History typically portrays the Revolution as an American war for independence in which the colonists severed their ties with the mother country across the Atlantic and incidentally fought off Indian raids on the western frontier. Native Americans did little to affect the outcome of the Revolution so they are usually accorded a minimal role in its story. This chapter, in contrast, recognizes that Native peoples, and their lands, played a significant role in the causes and course of the Revolution and demonstrates that the Revolution mattered profoundly and had huge repercussions in Indian country. Rather than simply fulfilling the negative role prescribed for them in the Declaration of Independence, Native Americans waged their own wars of independence and fought to defend their lands, lives, and freedom.

This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.

After the American Revolution, the British gave away Six Nations lands at the negotiating table in 1783. The loyalist Six Nations claimed territory in what would become Upper Canada in 1791. The chapter first examines the corruption scandal around Guy Johnson’s abuse of Indian department funds in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. It then follows the move of the Six Nations to territory that would become Upper Canada, where their presence posed questions about Indigenous sovereignty and the extent of imperial control. Joseph Brant tried to exploit his interstitial role both to accumulate personal power and to promote Indigenous sovereignty, even as the Grand River community struggled over the best economic strategy to adopt and many rejected Brant. Despite considerable ambiguity and the enduring importance of kinship-based political strategies, the eventual colonial response to the challenge of Indigenous claims would eventually be to seek to control the membership of Indigenous communities, while failing to protect Indigenous lands or investments, even as ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ increasingly became separate social categories. Attacks on the power of Indigenous peoples were linked rhetorically to attacks on corruption and on family bio-power.

The middle section of this book focuses primarily on the Bannister brothers, members of the minor gentry who both critiqued settler colonialism and yet simultaneously promoted and made careers from it. John William Bannister settled in Upper Canada after being demobilized from the navy at the end of the Napoleonic wars. John William’s interaction with the Six Nations helped launch the long career of the Bannisters as supposed experts in Indigenous affairs. This chapter discusses the struggle of John Brant and his cousin Robert Kerr to have the Grand River headlands returned to the Six Nations, and the efforts of John William and Saxe Bannister to support a Brant–Kerr embassy to London to that effect. The chapter also discusses the involvement of both William Johnson Kerr, a descendant of Joseph Brant, and John William Bannister in the controversial colonial career of Robert Gourlay in Upper Canada. It concludes by exploring the commission of inquiry proposed by Saxe Bannister into British relationships with the Six Nations, and the related efforts of the Bannister brothers to broker Indigenous expertise for colonial positions.

This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon with law because settler law denied Aboriginal land title and continues to deny Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing settler laws’ complicity with the colonial project, this chapter first examines how the fantasy of terra nullius was instantiated through laws which enabled the expropriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lands and waters. It then examines how First Nations people have been unduly affected by separate, discriminatory settler laws which governed almost all facets of their lives. Yet, Australia’s legal system to redress these injustices, constitutes new and evolving chapters in the nation’s legal history.

Taking a transnational and comparative approach, this chapter examines how a distinctive discourse of indigenous rights in Anglo settler states (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) threaded claims at the level of the state – about collective identity, treaty promises, land rights, and sovereign peoplehood – together with an international language of human rights. Indigenous claims to rights of identity and sovereignty were not considered human rights in the way that international institutions and civil society was employing the concept in the 1970s. That is, to protect individuals from violence and suffering at the hands of the state. Yet indigenous peoples in the Anglo settler states argued that their claims to collective rights were matters of concern to humanity. This chapter argues for an alternative genealogy of the 1970s – distinct from the earlier anti-colonial claims of leaders in the Third World and from the increasingly individualist emphases in other human rights campaigns – in which indigenous peoples in the heart of “the West” claimed collective, quasi-sovereign, and substate rights in part by deploying, and expanding, the language of human rights.

The Indigenous languages of North America once constituted the entire human linguistic landscape of the continent, and played a vital role in the early relationships between Indigenous peoples and European explorers and traders. In the modern national era, however, those languages have been relegated to a footnote, and the few efforts to include them in legislation and policy have done little to change their marginal status. In this chapter I examine the increasing prominence of linguistic issues in Indigenous political and cultural movements in North America, together with relevant aspirational declarations and policy statements. From this foundation, I argue that reconciliation, as a political and social process aimed at achieving greater parity and justice between Indigenous and settler peoples in North America, offers more promising grounds, ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically, for the management of language diversity in general, and suggest some specific policy directions for more detailed exploration.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.