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24 - Indigenous Rights in Settler Colonies

from Part III - Rights and Empires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Saliha Belmessous
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

By recovering fragments of the political negotiations that took place between native peoples and European colonizing powers in the settler colonies of Canada and Australia, this chapter argues that treaty-making was central to the ability of Indigenous peoples to assert the rights they wanted, rather than those they were granted, against imperial and colonial states. In settler colonies, colonial states used the principles of protection and assimilation to establish the legal status of Indigenous peoples to create them as subjects within a particular legal order that set the place of everyone in relation to the sovereign. Without a treaty, Indigenous peoples were effectively placed in a position where they could only claim rights that were compatible with the aims of protection in the nineteenth century, and so were defined by the colonial authorities. Yet the language of ‘rights’ could restrict, or even distort, some of the political arguments that Indigenous peoples wanted to assert, for example in relation to hunting and fishing rights that Europeans understood in terms of access to resources in order to secure their subsistence.

Keywords

treaty-makingsettler colonialismIndigenous peopleshunting rightsfishing rights
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 565 - 594
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Beaulieu, A., “Les Garanties d’un traité disparu: Le Traité d’Oswegatchie, 30 août 1760,” Revue juridique Thémis 34/2 (2000), 369–408.Google Scholar
Belmessous, S. (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900 (New York, Oxford University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Belmessous, S. Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920 (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Benton, L., Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Carter, S., and Nugent, M. (eds.), Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Chesterman, J., and Galligan, B., Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curthoys, A., and Mitchell, J., Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorsett, S., and McLaren, J. (eds.), Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (London, Routledge, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, J. et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laidlaw, Z., and Lester, A. (eds.), Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (London, Palgrave 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nettelbeck, A., Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yirush, C., “‘Since We Came Out of This Ground:’ Iroquois Legal Arguments at the Treaty of Lancaster,” in Owensby, B. P. and Ross, R. J. (eds.), Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York, New York University Press, 2018).Google Scholar

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