Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law

Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law
Author: Irene Watson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317938372

This work is the first to assess the legality and impact of colonisation from the viewpoint of Aboriginal law, rather than from that of the dominant Western legal tradition. It begins by outlining the Aboriginal legal system as it is embedded in Aboriginal people’s complex relationship with their ancestral lands. This is Raw Law: a natural system of obligations and benefits, flowing from an Aboriginal ontology. This book places Raw Law at the centre of an analysis of colonisation – thereby decentring the usual analytical tendency to privilege the dominant structures and concepts of Western law. From the perspective of Aboriginal law, colonisation was a violation of the code of political and social conduct embodied in Raw Law. Its effects were damaging. It forced Aboriginal peoples to violate their own principles of natural responsibility to self, community, country and future existence. But this book is not simply a work of mourning. Most profoundly, it is a celebration of the resilience of Aboriginal ways, and a call for these to be recognised as central in discussions of colonial and postcolonial legality. Written by an experienced legal practitioner, scholar and political activist, AboriginalPeoples, Colonialism and International Law: Raw Law will be of interest to students and researchers of Indigenous Peoples Rights, International Law and Critical Legal Theory.

Aboriginal Women, Law and Critical Race Theory

Aboriginal Women, Law and Critical Race Theory
Author: Nicole Watson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2021-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030873277

This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.

The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws

The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws
Author: Australia. Law Reform Commission
Publisher: Australian Government Publishing Service
Total Pages: 556
Release: 1986
Genre: Aboriginal Australians
ISBN:

Detailed examination of the scope for recognition of customary laws through existing common law rules; human rights and problems of relativity of standards; contact experience; constitutional aspects; marriage and family structures; recognition of traditional marriage; protection and distribution of property; child custody, fostering and adoption; the criminal justice system; customary law offences; police investigation and interrogation; issues of evidence and procedure including unsworn statements, juries and interpreters; proof of customary law including scope of expert evidence; taking of evidence including group evidence, secrecy and privileged communications; customary methods of dispute settlement; special Aboriginal courts and justice schemes; relations with police; traditional hunting, fishing and gathering practices; relevant case law and legislation considered throughout.

Traditional, National, and International Law and Indigenous Communities

Traditional, National, and International Law and Indigenous Communities
Author: Marianne O. Nielsen
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816540411

This volume of the Indigenous Justice series explores the global effects of marginalizing Indigenous law. The essays in this book argue that European-based law has been used to force Indigenous peoples to assimilate, has politically disenfranchised Indigenous communities, and has destroyed traditional Indigenous social institutions. European-based law not only has been used as a tool to infringe upon Indigenous human rights, it also has been used throughout global history to justify environmental injustices, treaty breaking, and massacres. The research in this volume focuses on the resurgence of traditional law, tribal–state relations in the United States, laws that have impacted Native American women, laws that have failed to protect Indigenous sacred sites, the effect of international conventions on domestic laws, and the role of community justice organizations in operationalizing international law. While all of these issues are rooted in colonization, Indigenous peoples are using their own solutions to demonstrate the resilience, persistence, and innovation of their communities. With chapters focusing on the use and misuse of law as it pertains to Indigenous peoples in North America, Latin America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this book offers a wide scope of global injustice. Despite proof of oppressive legal practices concerning Indigenous peoples worldwide, this book also provides hope for amelioration of colonial consequences.

Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia

Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia
Author: Larissa Behrendt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

"This book looks at Indigenous peoples' contact with Anglo-Australian law, and deals primarily with the problems the imposed law has had in its relationship with Indigenous people in Australia. This is supplemented by comparative sections on Indigenous peoples' experience of imposed law in other settler jurisdictions such as NZ, Canada and the US. The book covers issues relating to sovereignty, jurisdiction and territorial acquisition; family law and child protection; criminal law, policing and sentencing; land rights and native title; cultural heritage, heritage protection and intellectual property; anti-discrimination law; international human rights law; constitutional law; social justice, self-determination and treaty issues."--From information provided by publisher.

Indigenous Legal Judgments

Indigenous Legal Judgments
Author: Nicole Watson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000401243

This book is a collection of key legal decisions affecting Indigenous Australians, which have been re-imagined so as to be inclusive of Indigenous people’s stories, historical experience, perspectives and worldviews. In this groundbreaking work, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have collaborated to rewrite 16 key decisions. Spanning from 1889 to 2017, the judgments reflect the trajectory of Indigenous people’s engagements with Australian law. The collection includes decisions that laid the foundation for the wrongful application of terra nullius and the long disavowal of native title. Contributors have also challenged narrow judicial interpretations of native title, which have denied recognition to Indigenous people who suffered the prolonged impacts of dispossession. Exciting new voices have reclaimed Australian law to deliver justice to the Stolen Generations and to families who have experienced institutional and police racism. Contributors have shown how judicial officers can use their power to challenge systemic racism and tell the stories of Indigenous people who have been dehumanised by the criminal justice system. The new judgments are characterised by intersectional perspectives which draw on postcolonial, critical race and whiteness theories. Several scholars have chosen to operate within the parameters of legal doctrine. Some have imagined new truth-telling forums, highlighting the strength and creative resistance of Indigenous people to oppression and exclusion. Others have rejected the possibility that the legal system, which has been integral to settler-colonialism, can ever deliver meaningful justice to Indigenous people.

Aboriginal Australia

Aboriginal Australia
Author: Colin Bourke
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780702230516

With an analysis of the traditional, colonial, and contemporary experiences of indigenous Australians, this study examines various facets of the lives of Aboriginal Australians and shows how their struggles enrich the Australian community as a whole. Insightful and engaging, this reference presents an investigation on the continual struggle facing Aboriginals to maintain a strong identity and heritage while actively participating in and contributing to the modern world.

Australian Native Title Anthropology

Australian Native Title Anthropology
Author: Kingsley Palmer
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1760461881

The Australian Federal Native Title Act 1993 marked a revolution in the recognition of the rights of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The legislation established a means whereby Indigenous Australians could make application to the Federal Court for the recognition of their rights to traditional country. The fiction that Australia was terra nullius (or ‘void country’), which had prevailed since European settlement, was overturned. The ensuing legal cases, mediated resolutions and agreements made within the terms of the Native Title Act quickly proved the importance of having sound, scholarly and well-researched anthropology conducted with claimants so that the fundamentals of the claims made could be properly established. In turn, this meant that those opposing the claims would also benefit from anthropological expertise. This is a book about the practical aspects of anthropology that are relevant to the exercise of the discipline within the native title context. The engagement of anthropology with legal process, determined by federal legislation, raises significant practical as well as ethical issues that are explored in this book. It will be of interest to all involved in the native title process, including anthropologists and other researchers, lawyers and judges, as well as those who manage the claim process. It will also be relevant to all who seek to explore the role of anthropology in relation to Indigenous rights, legislation and the state.

The Land is the Source of the Law

The Land is the Source of the Law
Author: C.F. Black
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2010-10-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136919732

The Land is the Source of Law brings an inter-jurisdictional dimension to the field of indigenous jurisprudence: comparing Indigenous legal regimes in New Zealand, the USA and Australia, it offers a ‘dialogical encounter with an Indigenous jurisprudence’ in which individuals are characterised by their rights and responsibilities into the Land. Though a relatively "new" field, indigenous jurisprudence is the product of the oldest continuous legal system in the world. Utilising a range of texts – films, novels, poetry, as well as "law stories" CF Black blends legality and narrative in order to redefine jurisprudentia in indigenous terms. This re-definition gives shape to the jurisprudential framework of the book: a shape that is not just abstract, but physical and metaphysical; a shape that is circular and concentric at the same time. The outer circle is the cosmology, so that the human never forgets that they are inside a universe – a universe that has a law. This law is found in the second circle which, whilst resembling the ancient Greek law of physis is a law based on relationship. This is a relationship that orders the placing of the individual in the innermost circle, and which structures their rights and responsibilities into the land. The jurisprudential texts which inform the theoretical framework of this book bring to our attention the urgent message that the Djang (primordial energy) is out of balance, and that the rebalancing of that Djang is up to the individual through their lawful behaviour, a behaviour which patterns them back into land. Thus, The Land is the Source of the Law concludes not only with a diagnosis of the cause of climate change, but a prescription which offers an alternative legal approach to global health.

Legal Australia-wide Survey

Legal Australia-wide Survey
Author: Christine Coumarelos
Publisher: Law and Justice Foundation
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: Justice, Administration of
ISBN: 0909136963

"The Legal Australia-Wide Survey (LAW Survey) provides the first comprehensive quantitative assessment across Australia of an extensive range of legal needs on a representative sample of the population. It examines the nature of legal problems, the pathways to their resolution, and the demographic groups that struggle with the weight of their legal problems." -- Law and Justice Foundation of N.S.W. website.