Introduction: Public Policy and Indigenous Futures

Abstract

AbstractThis volume is driven by a question over whether public policy, rendered as ‘Indigenous affairs’, can be motivated by Indigenous futurity, rather than the eliminatory desire of settler colonialism. The project of securing a future for settlers is always predicated on the replacement of Indigenous peoples and the theft of Indigenous land; the reality that ‘Indigenous affairs’ largely does not elevate Indigenous rights and wellbeing suggests that the settler state is in fact achieving what it sets out to do. ‘Indigenous affairs’—as a mode of colonial governance—problematises the Indigenous subject in order to incapacitate Indigenous collectivities. The history of state ‘failure’—of targets missed, of underfunding, of violence, of racism, of precarity—does not manifest as a surprising and unintended consequence of colonial policy. Political contests are fought over the future as much as they are determined by the past, and so the practice of failure simply moves the desired state of Indigenous vanishment back in time to the present. A particular version of an Indigenous future is always present in settler colonial Indigenous policy, and this is and always has been fought by Indigenous peoples who have a different relationship with both the past and the present.KeywordsSocial policyGovernanceDecolonizationSelf-determinationClosing the gap