The Land Is Our History

Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State

Miranda Johnson

First single-authored history to synthesize and examine indigenous legal claims in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Focuses on how indigenous agency in the late twentieth century forced settler states to engage in rights negotiations.
Demonstrates the distinctiveness of postcolonial politics in Anglo settler states.
Shows how indigenous claims in the 1970s were enmeshed with the changing politics of national identity in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, as each threw off ties to Britain and sought out new postcolonial identities.
Comparatively examines the unexpected effects of indigenous peoples' claims on broader issues of national identity and state-building.

The Land Is Our History

Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State

Miranda Johnson

Description

The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results. For the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights.

Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples' claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging.

The Land Is Our History

Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State

Miranda Johnson

Acknowledgments
A Note on Terms
Introduction: A Fragile Truce
Chapter 1: Citizens Plus: New Indigenous Activism in Australia and Canada
Chapter 2: Australia's First, First People
Chapter 3: Frontier Justice in Canada's North
Chapter 4: Commissions of Inquiry and the Idea of a New Social Contract
Chapter 5: Making a "Partnership Between Races:" Maori Activism and the Treaty of Waitangi
Chapter 6: The Pacific Way
Epilogue: Truce Undone
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The Land Is Our History

Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State

Miranda Johnson

Author Information

Miranda Johnson is a lecturer in history at the University of Sydney.

The Land Is Our History

Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State

Miranda Johnson

Reviews and Awards

Shortlist for General History Prize of the New South Wales Premier's History Awards
Shortlist for the New Zealand Historical Association Best First Book Prize
Winner of the W.K. Hancock Prize of the Australian Historical Association

"One of the most important contributions of Miranda Johnson's The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State is to invigorate the value of 'comparative history.'...Johnson's organized study and careful comparisons of similar historical phenomena in specific temporal and geographical spaces identifies significant historical contingencies, similarities, and differences. We discover what is distinctive about these particular series of related historical developments. The book is no less a documentation of the extraordinary achievements of those who struggled against intractable governments, courts, and crude contours of racism and misrecognition to push for redress and recognition of an ongoing dispossession. The book is a major achievement as a detailed study and also a source of reflection on earlier struggles."--Barry Morris, American Historical Review

"[An] auspicious first book, The Land Is Our History is ambitious in scope, yet readable and concise in style. To read this book is to engage with three important interrelated themes: the common historical forces by which the Commonwealth settler-states were made; the impact of colonialism upon the social and political organisation of their indigenous peoples and how the modern activism of those peoples has reshaped and is reshaping those states Publication of the author's arguments is especially timely here because of the constitutional recognition debate."--Kevin Bell, Australian Book Review

"Johnson is alert to paradox and nuance in the complex story she tells, and I admire the way she focuses as much on the creativity of individual actors--the judicious activists and the activist judge--as well as on the larger cultural and historical trends shaping their respective contributions."--New Zealand Books

"Miranda Johnson's wonderful, engaging, and nuanced new work, The Land Is Our History, crosses disciplinary, theoretical, geographic, and national boundaries. It not only compares the emergence of distinct indigenous rights movements across three Commonwealth settler states but also examines how such movements have transformed the meanings of national history within them. Impressively conceptualized and deeply comparative, this work is an important addition to the growing field of global indigenous history."--Ned Blackhawk, Yale University

"An important book, The Land is Our History offers critical insights into the tensions between white settler colonialism and indigenous peoples in the struggle over land. Over the last thirty years, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada shifted from policies of assimilation to recognition of indigenous claims to land. This book traces the structures of power which dispossessed indigenous peoples from their lands at the same time as it recognizes the capacity of indigenous leaders and particular judges and lawyers to change this trajectory. It brilliantly shows the capacity of law to offer, from time to time, power to the powerless, to those who have moral claims but lack economic and political power."--Sally Engle Merry, New York University

"The Land Is Our History is an exemplary illustration of the complex and intertwined histories of indigenous politics and indigeneity in settler colonial societies. Moving beyond a conventional nation-state paradigm, it engages with the re-imagining of nationalist identities since the 1960s within a global context. Underscored is the forging of new legal spaces and opportunities to reframe nationalist myths, while also acknowledging the pitfalls and compromises involved in pursuing indigenous justice within formal western law. This sophistical historical account deserves attention from everyone interested in indigenous peoples' engagement with state law and the ways such engagement informs contemporary politics and cultural relations."--Eve Darian-Smith, author of Laws and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches

"Miranda Johnson has produced an ambitious, original and imaginative history exploring land, indigeneity, legal rights and activism across three settler-colonial nations. Thinking transnationally, Johnson explores legal and public discourses to draw together a raft of distinctive events and personalities into a vast and coherent canvas...Johnson writes with precision, flow and economy. The work has a compelling argument, convincingly showing the complex and sophisticated ways indigenous activisms functioned to change settler attitudes towards land and indigenous belonging. An exemplary history, The Land Is Our History brings important new insights to a significant topic in both the past and the present."--From the prize citation for the W.K. Hancock Prize