Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920

Abstract

This book of essays, the product of a workshop at the University of Sydney, vividly demonstrates how indigenous peoples around the globe resisted European colonization and contested their dispossession. These essays uncover the full range of sophisticated native arguments that were comparable to prevailing European legal arguments. European justification for colonization, however, was not based on their own legal principles but was simply a response to indigenous claims. Following Saliha Belmessous's succinct introduction, which arranges the diverse essays into a coherent whole, Lauren Benton, in a fascinating study of controversy between Spain and Portugal, examines their claims through treaty, discovery, and possession and insists that the territory was acquired not just through Iberian diplomacy but by indigenous strategies. R. Jovita Baber analyzes the legal rhetoric of the Tlaxcalans in New Spain and maintains that the natives used petitions “creatively” and “flexibly” to advance their claims (p. 19). Rolena Adorno's chapter is on the legal chronicle of the Spanish conquest of Peru, written in the seventeenth century by the Andean Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Poma de Ayala challenged Spanish control over Peru because Spain had not conquered it and demanded the restoration of Andean sovereignty “as an act of Christian restitution” (p. 11).

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