposes an historical act of exclusion in the political constitution of a demos, human rights presupposes a universally inclusive moral community. In this paper I examine whether a commitment to radical democracy requires that we affirm Mouffe’s account of the democratic paradox. In order to consider what is at stake politically in this philosophical debate, I consider its implications in relation to the claim for Aboriginal Sovereignty advanced by activists at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia. I agree with Mouffe that to understand human rights and democracy as ‘co-original’ in the way that Habermas proposes is potentially to domesticate radical political speech and action that would fundamentally contest the terms of political association. Against Mouffe, however, I suggest that to identify democracy with an exclusive political identification and human rights with an inclusive moral cosmopolitanism, is to remain caught within the terms of liberal ideology.
Australian 'Aboriginal' Reconciliation: The Latest Phase in the Colonial Project 1
Citizenship Studies, 2003
In the 1990s several countries that had been divided by episodes of mass violence or gross human rights violations instigated projects of national 'reconciliation'. Reconciliation initiatives sought to provide an alternative to traditional state diplomacy and realpolitik by focusing on restoring and rebuilding relationships in novel and context sensitive ways that promoted state legitimacy, forgiveness and social stability. In 1991 the Australian parliament unanimously passed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act, which heralded the start of a process of reconciliation between the indigenous peoples and wider society. The Preamble to the Act founded the need for a reconciliation process on the injustice of colonial dispossession and on the continuing dispersal of indigenous people from their traditional lands. Yet, as this paper will show, the notion of 'justice' was deemed inappropriate from the start, and the resulting process was framed in a nation building discourse that placed a definite ceiling on indigenous aspirations. This paper seeks to demonstrate that, far from being a genuine attempt at atonement that is responsive to indigenous aspirations, Official Reconciliation exhibits a subtle, yet pervasive, assimilationist agenda, and consequently the process should be understood as but the latest phase in the colonial project. The paper will conclude by suggesting a de-colonising approach to reconciliation that addresses the problem of internal colonisation and which more closely reflects indigenous aspirations.
2010
As a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972, demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992, Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper, we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.
Confounded by Recognition: The Apology, the High Court and the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia
In this chapter we seek to draw out some of the more agonistic (and antagonistic) dimensions of the demand for recognition by looking at the politics surrounding the two identity-based harms tangled up in the reconciliation debate in Australia: the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty. As it unfolded in the 1990s, the reconciliation process gradually became identified with the tragedy of the 'Stolen Generations' and the poverty of the official response to the findings of the a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. When the newly elected Rudd government finally delivered the apology in February 2008, therefore, it was officially hailed as the crowning achievement of the reconciliation process.In principle revelations about the forced removal of Aboriginal children provided a perfect opportunity to focus critical attention upon the identity-making practices of the Australian state: the history of strategic attempts to incorporate the Indigenous peoples of the territory into the Australian nation as citizens. Ironically, however, the apology presumptively addressed Indigenous people as members of the nation, passing over the fact that it was precisely the attempt to turn them into 'fellow Australians' that was responsible for the tragedy of the Stolen Generations. It is this ongoing inability on the part of the Australia state to properly acknowledge the underlying connection between its own pursuit of identity and the damage inflicted upon the identity of others that provides the critical impetus for our examination of the struggle for the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty. Turning our attention to the High Court case of Coe v Commonwealth and the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra, we highlight the way claims for Aboriginal sovereignty press the Australian state to confront the deeper sources of misrecognition in its own desire for unity and sovereign control. Paradoxically, we suggest, it is when the Australian state is forced to acknowledge the failure of its own identity and the project of identity-making, that it can begin to do justice to others.
Negotiating Sovereignty: Aboriginal Perspectives on a Settler-Colonial Constitution, 1975-1983
2016
In contrast to settler colonial legal understandings of Aboriginal rights and title as existing within the Canadian state, BC Aboriginal political actors in the 1970s and 1980s relied on philosophical notions of Aboriginal rights as stemming from the inherent, pre-colonial sovereignty and nationhood of First Nations peoples. These concepts run throughout the history of Aboriginal experience and remained foundational to the discourse of Aboriginal sovereignty in British Columbia during debates surrounding the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Existing Canadian historiography has located Aboriginal activists as key and yet marginal figures in the constitutional debates, while a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship has helped us understand the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty in theory. Building on these insights, our work shifts Aboriginal people into the foreground and emphasizes their centrality in the patriation debates, which, as an example, grounds and historicize...
The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which ‘reconciliation’ needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments’ apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology’s commentary.
Aboriginal Recognition: Treaties and Colonial Constitutions, ‘We Have Been Here Forever … ’
Bond Law Review, 2018
Excerpt: I have been asked by the editors of this special edition of the Bond Law Review, themed 'The Law and Politics of Control and Power' , to reflect upon the significance and legacy of the Commonwealth of Australia's 1967 referendum. I will do this from a critical First Nations stand point. In doing this I acknowledge the efforts of those people who worked on bringing about the 1967 referendum, in the hope that it would provide relief to the critical position of First Nations peoples at the time. The approach I take, or the stand point from which I speak, is centred by and in relationship to the ruwe of my ancestors: the Tanganekald, Meintangk and Boandik Peoples of the SouthEast of South Australia.