CRASSH

It is a sharp irony for many indigenous people that as original inhabitants of the lands on which they live they very often have attenuated citizenship rights yet the last thirty years have seen considerable progress for indigenous people on the national and international level.  This paper goes beyond an analysis of the relationship indigenous citizens have with the state to explore the nature of indigenous citizenship as being something qualitatively different from the standard liberal models.   Whereas the many new ways of understanding citizenship focus on different kinds of individuals as they access resources and fight for justice, indigenous citizenship is based on collective rather than individual rights.  Indigenous citizenship is much more, therefore, than an extension of liberal rights to a particular set of people, although it is certainly that; it is also an assertion of a particular relationship to place, the nation, and consequently the state that no other group can assert.  If, as in Marshall’s formulation, citizenship is rooted in the individual, I suggest an essential component of indigenous citizenship is an assertion of rights with respect to the state beyond those accorded to citizens with a particular ethnic background; an assertion of rights based on a collective indigenous identity.  Indigenous citizenship, therefore, offers a fundamentally different model for understanding the way people relate to the state.