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eBook details

• Title: Corroboree 2000: a Nation Defining Event: A Comparative Perspective.
• Author : Arena Journal
• Release Date : January 01, 2000
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 196 KB

Description

Corroboree 2000 for a Canadian participant-observer was as exhilarating as it was surprising. The surprise was to see how deeply engaged the country is in trying to get right the relationship ,between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. In my own country, Canada, we too have been working on the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples as a great project in civic justice since the 1960s. Getting this relationship right, however, has never been the central preoccupation of our body politic; rather, the defining issues of Canadian political life have been Quebec and French-English relations. In a similar sense I believe that the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians has become this country's defining issue of political justice. That is what I sensed in watching the largest gathering of public leaders in Australian history assemble in the Sydney Opera House on 27 May 2000 to discuss and encourage reconciliation with Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. It is what I felt even more powerfully the next day, when I joined in the biggest public demonstration in Australian history and became part of that great river of humanity flowing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. From a human rights perspective, relations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples are more deserving of Canada's moral energy than relations between French and English. Not since the expulsion of the Acadiens in the eighteenth century, have French Canadians been subjected to anything like the injustices and oppression that both the English and French-speaking settlers have inflicted on peoples native to our land. Much of that oppression was based on the same paternalistic racial arrogance that provided the moral energy for the oppression of indigenous peoples in Australia. But Quebec separatism poses such a tangible threat to the continuation of the Canadian federation that the Quebec relationship continues to be at the centre of our constitutional politics. Canada's Aboriginal peoples, nonetheless, derive a benefit from this preoccupation with the Quebec issue. The effort to accommodate Quebec nationalism within Canada conditions English-speaking Canada to the idea that our unity as a nation-state depends on recognizing distinct societies within our country. Thus the mainstream of Canada's settler society is more prepared than Australia's to recognize indigenous peoples as 'first nations' and to regulate relations with them through consensual agreements.

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