Indigenous Exclusion Research Articles

The Politics of Indigenous Exclusion in Australia and New Zealand

In both Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples have called for alternative non-colonial political arrangements. In October 2023, Australians voted in a referendum against distinctive Indigenous participation in public policymaking, which had been proposed as a step toward a more inclusive political system. On the same day, New Zealand elected a new Parliament, leading to the formation of a government comprising three parties that had campaigned against what they saw as excessive Māori political influence. Comparing these developments and the histories of the two countries raises questions about liberal equality, democratic citizenship, and whether all or just some citizens should own the liberal democratic state.

A Bandage on A Broken System: Moving Beyond Peremptory Challenges To Increase Indigenous Juror Representation In Canada

In 2016, Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Indigenous man, was fatally shot by Gerald Stanley, a white farmer. Stanley was later acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter by an all-white jury. Peremptory challenges became the major legal focus, with the all-white jury attributed to the defense attorney’s peremptory dismissal of five Indigenous individuals from the final jury panel. Following a raucous public debate, just two months after Stanley’s acquittal, Canada’s Government quickly introduced Bill C-75, eliminating peremptory challenges. While some legal actors view the ban on peremptory challenges as a step toward improving Indigenous juror participation, others argue that this elimination decreases Indigenous representation. As the insular debate endures, it continues to distract from numerous substantial issues with more profound implications on Indigenous juror representation. Through an analysis of the Jury Acts of Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, this Article highlights how provincial jury pool selection and summoning policies continue to encourage Indigenous exclusion. For more representative juries, Canada must move past peremptory challenges and acknowledge that sustained efforts made in partnership with Indigenous communities are desperately needed. Examples are offered of structurally-oriented, deeper reform actions to begin the process of addressing root causes of white-washed criminal juries in Canada.

Inside and Outside the Body Politic: Fortress Australia, Europe, and Spain

ABSTRACT Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffatt’s 3-minute short Vigil, part of her My Horizon show at the 2017 Art Biennale in Venice, captures the increasing fear, hysteria and obsession regarding the borders of Australian national identity in the new millennium. Moffatt’s interest in Asian asylum seekers and refugees ties her critique of immigrant control into Indigenous exclusion, both of which define what is known as Fortress Australia. Taking the Australian particulars as its lead, this paper looks at the xenophobic rhetoric and practice that characterize so-called Fortress Europe, which rejects immigration and clamps down on its native minorities’ claims for sovereignty. It narrows the analysis down to Fortress Spain, whose policies of exclusion affect immigrants as well as Peninsular ethnic minorities, such as Catalonia. In using Moffatt’s video as a lead, this paper calls on art and literature as powerful means to unpack and rewrite identity from the margins of the nation.

Indigenous learning gaps and home language instruction: New evidence from PISA-D

Even though Indigenous exclusion in education is well understood, there is a lack of comparable evidence across-regions on the extent of the learning gap and challenges faced by Indigenous students and, in turn, which policies may mitigate them. In this paper, I use the new PISA-D learning survey for seventh grade students and I first estimate the learning gap of Indigenous students in Guatemala, Paraguay, Senegal, and Zambia through quantile treatment effects and, then, I assess whether earlier literacy exposure in the mother-tongue language can help towards lessening achievement gaps for Indigenous students. After accounting for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students background differences, I found that the unexplained learning gap can be substantially reduced and turn out to be insignificant if Indigenous students had previous exposure to home language at primary school, especially for low achievers. Thus, school policies providing learning skills in the home language could be an important leveller when transition to the main language at later education stages, boosting equity in line with equity targets of the sustainable development agenda.

A colonized COP: Indigenous exclusion and youth climate justice activism at the United Nations climate change negotiations

Youth activists around the world are demanding urgent climate action from elected leaders. The annual United Nations climate change negotiations, known as COPs, are key sites of global organizing and hope for a comprehensive approach to climate policy. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews at COP25 in 2019, this research examines youth climate activists’ priorities, frustrations and hopes for creating just climate policy. Youth are disillusioned with the COP process and highlight a variety of ways through which the COP perpetuates colonial power structures that marginalize Indigenous peoples and others fighting for justice. This is intersectional exclusion – the character of exclusion experienced by people with multiple intersecting marginalized identities. We demonstrate that the space, policies and even the social movement organizing at COP25 are exclusive, necessitating new ways of negotiating, building relationships, and imagining climate solutions that centre Indigenous communities, and protect and return to them the lands on which they depend. As the youth climate justice movement grows, attending to Indigenous priorities will help it transform, rather than reinforce, the systems at the root of climate crisis and to challenge existing policymaking structures.

Imperious Temptations: Democratic Legitimacy and Indigenous Consent in Canada

AbstractCanadian courts and governments increasingly invoke principles of mutual consent and nation-to-nation negotiation as central to the goal of addressing colonial injustices in a democratic society. However, Canada continues to interpret its obligations according to the Crown's fiduciary obligation to merely consult and accommodate Aboriginal peoples on infringement of their rights. In this article, I argue that there are conceptual resources available within existing Canadian law and politics for reconstructing a democratic consensual resolution to the problem of Indigenous exclusion and dispossession. I demonstrate that meeting the basic threshold of mutual consent would first require Canadian institutions to abjure the imperious temptation to impose parochial standards of free, prior and informed consent. Second, the Crown would refuse to ensnare Indigenous communities in unconscionable bargains, agreements that they would not otherwise view as reasonable, fair or equitable. And finally, Canada would accept rights of jurisdiction over land rooted in vital relations of health and well-being, as well as a corollary right of refusal or veto over decisions deemed by affected parties to be unwanted.

Social ignorance and Indigenous exclusion: public voices in the province of Quebec, Canada

This article explores the mobilization of ignorance to uphold and perpetuate settler privilege and domination in the public voice record generated by the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation, held in Quebec, Canada from February 2007 to May 2008. The Commission was a provincially funded inquiry into how the public felt about accommodating ethnocultural deviance from an assumed norm. Focused primarily on recent immigrant difference, Aboriginal accommodation, Aboriginality and Aboriginal rights were deliberately excluded from the Commission's purview, yet they are suggestively apparent in the public display and performance of ignorance in the briefs received by the Commission. The role of the intellectual elite in shaping and perpetuating ignorance is clear in the interplay between the Commission parameters established by Bouchard and Taylor and the public response to those parameters. In this article, we theorize ignorance and its role in reinforcing colonial logics; discuss the Commission's work; analyse the written briefs submitted to the Commission; discuss the Commission's final report; and reflect on the personal and collective dynamics of ignorance and its consequences for settler–Aboriginal relations. Ignorance is understood here not as an absence of knowledge but as an active, though not necessarily self-conscious, agreement to “know the world wrongly” in a way that supports settler interests and masks its own existence.

Dora Mayer, los indígenas y la nación peruana a inicios del siglo XX

This article analyses the expositions that the journalist Dora Mayer did regarding the “indigenous question” and the Peruvian nation, in a stage of deep social conflicts that take place in a context of economic modernization sustained on pre-modern labor relationships and indigenous oppression. We reconstructed her vision on how the relation between the components of the Peruvian Nation had to be, her critics towards indigenous exclusion and her warnings on the repercussions that the latter one had. The main purpose is to think about the impact of the double formation on critical conscience of the public opinion, as well as on civic education of the indigenous people that Dora Mayer did in El Deber Pro- Indigena (1912-1917).

Towards Decolonisation of Australia's Protected Area Management: the Nantawarrina Indigenous Protected Area Experience

Management of Australia's National Parks and Protected Areas originally developed according to the United State's ‘Yellowstone’ model. Aimed primarily at preserving ‘wilderness’ areas, this form of protected area management has excluded indigenous habitation and land management, effectively colonising these landscapes. Since the 1980s indigenous exclusion from protected area management has been contested in the public sphere. Indigenous peoples have become involved in protected area management in various ways, such as the joint management of national parks. However, greater indigenous control is necessary to truly decolonise protected area landscapes and fully recognise the importance of indigenous Australians in land management.This paper explores a new initiative in protected area management: the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program. IPAs are established through voluntary declaration of indigenous land with the aim of enhancing indigenous control of protected area landscapes. Nantawarrina, the first declared IPA, is considered as a case study. Although some manifestations of colonialism are still evident in the Nantawarrina IPA, the program has made some significant contributions to the decolonisation of protected area management in Australia.