ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways in which Aboriginal recognition has been attached to the project of national reconciliation since the early 1990s. The idea of the Australian nation is indeed problematic for Aboriginal peoples, and postcolonial scholars have widely critiqued the emphasis on post-colonial nation building in the Australian reconciliation process, variously charging it with being assimilative of Aboriginal alterity and more concerned with settler desires than Indigenous needs. This chapter argues that appeals to nation should not be seen as innately incompatible with Aboriginal cultural difference, but rather an indispensable and politically productive vocabulary for Indigenous claims. Ideas of national identity and culture constitute a critical dimension of Aboriginal experiences of misrecognition. Moreover, unsettling national terms of association are particularly pertinent for Aboriginal claims, because they require settler Australians to acknowledge historical wrongs and the validity of Indigenous perspectives. I demonstrate that nation can be as much a political category as an ideological one with reference to the 2008 federal government apology to the Stolen Generations. Even as an increasing number of critical voices have argued that full Indigenous justice requires recognition of sovereignty, I suggest that appeals to a national ‘we’ continue to have political and rhetorical significance.
