Treaties, Agreement Making and the Recognition of Indigenous Customary Polities (original) (raw)

Treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others during pre-colonial, colonial and modern times has, to varied extents, required the recognition of Indigenous customary polities. In this chapter we investigate some instances of treaty and agreement making between Indigenous people and others, with the purpose of discussing critically the modernday relevance of customary authority and legitimacy in modern Aboriginal political formations within the Australian nation-state. Some recent studies in history, and in legal and political thought apposite to the problem of contested sovereignty and governmental arrangements, have drawn our attention to inventive ways of considering colonial and postcolonial relationships and expressions of legitimate authority beyond the nineteenth-century confines of the nation-state doctrine.