4 - Indigenous Citizenship and Self-determination: The Problem of Shared Responsibilities

Summary

In their recent review of academic studies of citizenship, Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman argue that although citizenship is a status to which not only entitlements but also responsibilities attach, entitlements have been of disproportionate interest to theorists of citizenship. In particular, ‘the left has not yet found a language of responsibility that it is comfortable with, or a set of concrete policies to promote these responsibilities’.

In Australia it seems gratuitous to spell out the responsibilities of indigenous Australians as citizens. Perhaps those responsibilities are no more and no less than the responsibilities of all Australian citizens. Or perhaps there are distinct indigenous responsibilities, just as many people would argue that there are distinct indigenous entitlements, such as native title. Perhaps there are ways in which indigenous Australians, as the original and colonised people, have fewer responsibilities as citizens. Whichever way you begin to look at the matter, it is easier to criticise a residual colonialism for failing to actualise indigenous citizenship entitlements than to write of the responsibilities of indigenous Australian citizens.

Yet our understanding of the contemporary forms of Australian citizenship is impoverished if we do not ask what responsibilities are implied in indigenous citizenship. The notion of indigenous self-determination entails a proposition about distinct indigenous citizenship responsibilities: indigenous people are responsible (though not exclusively) for the reproduction of their indigenous social order.