Australia's First Nations

• Published in: American Anthropologist
• Main Author: Merlan, Francesca Cordelia
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2022
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/aman.13694; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/aman.13694; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full-xml/10.1111/aman.13694; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/aman.13694

Abstract Since the 1990s, the term “nation” for Indigenous Australian groups has emerged, along with an increasingly common phrase “First Nations,” used both by Indigenous groups in self‐reference and by others in reference to them. This article examines the multiple sources of nation and its emergence in Australia as a contemporary form of Indigenous political discourse. Following a history of repeated dismissal of representative organizations by the Australian state, collective gains in recognition and legal visibility of Indigenous people, globally and nationally, have motivated a search for persuasive forms of organization that can command political authority between local social forms and governments, businesses, and other entities. Treaties are commonly understood as between distinct “nations,” but—notoriously—the Australian state did not negotiate treaties with Indigenous people. The emergence of “nation” is aspirational and double‐sided: it responds to dominant Australian conditions and political demands but retains much that is distinctive of Aboriginal social process rather than erasing it in the socio‐political innovation of nationhood. The rise of Australian Indigenous “nations,” recent and partial, sheds light both on persistence in Indigenous action and extension of governmental power into Indigenous domains—the “post‐” of settler colonialism.