How, why, and to what extent have the governments of the United States and Australia responded to the demands of indigenous groups for self-determination? This lecture explores indigenous rights within the corridors of national power, from the White House and Capitol Hill to the Lodge and Parliament House, offering a brief overview of the similarities between these two Pacific partners in an important area of race relations, minority rights, and identity politics.

Between 1970 and 1988, US policy became favorable toward self-determination for American Indians. Beginning in 1970, the federal government ceased its effort to “terminate” Indian tribes and to assimilate Indians into non-Indian society. Instead, under the banner of “self-determination without termination,” the government turned to respecting, even enhancing, tribal authority and American Indian cultural distinctiveness. This change had enormous implications. Writing in 1988, the historian Lawrence C. Kelly observed that US Indian policy had evolved over a century from “virtual denial of tribal sovereignty to almost full recognition.” Fascinatingly, Australian policy moved toward self-determination for Aborigines during the same period. The governments of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, not unlike the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, called for a halt to assimilationist policies and embraced self-determination or self-management. To be sure, the major breakthrough in rights for Aborigines occurred with the High Court’s decision in Mabo v. Queensland No. 2 (1992) which upheld the common law doctrine of Aboriginal title. Nevertheless, Commonwealth governments had moved to enhance the land rights of Aborigines since the mid-1970s.

Dean J. Kotlowski is Professor of History at Salisbury University, Maryland, USA. He is the author of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015) and the editor of The European Union: From Jean Monnet to the Euro (Ohio University Press, 2000). He has published nearly forty articles and book chapters on United States political, diplomatic, and transnational history. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar at De La Salle University in Manila (2008) and at the Universität Salzburg, Austria (2016).