The indigenous sector

![CDATA[In Indigenous Futures, I put forward the concept ‘Indigenous Sector’. The Indigenous Sector consists of thousands of publicly funded organisations. Some are statutory authorities mandated to act for an Indigenous electorate (for example, the Lands Council in New South Wales and in the Northern Territory, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission – ATSIC), some are incorporated ‘councils’ performing the function of local governments in remote parts of the continent, some are employers and job placement agencies (the Community Development Project schemes), and there are Indigenous health services, legal services, housing associations, schools and sporting clubs. The rise of the Indigenous Sector, I suggested, is the most important product of the policy era known as ‘self-determination’. The Indigenous Sector is neither the ‘state’ (though it is almost entirely publicly funded), nor ‘civil society’ (though its organisations are mostly private concerns in their legal status). Rather the Indigenous Sector is a third thing created out of this interaction – sometimes, but not always, frictional – of government and the Indigenous domain. In this paper, I develop the notion ‘Indigenous Sector’.]]