The Invite: Indigenous sovereignty and the Australian border

The nation state border is often theorised as a site of exclusion. In this talk I interrogate an unusual moment of inclusion at the Australian border. In February 1905 two Māori men travelled to Sydney, Australia, and faced immediate deportation. These were the early years of the ‘White Australia policy.’ By March 1905, the Australian Prime Minister had apologised publicly and ammended immigration practice. For much of the twentieth century, Māori were the only non-white peoples exempt, as a group, from Australia’s race-based immigration exclusions. At first glance the 1905 incident appears to tell us about the haphazard realities of settler nation-building and the power Māori possessed to wield British subjecthood for political rights. But when we stay with the 1905 exemption, and take seriously Aboriginal sovereignty, the exemption reveals messier questions about the consequences of state borders for Indigenous relationality.

About the speaker:

Dr Sam Iti-Prendergast (Ngāti Paretekawa, Ngāti Maniapoto) is a lecturer in history. She holds a PhD from New York University (2023) and is currently working on a manuscript, The Invite, based on her doctoral dissertation. Her Marsden Fast Start project, ‘Tūpuna Critiques of Colonial Violence,’ asks how 19th century Māori theorised and navigated around the violence of imperialism with their future descendants in mind.