How does the relationship between Indigenous rights litigation and academic disciplines such as history and anthropology shape those disciplines and the law? How are historical narratives unsettled when challenged in the context of rights disputes? Part history and part survey of legal and theoretical developments concerning Indigenous peoples and their rights, Arthur Ray's Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History provides a context for thinking through these questions.

There is much reason to commend this work to specialist and nonspecialist readers alike. As a work of history, it provides an introductory account of the processes of dispossession in four settler-colonial states: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, as well as South Africa, which perhaps does not fit the “settler-colonial” paradigm snugly, but whose inclusion Ray convincingly justifies. As a work of contemporary history, the book tracks the development of processes designed to redress Indigenous dispossession in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a work of intellectual history, it identifies the intellectual trends that shaped the historical narratives and anthropological accounts that were brought before courts and tribunals to explain evidence, or as evidence in their own right. Although the treatment of each region and topic is cursory—as Ray himself notes in the introduction, the breadth of coverage requires a sacrifice in depth—there is considerable value in the comparative analysis that this approach makes possible.

Ray begins with the Indian Claims Commission in the United States created in the 1950s. This was the first body designed specifically to resolve outstanding disputes between Indigenous peoples and the nation states who claimed their lands. The other countries subsequently analyzed followed suit in the decades that followed by forming their own legal mechanisms for redress. Tracing the cross-border exchange of ideas on the development of these processes, Ray shows how shared sets of beliefs—about Indigenous peoples, history, law, and the nature of the state and its relation to colonized peoples—travelled throughout the former British Empire. Each jurisdiction had path-dependent characteristics, with differences developing in part because of the varying academic theories that informed the framing of the evidentiary basis for national proceedings and in part because the specific procedures and mandates of these adjudicative bodies in turn shaped the academic debates they engendered. Courts and tribunals became sites for the contestation of competing theories of anthropology and history, with the parameters of debate shaped by the requirements of the law and the nature of the decision-making body.

Ray illustrates how the theoretical orientations of academics shaped the way courts and tribunals understood the evidence before them and, in turn, how academic theories were reworked in light of legal proceedings. The adversarial nature of the proceedings at the United States Claims Commission, for example, drove a wedge between anthropological camps, which exacerbated their differences and entrenched their mutual opposition. Approaches to history were most contentious in New Zealand, where reports of the Waitangi Tribunal led to the “history” wars and now-familiar debates over presentist histories. Historical narratives became particularly contentious when efforts were made to understand history from Indigenous perspectives. This should come as no surprise. Colonial power and the nation state are held together by narratives defining the history of the state, its legitimacy, and the “people” who make up its constituent political community. Challenging these narratives creates cracks in the foundation of that power.

One of the most compelling aspects of this work is not solely the historical account itself, but the question of what lessons regarding how the relationship between law and history impact historical scholarship and legal doctrine moving forward. With the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples applying pressure on domestic legal regimes as Indigenous peoples use the language of self-determination to express their long-standing claims, legal doctrine is now requiring historians to ask different sets of questions. In the past decade, legal pluralism has been an increasingly popular frame taken up by legal historians, and this theoretical change has provided enlightening new ways to conceptualize colonial spheres and the relationships between colonized peoples and colonial powers. As courtroom actors begin to assess Indigenous claims not in light of property rights, but of jurisdiction grounded in indigenous legal orders, both law and history will be pushed to work through a lens of legal pluralism. As Ray's work shows, these shifts will occur through the iterative interaction of law and history.

Those looking for an introduction to legal and historical issues in settler colonial states will find in this book a comprehensively researched and accessibly written account. Specialists familiar with how these issues have played out in one or two of the jurisdictions so treated will find the comparative aspect helpful, and will find that it may spark new sets of questions for their own work.