ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 is concerned with community empowerment directed at creating the conditions for de-alienation and participation in the life of cities in which First Nations peoples live. This is about how the social activism I described in Chapter 3 is also a political struggle for an Indigenous right to the city. The chapter turns to the concerted struggle for what French sociologist and philosopher Henry Lefebvre first coined as the Right to the City (1968). Lefebvre’s city is a place of human emancipation. It makes visible the localised, situated struggle that involved First Nations peoples’ active engagement in the exercising of their right to the city of Newcastle through reconciliation. The intent was to mobilise reconciliation to decolonise city spaces and redefine the relationships that structures the politics of self-determination. It does not analyse the extent to which reconciliation adheres to an ideal type of participation or recognition, or define reconciliation, but describes reconciliation in practice. The chapter continues to examine how Indigenous resurgence is a practical, grounded mode of being and resistance.
