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This chapter addresses methodological pitfalls historians face when working on indigenous claim making. These problems include: a teleological understanding of dispossession; the paucity of evidence; the difficulty in assessing authorship when indigenous claims rely on colonial records; the confusion between sovereignty and property claims. This chapter also reconsiders the understanding of colonial history in the light of the recovered legal dialogue between indigenous and European peoples over centuries.

This book shows that from the moment European expansion commenced through to the 19th century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. Colonisation was countered not only by force but also by ideas. Indigenous peoples made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law which applies between peoples: that is, a kind of law of nations which was comparable to that being developed by Europeans. Confronted by indigenous claims, Europeans were forced to make rival claims. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonisation is, of course, well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonisation should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Indigenous claims show that a dialogue was being held between colonisers and colonised which can only be restored by staging all the participants and showing how they dealt with and reacted to each other.By enlightening the history of indigenous legal opposition to dispossession from the beginning of colonisation, this book will provide the general community with a means of engaging with the political challenges and responses posed by legal conflicts with indigenous peoples over the question of land.