Reconciliation, indigeneity, and postcolonial nationhood in settler states

Abstract

In the Commonwealth settler states of Australia, New Zealand and Canada 'reconciliation' became a key political term at the turn of the twenty-first century. The use of such a term to herald a new relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in these countries may strike many as surprising since none of these states have experienced revolutionary or state violence in the recent past. This development might appear to be all the more remarkable since reconciliation in the context of the three settler states does not connote a dramatic democratization as it has done in South Africa, the country most commonly associated with the term. Nonetheless, reconciliation did become a useful term in Australia, New Zealand and Canada for marking shifts in the terms and expressions of national affect, particularly in regard to the injustices suffered by indigenous people in those countries' colonial pasts and the need for acknowledgement of and reparation for those injustices in the present.In this article, I argue that what reconciliation in those countries denotes might also be considered as a kind of postcolonial nationhood in settler states. This is a peculiar form of nationhood in which the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous, primarily white, settlers bears symbolic significance for how the state reckons with the colonial past in bringing about a postcolonial future. That relationship even frames how state representatives describe the incorporation of new immigrants who are neither indigenous nor white into the contemporary multicultural nation.Postcolonial nationhood in settler states is not dependent upon an actual shift in indigenous peoples' access to, or representation by, state power. Rather the state is still, in the three countries under consideration here, primarily a 'settler' one. There has been neither a revolutionary rupture with the settler colonial past nor a dramatic shift in the balance of power to indigenous minorities. Instead, what has happened through the affective phrasing of reconciliation is that the authority of the settler state has been cast away from the former imperial metropole and localized in terms of more indigenous claims of political belonging.Here, I discuss the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's official apology to indigenous Australians as an example of the politics of reconciliation in action. Although the apology was in many respects an exceptional event, it also compares with and even connects to similar instances in the other Commonwealth settler states where apologies and

Making space for reconciliation in the planning system

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Reflection, Acknowledgement, and Justice: A Framework for Indigenous-Protected Area Reconciliation

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Governing (in)security in a postcolonial world: Transnational entanglements and the worldliness of ‘local’ practice

“…While this notion is frequently used to describe to those spaces that became independent nation states governed by the formerly colonized indigenous population, we argue that postcolonial relations also characterizes the relationship between indigenous people and Creole elites, as, for example, in Latin America, as well as those between indigenous populations and the majority of the society in settler colonies inside 'the West', like North America, Australia and New Zealand. In the latter cases, colonial settler societies that gained political independence continue to marginalize and discriminate against indigenous populations, inscribing postcolonial relations into liberal-democratic states that are marked by ongoing struggles over rights and recognition of indigenous groups (Grossman and Sparks, 2005;Johnson, 2011) Western-centrism that informs much of the related literature on these interventions, it is first of all important to sensitize SS to the ways colonial and imperial encounters shaped the knowledge, institutions and practices involved in the governance of (in)security at home and abroad, thereby making visible the entangled transnational histories of postcolonial (in)security governance.…”