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Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism

The prevalence of ‘scientific’ racism and social Darwinism in white colonial nations in the late nineteenth century ensured that indigenous peoples were regarded as an alien ‘other’ to national identities based on racism and progress. This outlook gradually changed over time with the aid of socio-historical understanding developed by indigenous and non-indigenous revisionist historians, academics and activists, which sought to explain past and present indigenous/settler relations by placing white colonial nation-states within a critical account of colonialism and racial discrimination. As white settler nations gradually began to accommodate a plurality of ethnic cultures and in that sense become more multicultural, politicians sought to construct national identities based on the imagery of ‘harmonious multiculturalism’. In settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, a significant political obstacle to this was the continued disquiet of indigenous populations. The emerging post-colonial challenge for politicians in such societies was to find a way to include indigenous people in the cultural fabric of the nation which would seem fair and appropriate and therefore serve a legitimising function for the settler state. Recently the now popular peacemaking language of ‘reconciliation’ has been the preferred rhetorical device for this endeavour in Canada and most notably in Australia.1 The aim of this paper is to outline why two dominant understandings of reconciliation as an outcome that have emerged from post-conflict reconciliation processes would be inappropriate goals for a process concerned with genuinely legitimising an internal colonial situation.2 It begins with a general introduction to the concept of reconciliation, discusses the context-specific problems with the dominant understandings and concludes by suggesting an approach to reconciliation which would genuinely decolonise an internal colonial situation.