Introduction: Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Reconciliation, Recognition, Responsibility

Abstract

This book is the first in a new series devoted specifically to understanding and transforming Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world. The series aims to bring together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-settler relations series will focus sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally. The multi-faceted approach to Indigenous-settler relations that will define the series seeks to capture how questions of relationality are already being asked by scholars across disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, media, and cultural studies. As the first volume in the series, this book seeks to define this emerging field. In the chapters that follow, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors explore Indigenous-settler relations in terms of what the relational characteristics are, who steps into these relations and how, the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect, where these relations exist around the world and the variations the relations take on in different places, and why these relations are important for the examination of social and political life in the twenty-first century.