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Dean Kotlowski, ‘Not going to disappear’ Comparing American & Australian Indigenous Policy

Australia is far from the only country that started out as a settler colony built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, nor is it alone in having a complex path in coming to terms with the resulting legacies. Each story has its own nuances, similarities and contrasts, that can help reveal what we have gotten right and what we have gotten wrong. One obvious parallel is the United States, which experienced its own frontier wars but which also has a distinct history of making and ultimately breaking treaties signed with Native American tribes. One surprising American reformer on Indigenous issues was President Richard Nixon, whom Menzies had a complex relationship with, and in this podcast we unpack what was happening in America roughly contemporaneously with the Menzies era.

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Professor Dean Kotlowski, who is visiting Australia to construct a comparative history of American and Australian Indigenous Policy.

Dean J. Kotlowski is the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and professor of history at Salisbury University, Maryland. He is the author of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015) and the editor of The European Union: From Jean Monnet to the Euro (Ohio University Press, 2000). He has published over forty articles and book chapters on U.S. political and policy history, including in journals such as Diplomatic History, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Policy History, The Historian, and Business History Review. He has served four times as a Fulbright scholar, in the Philippines (2008), Austria (2016), and Australia (2020, 2022) and has been an historical adviser to the U.S. National Archives, Richard Nixon Library, and U.S. Mint. His next book, Toward Self-Determination: Federal Indian Policy from Truman to Clinton, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press. He is also researching a comparative study of Indigenous policymaking in the United States and Australia.