568 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 51 The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and Australian citizenship Edwina Howell and Andrew Schaap The position of Aboriginal people as citizens is potentially fraught, given the association of the ideal of citizenship with the modern state and the civilizational discourse used to legitimate colonization. In this discourse, those qualities of agency and industriousness that are supposed to distinguish citizens are precisely what the colonized are imputed to lack. In practice, citizen- ship has been associated with techniques of government that deny the basic rights of Aboriginal people by differentiating their civic status from that of citizens of a settler state or by making rec- ognition of citizenship conditional on assimilation to a settler society. Yet, as a term of political discourse, citizenship also potentially affords a basis from which to contest settler ideology. This potential lies in the ideal status of the citizen as a free and equal member of a self-determining political association. As such, Aboriginal people might demand citizenship or put to the test their status as citizens in order to resist their colonization. Such struggles over citizenship by Aboriginal people should not necessarily be identified with a desire for inclusion within a settler nation but may be consistent with a rejection of the state and an assertion of land rights and self-determination. At the same time, however, they may also afford an opportunity for renegotiating the terms of political association between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In 1972, the establishment of an Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra challenged the com- placency of Australians about the value of citizenship for Aboriginal people. Since they were effectively aliens in their own land, the demonstrators said, they needed an Embassy on the lawns opposite Parliament House to represent their interests to the government. The Embassy was born out of disappointment after the 1967 referendum, which raised expectations that ‘full citizenship’ would be extended to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Although the referendum was successful, the Federal Government’s inaction and continued commitment to assimilation and denial of land rights fostered further resentment among Aboriginal people. In this chapter, we highlight how the demand for full citizenship by Aboriginal people who campaigned in the referendum can be understood as being consistent with the struggle for land rights and self-determination that found dramatic expression in the Aboriginal Embassy. We then discuss how the Tent Embassy was both a negative demonstration of the dispossession and political alienation experienced by Aboriginal people and a positive demonstration of the rights to land and self-determination that they claimed. By refusing to identify as Australian citizens, BK-TAFUK-ISIN_AND_NYERS-140031-Chp51.indd 568 BK-TAFUK-ISIN_AND_NYERS-140031-Chp51.indd 568 1/31/2014 9:29:52 PM 1/31/2014 9:29:52 PM