Indigenous Citizenship and the Historical Imagination

Abstract

The problem of the nation’s moral continuity must be resolved in any Australian statement of apology to Indigenous Australians, if they are to be reimagined as citizens of the nation. This chapter compares several Australian statements from members of Australia’s political elite, showing some of the ways that a nation and its victims/citizens were narratively configured in the 1990s. The chapter then turns to several Indigenous approaches to narrating the national and the personal past, illustrating that Indigenous standpoints vary by generation and by orientations to Christianity.