Citizenship in Theory and Practice: Indigenous Peoples' Perspective

This paper examines the complexity of citizenship in terms of accommodating diversity and cultural pluralism in the relationship between the state and ethnocultural groups. It focuses on the notion of citizenship in the context of indigenous peoples’ position in relation to the tension between basic social rights and multicultural rights. Extending citizenship rights to include basic social rights serves the function to ensure that it would help to promote a common sense of national membership and national identity. However, this promotion of a ‘common societal culture’ as embedded in the nation-building process inescapably privileges the members of the majority culture. Multicultural rights, on the other hand, help to protect the minorities, in this case indigenous peoples, against the injustices which were created in the nation-building process. They often emphasise achieving greater autonomy within the boundaries of a larger state. While the notion of social rights pertains to “common benefits through common public institutions operating in a common national language, so as to meet basic needs while simultaneously creating a common national identity” (Kymlicka 2002: 329), an ostensible paradox emerges because multicultural rights seem to be incompatible with social rights. The core question becomes: how to extend citizenship to include social rights without perpetrating further injustice upon indigenous peoples? Long-term care is examined as an example of social rights in this paper, with special focus on the extent of indigenous peoples’ agency in practicing their social rights. How do indigenous peoples use them to engage in their own competing nation-building? This paper investigates how indigenous peoples use social rights not just to protect and diffuse their societal culture throughout their traditional territory, but instead to grasp the power to interpret the ontological and epistemological meanings concerning what the indigenous elderly need.