AustLit

'Since the 1990s, the term “nation” for Indigenous Australian groups has emerged, along with an increasingly common phrase “First Nations,” used both by Indigenous groups in self-reference and by others in reference to them. This article examines the multiple sources of nation and its emergence in Australia as a contemporary form of Indigenous political discourse. Following a history of repeated dismissal of representative organizations by the Australian state, collective gains in recognition and legal visibility of Indigenous people, globally and nationally, have motivated a search for persuasive forms of organization that can command political authority between local social forms and governments, businesses, and other entities. Treaties are commonly understood as between distinct “nations,” but—notoriously—the Australian state did not negotiate treaties with Indigenous people. The emergence of “nation” is aspirational and double-sided: it responds to dominant Australian conditions and political demands but retains much that is distinctive of Aboriginal social process rather than erasing it in the socio-political innovation of nationhood. The rise of Australian Indigenous “nations,” recent and partial, sheds light both on persistence in Indigenous action and extension of governmental power into Indigenous domains—the “post-” of settler colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

'In this article, I examine the recent emergence in Australia of two small, and now regularly enacted, rituals: “Acknowledgments” and “Welcomes to Country.” These are expressions of recognition, or response to perceived neglect and injustice. Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other colonized and subordinated peoples, and includes practices of apology and reconciliation. In Australia, recognition implies expansion the of relationship between categories of people who have been on unequal, distant, and (at some levels) negligible terms as settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized. Practices of recognition are therefore ambiguous: What is to be recognized, and how is recognition to proceed? Here I consider these rituals and their putative origins, structure, content, variations, and affect of participants and audiences. Both rituals cast recognition in ways that continue recent decades of national emphasis on indigenous emplacement, judgments concerning originariness, and authenticity; “Welcomes” also recast relations in terms of a host–guest framework. The emergence of these rituals fosters new kinds of indigenous public expression and receptions of recognition as well as some standardization of both. It is an indication of change, as well as of its limits in indigenous–nonindigenous relationships.' (Publication abstract)