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For 30 years the dominant approach to Aboriginal affairs in Australia has been to support cultural recovery and accommodate cultural difference in the expectation that this will enhance Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders' equality as citizens.This approach has been driven by a dialectic of progressivist desire to ameliorate the effects of earlier colonialist policy and Aboriginalist discourse that assumes isolable cultures, unitary identities and uni-directional causes of marginalisation. That discursive formation, once counter to dominant colonialist discourse, has now itself become normative, internally repressive, counter-productive and resistant to change. This is the national misadventure with Aboriginalism. This paper argues that this unexpected development is a product of the national governing attempt to gain control through public policy that is inadequate to Aborigines' contemporary lived reality of interculturality, post-ethnicity and political agency. It uses an indicative case study and an analysis of the national misadventure to propose a deliberative intercultural approach to public policy in respect of Aborigines.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

"In Canada as in other (post)colonial settings, courts have been facing the challenging task of redefining both substantive aboriginal legal rights and evidentiary rules that now look ethnocentric. Recent litigation has shown that while rights claims made by indigenous collectives are difficult to make and sustain in court, the newly revived doctrine of the Crown's inherent 'honour' can work for aboriginal peoples precisely because the Crown's honour is, as it were, self-acting. But the neo-medieval discourse of the Crown coexists, in the text of Canadian courts, with discursive practices that enact a contemporary, pluralistic, socially aware form of judicial anthropology. These two wholly conflicting representations of the Canadian state live happily side by side in current Canadian judicial discourse. This easy eclecticism stands in marked contrast to the difficulties and embarrassments experienced by aboriginal leaders testifying before judges. The close judicial scrutiny of aboriginal claims contrasts with the tolerance of major epistemological contradictions in the state's discourses about itself."

Examining two published narrative accounts of the signing of Treaty 8 in northwest Canada at the close of the nineteenth century, this essay highlights how the administrative practices and spatial discourses inscribed in the accounts of Charles Mair and Dr O C Edwards are implicated in the geographical fashioning of the Canadian north. The Treaty 8 Commissions of 1899 and 1900 were empowered by the Dominion Government of Canada to extinguish Aboriginal title to the vast territory of the Athabasca District. What the written narrative accounts of the treaty signing reveal are how the administrative practices of treaty making were strongly marked by the physicalities of travel, by the visual economies of spatial and cultural encounter, and by the recoding of the social and historical geographies of Aboriginal occupancy by an emergent national order. The accounts examined in the essay underscore how the geographies of northern Canada have been particularly drawn around the misapprehending of the patterns of Aboriginal land use and economy within governmental frames of knowledge.

Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, organizations, and communities in Australia have embraced international human rights norms in their efforts to obtain redress for historical grievances and influence government policy and legal reform on contemporary social justice issues. This is unsurprising given the absence of formal national infrastructure for human rights recognition in Australia. While the use of international law and frameworks has brought notable gains, there have also been significant limitations on the relevance of international human rights law to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. These limitations are both a result of the local legal conditions in Australia as well as the form and nature of international law generally. A case study of the attempts during the 1990s and 2000s to apply the label of genocide to past government policies of removing and separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities illustrates that there are considerable challenges and risks associated with campaign strategies based on the local mobilization of international human rights law.

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"Antiracism research often examines how stigmatized groups transform the meanings associated with their group. A complementary approach analyses the tactics that dominant and subordinate groups use to defend or advance their 'group positions' in situations that threaten the status quo. A case study of the proposed relocation of an Aboriginal child welfare facility to a rural Ontario township sheds light on both processes. Before rejecting the proposal, white residents and municipal councillors used delaying tactics, searched for race-neutral justifications, offered unsolicited advice, created new rules, and censured 'traitors'. The Native agency (and its few white 'allies'), guided by traditional decision-making practices, initially tried to provide 'neutral' information, stay positive, and emphasize common interests. When these tactics failed, they considered others before foregoing the opportunity to appeal to an independent tribunal. Ultimately, this case shows how laissez-faire frames and small-town dynamics can limit the choice and effectiveness of antiracist tactics."

"In the United Nations (UN) Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PF), indigenous political subjectivities take shape in the power relations that not only make indigenous peoples subjects but also subjugate them. This article discusses the process and the possibilities of resistance that open up for indigenous peoples within it. The approach taken acknowledges the limiting political environment of the UN for indigenous peoples, because it is a non-indigenous political system based on state sovereignty. Yet, it does not view the situation of those peoples in the PF as totally determined by the states and their dominant discourse. The theoretical framework of the article draws on the work of Michel Foucault and his conceptions on power, resistance, subjectification, technologies of domination and of the self. The power struggles in the PF, described through the complex of sovereignty, discipline and government, and the resistances within them engender paradoxical indigenous subjectivities: colonized/decolonized, victim/actor, traditional/modern, global/local. Indigenous peoples are able to engage both in resistance that is a reaction to states' exercise of power or the creative use of its tools and in indirect resistance that 'stretches' the UN system and constitutes action on its own terms."

"The Bolivian constitution, debated in a Constituent Assembly in 2006 and 2007 called by the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was adopted in a referendum in 2009. Among many other important provisions recognizing the country's majority indigenous population, it legitimizes the practice of indigenous community justice. Indigenous justice differs in important ways from the national justice system and from the international human rights regime but it expresses a legitimate assertion by the country's indigenous peoples of their cultural integrity."

This paper focuses on the demands for autonomy of the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankwamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with regard to control over their territories, self-determination, indigenous legal jurisdiction, management of the environment, food sovereignty, and political control through their own authorities. The main argument is that the autonomy of indigenous peoples is being influenced by the current context of local, national and international conflicts and other specific circumstances in the region in such a way as to require viewing autonomy as a complex process that transcends national and supranational legal frameworks. Indigenous autonomy is articulated within local, national and international dynamics and within processes of recognition of, and disregard for, indigenous rights - obliging us to understand it as a relational indigenous autonomy. It is relational because it is expressed in different ways depending on the interactions among different social actors and the specificities of the historical contexts.