Abstract

While the Australian settler population voted to include Indigenous peoples as citizens in their own country in 1967, this citizenship has remained on assimilative terms. Indigenous sovereignty, which would fundamentally allow for Indigenous cultural, educational, linguistic and law systems, has not been properly acknowledged either pedagogically, legislatively or ideologically in Australia. Until co-sovereignty is recognised as taking place within a relational ontology constitutively, and epistimologically supported as such, Indigenous peoples will remain the country's most disadvantaged citizens. This will be the case both in Australia, and in other colonised territories and globalisation will only exacerbate these effects. I will argue that relational ontologies of Indigenous and poststructural theorists show that co-sovereignty requires the allowance for difference as its structuring principle.