Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship 85 other ways. This practical reality again reinforces the theoretical claim that the struggles for recognition of both noncitizenship and citizenship are not mutually exclusive and may in fact be mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, individuals may seek a formal citizenship, tied up with a contestation of the way in which full and equal memberships are allocated. On the other hand, the relationship between the individuals involved and the relevant States cannot be understood simply as citizenship or simply as a negation of citizenship. This relationship also involves what is described here as an activated noncitizenship, and a par ticular vulnerability to the existing State system, as a result. 16 Noncitizen citizens and being counted I was born at a time when the Australian government knew how many sheep there were but not how many Aboriginal people […] I was 10 years old before the ’67 referendum fixed that. The first decade of my life was spent as a non-citizen. (Linda Burney, MP, in her maiden speech to the Australian Parliament, August 201617 ) The progress of other indigenous movements in States ostensibly built upon liberal democratic principles can bring out further aspects of the complex inter play of citizenship and noncitizenship in these cases and beyond. Individuals have, as in the case of the Haudenosaunee, both fought to obtain citizenships and fended them off, sometimes as part of the same process. There is no singular experience. In 1967, Australia was preparing for a referendum on whether to include Aboriginal people in the national census.18 Some saw this as a referen dum on something more: on whether finally to ensure full citizenship rights for Aboriginal people (they officially became citizens in 1948).19 Exclusion from the census was seen as symbolic of non-recognition, as well as making it difficult to demonstrate the interests of those left uncounted (something similar can be said of the stateless persons and irregular immigrants of Chapter 4).20 In 2016, Linda 16 Douglas M. George-Kanentiio (2006) Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation, Praeger, p. 27; Audra Simpson (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Duke University Press, p. 119; Marques 2011 ibid. p. 392; Peter Nyers (2011) ‘Alien Equality’, pp. 471–486 in Issues in Legal Scholarship 9(1) p. 474. 17 For example, see BBC (2016) ‘Australian Aboriginal MP Linda Burney vows to fight for change’, 31 August 2016. 18 For example, see Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (2007) The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, Aboriginal Studies Press; an official research brief on the history of the referendum is given here: John Gardiner-Garden (2007) ‘The 1967 Referendum – history and myths’, Research Brief no. 11, 2006–07, Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary Library, 2 May 2007. 19 Attwood and Markus 2007 ibid. at p. 44. But see also David Mercer (2010) ‘ “Citizen minus”? Indigenous Australians and the Citizenship Question’, pp. 421–445 in Citizenship Studies 7(4). 20 For an interesting discussion of the politics of censuses and the relationship to citizenship, see Melissa Nobles (2000) Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics, Stanford University Press.