Symptoms of Sovereignty? Apologies, Indigenous Rights and Reconciliation in Australia and Canada

Abstract

This article engages in a comparative study of the “Apologies” to Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia that are part of efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples through reconciliation. I argue that, despite differences in context and government strategies surrounding the apologies, there is a “parallel of imaginative dispositions” in them that present a common set of “symptoms” characteristic of sovereignty in the modern state. Plying a version of sovereignty as unlimited, unchallengeable and monologic, the apologies re-enact an original injustice that ignored limits, challenges and multiplicities posed by the presence of indigenous peoples. In this way they undermine their reconciliatory intentions. Or do they? This grounding argument can be complicated in two ways: first, by considering the broader political and legal context of reconciliation in both nations, such that reconciliation can be seen as consistent with, and even necessary to, the assertion of state sovereignty, and second, by attending to the claim that the power of sovereignty is maintained by symbolic as well as material means, such that these symptoms are not conclusive.