Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism

The prevalence of ‘scientific’ racism and social Darwinism in white colonial nations in the late nineteenth century ensured that indigenous peoples were regarded as an alien ‘other’ to national identities based on racism and progress. This outlook gradually changed over time with the aid of socio-historical understanding developed by indigenous and non-indigenous revisionist historians, academics and activists, which sought to explain past and present indigenous/settler relations by placing white colonial nation-states within a critical account of colonialism and racial discrimination. As white settler nations gradually began to accommodate a plurality of ethnic cultures and in that sense become more multicultural, politicians sought to construct national identities based on the imagery of ‘harmonious multiculturalism’. In settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, a significant political obstacle to this was the continued disquiet of indigenous populations. The emerging post-colonial challenge for politicians in such societies was to find a way to include indigenous people in the cultural fabric of the nation which would seem fair and appropriate and therefore serve a legitimising function for the settler state. Recently the now popular peacemaking language of ‘reconciliation’ has been the preferred rhetorical device for this endeavour in Canada and most notably in Australia. 1 1. See the Canadian government's ‘Statement of Reconciliation’ at http: //www. ainc-inac. gc. ca/gs/chgₑ. html#reconciliation and The National Day of Healing and Reconciliation (NDHR) which is ‘an initiative meant to effect healing and reconciliation among all races, creeds, and denominations now residing in Canada’ at http: //www. ayn. ca/ViewNews. aspx? id = 214. An enormous amount of material on Australian reconciliation is available from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's archive at http: //www. austlii. edu. au/au/other/IndigLRes/car/ The aim of this paper is to outline why two dominant understandings of reconciliation as an outcome that have emerged from post-conflict reconciliation processes would be inappropriate goals for a process concerned with genuinely legitimising an internal colonial situation. 2 2. Political scientist James Tully (2000: 39) defines internal colonialism as ‘the situation where the colonising society is built on the territories of the formerly free, and now colonised, people. The colonising or imperial society exercises jurisdiction over them and their territories and the indigenous peoples, although they comply and adapt, refuse to surrender their freedom of self-determination over their territories and continue to resist within the system as a whole as best they can. ’ It begins with a general introduction to the concept of reconciliation, discusses the context-specific problems with the dominant understandings and concludes by suggesting an approach to reconciliation which would genuinely decolonise an internal colonial situation.