| Summary: | For a generation of Indigenous men and women, the decades following the 1970s produced a period of unprecedented political agency and legislative change in their struggles for recognition of postcolonial rights. Heightening these struggles was the background of great political and economic change. Rural communities, where significant Aboriginal populations continue to live, experienced major structural change resulting in social fragmentation and unparalleled unemployment. At the same time neoliberal political ideology emerged to reshape the state's role in the economy, redefining government programs and services. It was a period of intense political debate, struggle and conflict where new social forces were unleashed and clashed as a postsettler colonial state grappled with its past. In his new work, Barry Morris captures the dramatic changes in Indigenous recognition that occurred in the 1980s that were subsequently undermined by an emerging new political orthodoxy that overlapped and contested previous Indigenous policy in the early 1990s.
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