ABSTRACT
On 2 June 2020, 5,000 people turned out for the Black Lives Matter march in Newcastle’s Pacific Park. It was Reconciliation Week in Australia, 50 years on from those new social movements that would influence the struggle for autonomy and self-determination in Aotearoan New Zealand, Australian, and Canadian cities. The Black Power and Red Power movements of the late 1960s focused on creating economic, social, and political power of their own, rather than seeking integration into white-dominated society. Indigenous agency saw First Nations peoples contesting the legitimacy of the sovereign right during the late 1960s and 1970s and acting independently. For over 70 years, cities have been part of Indigenous social and political movements in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. First Nations peoples in cities have asserted their visions for self-determination on their own terms. Indigenous people have engaged in their nation-building endeavours for resurgence and community development.
The chapter returns to considerations introduced at the beginning of the book about how Indigenous invisibility in cities concerns the wilful inattentiveness to ongoing Indigenous disempowerment. It takes us to the history of race-based epistemologies deeply embedded in western ways of seeing what it means to be Indigenous in cities. It takes us to the history of seeing the urban Indigenous ‘other’ through a deficit, commodified, or objectified mainstream lens. It takes us to the inattentiveness of visibility and the act of ignoring, which takes us from the sociological to the epistemological. Wilful ignorance plays out in the epistemic positioning of First Nations peoples, who have relocated to cities, as an urban ‘other’ who is out of place – off-nation or off-reservation. Indigenous practices and ways of doing business in cities are myopically boxed in and interpreted through a western epistemological lens of whiteness.
