Miranda Johnson: The Land is our History (Oxford University Press, 2016)
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.
Miranda Johnson is a historian of indigenous peoples and settler colonialism in the Anglophone post/colonial world, most specifically in North America and the Pacific. At the University of Sydney, She holds an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of History. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, as part of Professor Warwick Anderson’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project, “Race and Ethnicity in the Global South”. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.
Tues. 28 March, 5pm-6.30pm, REGS Western Tower Balcony, Quadrangle
Please see the link below for an invitation to a book launch for Miranda Johnson’s The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State published by Oxford late last year.
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All are warmly invited to join us at REGS on Tuesday 28 March, at 5pm. Duncan Ivison will launch the book.
Please RSVP to
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