Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples  

Duncan Ivison
Oxford Handbook of Indigenous People’s Politics
Edited by José Antonio Lucero, Dale Turner, and Donna Lee VanCott

Subject: Political Science, U.S. Politics Online Publication Date: Jan 2015
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195386653.013.17

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines important connections and differences between multiculturalism

and the claims of indigenous peoples, particularly relating to contemporary liberal
democracies. It first considers what is meant by multiculturalism and the debates about it
that involve issues of culture, freedom, equality, democracy, and justice, then looks at
three broad approaches to or “logics” of multiculturalism: protective or communitarian
multiculturalism; liberal multiculturalism; and the view that multiculturalism is neither
protective nor liberal, but essentially a new version of the hierarchical and racialized
modes of political order it was supposed to displace. The chapter also discusses what the
proper subject of multiculturalism should be—individuals, groups, cultures, or peoples;
arguments for and against liberal multiculturalism; and the problem of legitimacy with re­
spect to indigenous peoples’ claims about multiculturalism. It concludes by suggesting
that normative pluralism is the starting point—rather than the terminus—of new forms of
democratic community.

Keywords: multiculturalism, indigenous peoples, culture, freedom, equality, democracy, justice, protective multi­
culturalism, liberal multiculturalism, normative pluralism

Introduction
Philosophical engagement with the claims of indigenous peoples is often associated with
the “multicultural turn” in contemporary political theory. Multiculturalism is associated
with the partial accommodation of these claims over the past forty years, especially in
Australasia and North America. In Australia, for example, the rejection of the racist
“White Australia” migration policy, combined with limited but still significant recognition
of broader human rights norms in its approach to issues of racial discrimination, is often
linked to the emergence of multiculturalism as a public ideal (Webber 2001). However, it
is also true that political theorists, and indigenous groups themselves, have sought to dis­
tinguish clearly between multiculturalism and the recognition of indigenous peoples’ land

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

claims and self-government rights. Although connected, there are important differences
between these two approaches to cultural and political diversity.

Defining and Defending Multiculturalism

First of all, what do we mean by multiculturalism? In the most general terms, it repre­
sents a particular approach to cultural and religious diversity. More specifically, it has
come to refer to a broad array of theories, attitudes, beliefs, norms, practices, and poli­
cies that seek to provide public recognition of and support or accommodation for non­
dominant ethnocultural groups. The nature of these nondominant groups will vary: some
may be immigrant minorities (including refugees); others will be “historically settled” mi­
norities, such as national minorities (e.g., the Quebecois) or indigenous peoples. These
differences are important. However, what is distinctive about multicultural approaches to
social and cultural diversity—and especially liberal multiculturalism—is the desire to go
beyond the protection of basic civil and political liberties associated with liberal citizen­
ship to forms of differentiated citizenship that allow groups to express their distinct iden­
tities and practices in various ways (Kymlikca 1995, 2001, 2007b). These measures in­
clude the recognition and support of minority languages, exemptions from generally ap­
plicable laws, and the recognition of “inherent rights of self-government.” This means de­
bates about multiculturalism inevitably involve deeper claims about not only the vexed
question of culture, but also the nature of freedom, equality, democracy, and justice.

It is important to acknowledge an immediate problem with this broad conception of multi­

culturalism. What it means (and prospects for its future) can vary from place to place.
This is particularly true when comparing attitudes toward multiculturalism in many parts
of Western and Eastern Europe; in North, Central, and South America; in Australasia; and
also increasingly in Africa and Asia. Some of this has to do with different facts on the
ground, and some with different histories of settlement and forms of nation building. So
context is crucial; although we can pick out certain broad elements that most forms of lib­
eral multiculturalism share, there will always be important differences, too. In Canada
and Australasia, for example, “multiculturalism” is not generally used to refer to the situ­
ation of indigenous peoples. This is because there is a prior question about the legitimacy
of the state, as we shall see (Turner 2006; Ivison 2002). Their situation is not akin, for ex­
ample, to that of recent migrants or refugees. Elsewhere, however, such as in Latin Amer­
ica, “multiculturalism” includes the claims of indigenous peoples, as well as other ethno­
cultural groups. As I understand it, there are three broad approaches to or “logics” of
multiculturalism.1

The first approach is protective or communitarian multiculturalism. Here the basic idea is
that the central point of any form of public recognition or accommodation of a group is to
preserve the cultural integrity and authenticity of its way of life. This is often accompa­
nied by a reified sense of culture, which is reduced to a discrete set of “traditional” prac­
tices said to be at the heart of the group’s identity. Thus, in order to protect the individu­
als, so this argument goes, we must preserve the group, and that means protecting the

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

culture. The right to preserve one’s cultural authenticity is assumed then to preclude oth­
ers from making judgments about the practices involved, including appealing to universal
standards of justice or human rights. The legitimacy of the exercise of authority within
these groups and of various internal practices is a matter for the group to adjudicate and
nobody else. This links multiculturalism closely to forms of communitarian political
thought.

The second approach is liberal multiculturalism, which has been far and away the most
prominent in recent political theory. There are many variations of this approach, but the
basic idea is that multiculturalism is justified as an approach to responding to cultural
and religious diversity, because doing so promotes and/or honors liberal values such as
equality, autonomy, toleration, and equal respect. Thus, although it may well support de­
grees of cultural preservation or protectionism, this isn’t the central aim of liberal multi­
culturalism. Cultural preservation and protection will be a function of the degree to which
multiculturalism promotes liberal ends.

Liberal multiculturalism is also universalist in orientation. Autonomy or equality is valu­

able for all people, according to this approach, whatever their cultural background. Thus,
those practices that undermine a person’s autonomy or basic human rights are not enti­
tled to protection or accommodation. Moreover, liberal multiculturalism aims explicitly at
transforming current social and political arrangements, especially the cultural dimen­
sions of these arrangements. It seeks to transform the way dominant majorities have
treated minorities within their boundaries, as well as the way minority groups ought to
press their claims. It also seeks to transform the identities and practices of both minority
and majority groups, in line with liberal-democratic norms of antidiscrimination, equality,
and basic human rights. It aims to do so by ensuring that minorities enjoy the “fair value”
of their basic civil and political liberties (Rawls 1971), but also by providing differentiated
rights tailored to the specific circumstances of the groups in question. Of course liberal
multiculturalists accept that simply imposing liberal democratic practices on groups is, in
many circumstances, unjustified and impractical. But ultimately, illiberal practices
(whether those of minorities or majorities)—defined in relation to certain key liberal
norms—ought to be transformed. Liberal multiculturalism is superior to monoculturalism
(liberal or otherwise), because it increases the range of choices and options available to
individuals. This means diversity isn’t valuable in itself for the liberal, but rather because
it is correlative with liberty, and thus crucial for the development of individual autonomy.

The third approach to multiculturalism is neither protective nor liberal, and not really a
normative stance at all, but rather a critical perspective. According to this perspective,
multiculturalism is essentially a new version of the hierarchical and racialized modes of
political order that it is supposed to have displaced. It presents a critical lens through
which the various relations of power that operate via forms of liberal “government” can
be analyzed (Foucault 1991, 2007). Critics of multiculturalism are often concerned with
the limits of multicultural accommodation, especially the practical consequences of “real­
ly existing liberal multiculturalism.” In particular, they point to the ways in which liberal
accommodation is essentially conditional: cultures that qualify for rights are assumed to

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

be homogenous and bounded (even as the liberal state is pluralized); minorities are not
expected to challenge the basic legitimacy of the state and are expected to live up to pre­
conceived notions of what a “good migrant” or “indigenous person” is supposed to be.
Liberal legal pluralism, on this reading, is basically a means of resubordinating marginal
groups within a legal system that leaves their substantive disadvantage intact. It might be
a subtle and less heavy-handed form of pluralism than earlier forms of colonialism, but
liberal multicultural “government” (understood in the broadest sense of the term) is basi­
cally continuous with it (Day 2000; Povinelli 2002; Hage 1998). Even more broadly, inso­
far as this analysis of multiculturalism puts power at its heart, it raises questions about
the way in which “minorities” and “majorities” are defined and produced in the first
place. Who is the “we” that tolerates “them,” and what are the underlying assumptions
about who or what can be accommodated, and why?

Each of these approaches picks out a distinctive strand of both the academic and public
discourse surrounding multiculturalism. There can be “harder” and “softer” versions of
all three. For example, one can find forms of protective liberal multiculturalism among
scholars for whom cultural difference is the crucial variable in addressing disadvantage.
Within this quadrant is a range of variations: some modes of protective liberalism license
greater intervention in cultural practices to promote liberal ends, others almost none,
save for the right to exit. Some liberals base their arguments on the value of autonomy,
others on toleration. An analysis of imperial liberal multiculturalism, on the other hand,
might focus on the conditions surrounding multicultural citizenship. Or it might question
the very ontology of liberal conceptions of “minorities” and “majorities” altogether.

A crucial question for multiculturalism here is: What is the proper subject of multicultur­
alism—individuals, groups, cultures, or peoples (Song 2007)? In particular, any approach
to multiculturalism must account for the nature of groups and the issues they raise for
liberal democratic political theory and practice.

Liberal Multiculturalism and Its Critics

The canonical liberal response to diversity (especially religious diversity) has three basic
features: the neutrality of the state, equal treatment in terms of nondiscrimination, and
the privatization of religious belief as a matter of individual conscience.2 Liberal multicul­
turalism does not reject these features so much as transform them from the vantage point
of a much more diverse array of groups. Although religious diversity remains important,
the scope of diversity has been radically extended. It is not only the claims of religious mi­
norities that need to be addressed, but also those of cultural and ethnic groups, racial
groups, national groups, and linguistic minorities, as well as those claims based on gen­
der, sexuality, and disability. The suggestion that liberal democratic states like the United
States or Canada are somehow ethnoculturally neutral is taken to be patently false: the
history of the way boundaries were drawn, the way symbols were chosen and used in the
public culture, and the dominance of English as a national language (at least in the Unit­
ed States), among other things, all point away from neutrality (Kymlicka 2007a, 33–34).

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

One way to grasp these developments is through the gradual extension of citizenship
rights. If the struggle for equal citizenship throughout the nineteenth and twentieth cen­
turies involved extending the rights of citizenship to encompass a greater number of peo­
ple, as well as across a broader range of entitlements (civil, political, social, and econom­
ic), then the demand for multicultural citizenship is simply another step along this path.
Multiculturalism is thus not a break with liberal citizenship, but rather the logical exten­
sion of it in conditions of deep diversity.

In considering the range of claims by ethnocultural groups for recognition, it should be

immediately clear that what might be appropriate in one case might not be in another.
Religion, for example, entails a commitment to various practices, creeds, and institutions,
while gender and sexuality are often experienced and practiced in very different ways.
Indigenous peoples consider themselves self-governing and lay claim to territories from
which they were forcibly removed, while minority migrant groups often seek greater fair­
ness and equality with regard to their integration into the wider society. There is no stan­
dard multicultural formula for minority rights that can be applied to each and every situa­
tion, regardless of context.

Having said that, the basic claim at the heart of liberal multiculturalism, at least, is that
certain social and cultural identities deserve to be recognized, because without them, in­
dividuals lack what they need for living decent lives. If human beings are always cultural­
ly embedded beings, then equal respect for individuals means equal respect for the cul­
tural forms they create, sustain, value, and inhabit. There are two important factors here.
The first has to do with the appeal to equality. The second has to do with the relationship
between individuals and groups.

First is the suggestion that “recognition,” or the accommodation of cultural, national, reli­
gious, or ethnic difference, is connected to a rich sense of equality. Recall that according
to liberal neutrality, we treat someone equally when we respect and protect her basic
rights. Lying behind this idea is an appeal to the connection between equality and treat­
ing people similarly. Of course, equality is always a matter of treating like cases alike, and
that means deciding what the relevant cases to consider are. But in the richer view, influ­
enced by the work of John Rawls (1971, 1993), we treat someone equally when she has
the resources to enjoy the “fair value” of her basic rights, as well as genuine equality of
opportunity. In a culturally diverse society, members of both majority and minority groups
may well have very different capacities and needs that are relevant to judging whether
someone enjoys genuine equality of opportunity. A disabled person, for example, may
need to be treated differently than an able-bodied person in order to be treated with gen­
uine “equal respect.” Both are entitled to equal civic liberties, but a disabled person may
require more resources to realize the equal value of her freedom. The interesting cases
are when this analogy is extended to cultural and national groups. Are there forms of ac­
commodation or protection for minority groups that can be justified on the grounds of
promoting equality?

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

There is a related question about different kinds of disadvantage an individual or group

might suffer from, and therefore what forms of compensation or public policy might be
justified in addressing them. Critics of liberalism often argue that a problem with adopt­
ing state neutrality is that it leaves forms of inequality that are the product of certain
structural features of society unaddressed. Interestingly, the same argument is applied to
multiculturalism. Iris Marion Young, for example, has distinguished between two forms of
“the politics of difference” (1990, 2000). The first involves “positional difference” and the
second “cultural difference.” Positional difference refers to the way individuals are struc­
tured by various kinds of norms, practices, and institutions. That is, it refers to the way
norms and practices are reproduced in society through, say, the division of labor or vari­
ous decision-making processes that systematically disadvantage certain groups by inhibit­
ing the development of their capacities. These structural inequalities persist despite peo­
ple enjoying the same (formal) civil and political liberties. Recall the example above of the
disabled. Young’s claim is that this isn’t simply a case of the disabled lacking the kind of
capacities required to lead fulfilling lives, but rather a problem with the practices and
norms of the rest of society that prevents them from exercising their capacities to their
fullest extent. What constitutes the “normal range” of valuable human functioning, for ex­
ample, includes facts about the built environment, social expectations and attitudes, aes­
thetic standards, and so forth, which have real consequences for the disabled to be able
to lead decent lives. Similar claims could be made about the persistence of institutional
racism and the gendered division of labor. Thus even with the extension of basic civil and
political liberties to members of previously excluded social and cultural groups, the struc­
tural features of society prevent genuine equality being realized by these citizens.

To address positional difference, therefore, requires going well beyond “difference blind”
or neutralist liberalism. But it’s also a structural difference as opposed to a cultural one,
so focusing on cultural difference might well leave structural disadvantage inadequately
addressed. Cultural differences present another set of challenges. Here inequality can ex­
ist in virtue of the relationship between the dominant “societal culture” and minority cul­
tural groups. Sustaining their cultural practices can become more difficult for minority
cultural groups, and if this is mainly a result of the circumstances members face, as op­
posed to the choices they make, then the situation is potentially unfair. The dominant
group can limit the opportunities of other groups to realize their ends, whether through
explicit repression or merely by growing or allowing minority practices to whither away.
Of course cultural change is not in itself something that can (or should be) prevented; the
case for sustaining minority cultural practices will depend on the connection between
their survival and the well-being of the group’s members.

Note that these two approaches to disadvantage are clearly not mutually exclusive, de­
spite what some of the literature suggests. Members of a minority cultural group might
well suffer from various structural forms of inequality as well. Feminist analyses of the
situation of women and girls within minority groups, for example, bring this out very
clearly (Shachar 2001; Song 2007). However, depending on the nature of the disadvan­
tage with which we are concerned, different solutions and approaches may be called for,
and tensions between different approaches can occur. Providing more autonomy for na­
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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

tional minorities, for example, will require finding ways of ensuring vulnerable members
within those groups are treated equally and can exercise their freedom in meaningful
ways. Focusing on disadvantage through the lens of structural disadvantage tends to shift
discussion toward ideals of democratic citizenship that cut across cultural and national
differences. Focusing on the accommodation of cultural differences, on the other hand,
tends to shift discussion toward forms of collective autonomy and freedom. Any adequate
analysis of the challenge of diversity will require a subtle interweaving of the two.

Up until now we have been moving between ideas of what is owed to individuals and
groups, as if this relationship was relatively unproblematic. Remember that one of the
crucial factors identified above is equal respect for persons being extended to equal re­
spect for cultures or groups. But we need an argument to link these two claims; one does
not follow automatically from the other. The tension is neatly demonstrated in the fre­
quent slippage between talking about the “rights of minority cultures” and the “rights of
cultural minorities.” Can cultures have rights? Or are we instead really concerned only
with the rights of the individual members of those groups?

Justifying Liberal Multiculturalism

One of the most influential arguments linking the well-being of individuals with the public
recognition of minority groups has been provided by Will Kymlicka, for whom access to a
secure cultural structure provides a “context for choice” for individuals (1989, 1995). Cul­
ture, in other words, or at least what he calls a “societal culture,” helps people realize
their autonomy—their freedom. This is a universalist claim about the value of autonomy
for persons in general. For Kymlicka, a societal culture is basically a territorially concen­
trated culture, centered on a shared language used in a wide range of societal institu­
tions in both public and private life (schools, media, law, economy, government, etc.)
(Kymlicka 2007a, 34–35). So a societal culture is different from a set of religious beliefs
or personal lifestyles: skateboarders may well share a common subculture, but they don’t
share a societal culture. Societal cultures are, however, inevitably pluralistic; they may
contain different religious faiths, sexual orientations, and class differences. But that plu­
ralism is balanced by a certain amount of linguistic, institutional, and territorial cohesion.

Many have criticized Kymlicka for this seemingly homogenous and bounded conception of
culture, however much he has used it to try to pluralize the nation-state (Carens 2000).
But for our purposes, it’s important to see how he thinks access to a societal culture and
freedom are connected. Providing groups with support for the preservation of their soci­
etal culture not only extends a privilege larger groups enjoy, but helps promote important
liberal goods. What is being protected through self-government rights or language rights,
therefore, is not the particular content of any culture, but rather the structure within
which people exercise their freedom and through which they make sense of the world.

Kymlicka’s is not the only argument to link cultural membership with liberal values. And
indeed, many have criticized it for appealing to a value that might not be as universal as
he thinks. There are at least two other ways of linking cultural membership to liberal
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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

ends. Charles Taylor, for example, sees “recognition” as a crucial human good, given the
way it is linked to forms of personal and collective identity that enable common delibera­
tion about the nature of the good in the first place (Taylor 1992). Because our sense of
self is shaped by the recognition (and indeed misrecognition) of others, the way the group
we identify with is recognized also matters. For Taylor, our identities are fundamentally
intersubjective, and this has important consequences for thinking about how we ought to
manage the deep diversity of modern societies. Joseph Raz (1998), on the other hand, ap­
peals to the values of equal concern and dignity: if we take the equal worth of persons se­
riously, then we need to be concerned about the well-being of the cultural groups they
value and to which they belong. Not all cultural groups provide the means for enjoying
equal concern and dignity. Only an “encompassing” group provides the kind of pervasive
cultural structure that is closely bound up with members’ self-identity and their well-be­
ing and therefore deserving of protection (Margalit and Raz 1990).

So the most important forms of group membership are those that provide people with ac­
cess to valuable human goods. For many people, these forms of identity are not easily
shed, but nor are they so constraining as to be necessarily incompatible with liberal free­
dom. For Kymlicka and other defenders of liberal multiculturalism, the main task then is
to distinguish between ways of accommodating diversity that are compatible with liberal
ends and those that are not.

According to Kymlicka, groups that violate their members’ basic liberties or prevent them
from exercising their autonomy are not entitled to multicultural accommodation (al­
though how we handle these situations in reality is a separate issue). For Raz, similarly,
the value of the equal worth and dignity of each individual constrains what cultures can
do to their members. In each case, individuals must be free to exercise a genuine right to
exit—however difficult that may be in practice (it can’t be merely a formal right). The
right to freedom of association is only really valuable if it also includes the freedom not to
associate (Shachar 2001; Song 2007).

At this point, for many critics liberal multiculturalism begins to look less multicultural and
more about defending a particular liberal way of life. As we have seen, for some liberals,
this is hardly a contradiction: the whole point of liberal multiculturalism is to transform
the way states engage with minority groups and how minorities, in turn, treat their mem­
bers. But the critique of liberal neutrality also points to a deeper critique of liberalism it­
self. And here we reach a critical point in the analysis of the relationship between the
claims of indigenous peoples and multiculturalism.

The Legitimacy Challenge

The fundamental challenge that indigenous peoples’ claims present to multiculturalism,
and especially to liberal multiculturalism, is to the underlying, assumed legitimacy of the
multicultural state. If liberal multiculturalism is premised on the state granting recogni­
tion to, or accommodation of, a minority group’s claims for self-government or autonomy,
then there is a prior question of the source of indigenous peoples’ self-determination and
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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

self-governance (Turner 2006; Report of the Royal Commission 1996). Indigenous sover­
eignty or autonomy is an assertion of autonomy that is not dependent on the grant of that
authority from any other entity. This is what Canadian theorists refer to as the “inherent
right of self-government” (Borrows 1992; Report of the Royal Commission 1996). Of
course the history of the state’s interaction with indigenous peoples—in North America
and Australasia, but not only there—is replete with conquest, colonialism, attempted as­
similation, and neglect. Despite this, indigenous groups have continued to understand the
source of their rights of self-government to derive from their own practices, laws, and
constitutions, not from those of the settler states to which they have been subject.

But first of all, who counts as an indigenous people? This returns us to the challenge of
groups for contemporary political theory. There are two basic approaches to the question
of indigeneity. First, one can link indigeneity to actual first residency or occupation of a
particular territory. Contemporary indigenous peoples in this case would be descendants
of the earliest populations living on that territory. Second, one can tie indigeneity to those
peoples who lived in the territory before settlers arrived and the process of colonization
began. This relativizes the definition to prior occupation rather than first occupation
(Kingsbury 1998; cf. Waldron 2000). The first is tied most clearly to claims of first occu­
pancy, whereas the second is a variable term, depending on the empire or conquering
power one is referring to, and thus to what happens to exist at that particular point in
time. Inevitably the two are mixed when invoked in relation to indigenous peoples today.
For example, James Anaya, one of the leading experts on indigenous peoples in interna­
tional law, argues that the term indigenous refers to “the living descendants of pre-inva­
sion inhabitants of lands now dominated by others…. They are indigenous because their
ancestral roots are imbedded in the lands in which they live… much more deeply than the
roots of more powerful sectors of society living on the same lands or in close proximi­
ty” (1996, 3). However, it is also important not to restrict our understanding of the juris­
diction and rights of indigenous peoples to mainly proprietary terms. Just as important is
the persistence and continuity of their legal and normative orders—their sovereignty—de­
spite the extensive disruption caused by the consequences of colonialism. The assertion
of these legal and normative orders by indigenous peoples has been occurring since the
very beginning of colonization, first through practices of treaty making (Tully 1995) and
continuing until the present day in various domestic and international fora. Different
forms of aboriginal sovereignty have also been recognized in important legal cases in the
United States, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as in the recent United Nations Decla­
ration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. (2007) Although we don’t have space to con­
sider these issues here, note that an assertion of autonomy or sovereignty does not in it­
self exclude other jurisdictions operating alongside or in conjunction with it (despite what
traditional conceptions of sovereignty might suggest). Nor does it follow that indigenous
forms of sovereignty need to mimic those associated with state-like structures to be legiti­
mate. And these indigenous normative orders have and will continue to evolve and
change, both in light of the consequences of colonialism and as a result of the changing
practices and understandings of aboriginal communities themselves.

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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

What kind of rights are indigenous peoples’ rights that flow from these preexisting claims
of self-government and autonomy? Rights are not self-justifying. We use them to mark out
certain crucial interests or capacities of individuals and groups that deserve special kinds
of moral, legal, and political attention. A challenge facing anyone defending indigenous
rights is to make clear what work the modifier “indigenous” is doing. To what interests or
capacities do these rights refer? On the one hand, we can appeal to the historical, cultur­
al, and political specificity of the interests at issue—to indigenous difference. This might
also lead us to emphasize the distinctive source of indigenous legal and moral rights—for
example, not only the hundreds of treaties that were signed between the various indige­
nous nations and European settlers in the Americas from the fifteenth century onward,
but also the distinctive legal and cultural traditions in which they are embedded. The
treaties themselves, as well as the normative framework of recognition, negotiation, and
consent that they represent, offer both a legal and moral framework for justifying and
clarifying the rights of indigenous peoples. However, the danger in appealing to historical
agreements as the source of rights is that the actual agreements might be morally prob­
lematic in various ways. The terms might be unfair, and the conditions under which they
were negotiated could be deeply unequal. But it also risks tying the recognition and con­
tent of those rights to a sense of indigenous peoples’ radical otherness from Anglo-Euro­
pean law. This can sometimes work against indigenous claims, because courts can limit
the recognition of indigenous rights to those practices or norms that were in place at the
time of European settlement, or just before (Asch 1999; Tully 2008). This can limit the
ability of indigenous peoples to extend and adapt those activities they see as integral to
their ongoing ways of life, at the same time staying true to their assertion of rights of in­
herent self-government. It can also serve to depoliticize their claims, such as when courts
and governments choose to emphasize the recognition of “lifestyle rights” over more ex­
plicitly political ones, such as self-government.

A second approach, therefore, is to appeal to more general rights, and especially human
rights, and to argue that indigenous rights are a species of these kinds of claims. Thus
they refer to interests or capacities that everyone, whether indigenous or not, deserves to
have protected or promoted. Reference to indigenous right, therefore, is a pragmatic
move; it is intended to extend to indigenous peoples those rights to which they have al­
ways been entitled, but that have been denied for contingent historical and political rea­
sons. It interweaves the emergence of human rights norms as an increasingly normative
presence in global politics and international law with the continued assertion of indige­
nous normative and legal orders (with indigenous sovereignty, in other words). But this of
course returns us to some of the tensions explored above about limits of legal and politi­
cal pluralism and the basis upon which those limits are justified and determined.

For example, what is the extent to which indigenous peoples’ rights include not only indi­
vidual rights, but also group rights? And what should the proper balance between them
be, as well as the mechanisms for managing that balance? Do indigenous peoples have
collective rights, in the sense of a right possessed by the group as a whole, as opposed to
by just the individual members? Focusing on individual rights alone, as we saw above,
might not offer enough protection from the harms indigenous peoples have suffered from,
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Multiculturalism and Indigenous Peoples

given the history of colonialism, and might not suit the distinctive interests they seek to
protect. Indigenous land rights, for example, are conceived of as a collective right, be­
cause “aboriginal” or “native” title is usually said to inhere in the group, as opposed to
the individual members (although there are individual entitlements within that underly­
ing collective title). The right to self-determination is also often conceived of as a group
right, insofar as it is a right that only the group as a whole can exercise jointly. If indige­
nous peoples do indeed have a moral and legal right to self-determination, and the right
to self-determination is a basic human right, then there is at least one genuinely collec­
tive human right. The best justification of the right to self-determination is one that em­
beds it within the constraints of a broader structure of human rights, as well as detaching
it from any necessary association with statehood—an association that historically has
been a source of continual confusion and realpolitik in international law. In fact, the polit­
ical activism of indigenous peoples in global politics has helped to generate new thinking
about the nature of sovereignty and self-determination more generally.

Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter has not been to demonstrate that multiculturalism and the
claims of indigenous peoples are fundamentally at odds with each other. Rather, my aim
has been to point to important connections and differences. Paying attention to the differ­
ent claims present in multicultural societies is crucial for being able to do justice to them.
In particular, in making sense of indigenous peoples’ claims in contemporary liberal
democracies, the persistence of different, contemporaneous, and complex legal and nor­
mative orders is important to acknowledge and engage with, both theoretically and politi­
cally. The persistence of normative pluralism is sometimes taken to be a sign of illiberal­
ism and the absence of a settled constitutional and political order. However, in genuinely
multicultural and multinational societies, we should see this normative pluralism as the
starting point—rather than the terminus—of new forms of democratic community.

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Notes:

(1) The following paragraphs draw on Ivison (2010).

(2) On the history of the emergence of multicultural approaches, see Kymlicka (1995,
2001, 2007b).

Duncan Ivison

Currently Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney;
Professor in the Department of Philosphy.

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