Over the last fifteen years or so, the history of the governance of Indigenous people in British settler colonies has become a favorite topic for scholars. Karen O'Brien's Petitioning for Land joins this body of work, exploring petitions submitted by Indigenous people in Australia, North America, and Aotearoa/New Zealand to colonial authorities. O'Brien's temporal framework ranges from the early American colonial period to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she also provides an overview of contemporary petitioning.

According to O'Brien, petitions are worth studying because they capture a range of Indigenous peoples’ voices and experiences with colonialism, that of their “strategic communications, negotiations, persuasion, and intervention elected by First Peoples in the pursuit of autonomy and legal justice” (4). The book draws on sources such as the manuscripts of petitions, newspaper accounts, parliamentary discussions, treaties, material culture (paintings that commemorate petitions and Australian Indigenous bark petitions), as well as secondary studies by historians and legal scholars. In O'Brien's eyes, this wide-ranging collection also provides clear evidence of Indigenous peoples’ agency in dealing with a myriad of problems that they encountered. Land rights, as O'Brien's evidence demonstrates, were a key focus of many petitions. Even in colonies or settler nation-states where treaties were negotiated with Indigenous communities, the fact that such agreements either were not respected or were not conducted equitably (or both) made petitioning an essential tool for Indigenous people. Petitions, though, ranged beyond land: they addressed settler violence, Indigenous peoples’ poverty as settler encroachment threatened their livelihoods, child removal, and, in certain contexts (such as twentieth-century Australia), Indigenous peoples’ claims to civil rights.

By drawing attention to petitions, O'Brien adds an important layer to our understanding of Indigenous-settler relationships, demonstrating that these were dynamic and continuously contested by Indigenous people. Foregrounding petitions also provides us with additional windows into Indigenous peoples’ lives and their desire to articulate their experiences of settler colonialism. It helps that O'Brien includes lengthy quotes from a number of petitions, thus providing us with valuable texts from which we can analyze Indigenous voices. She provides clear evidence that petitioning can be an important means by which to understand Indigenous activism on a range of important issues.

Yet while O'Brien's work raises many important questions, not all of them are answered as fully as they might be. For one, she does not explore the petition itself as a political genre and text that has a long history in Britain, one brought to colonial contexts. How might we understand Indigenous peoples’ use of a form of address that they may well have adopted from colonizers? Presumably such was the case but O'Brien tells us little about Indigenous self-government prior to European contact. How did Indigenous people adopt, negotiate with, subvert, or even change this genre? Obviously they found it useful but how did it compare to the political rhetoric and addresses used by Indigenous nations in, for example, northeastern North America, to address both each other and Europeans? An even larger question is that of the tricky nature of writing comparative histories, one with which I have great sympathy (having done so myself) but which scholars need to approach with caution. In a relatively short book (the text is only 160 pages), how useful is it to cover so many colonies, and nation-states, not to mention four centuries? While it is helpful to know that Indigenous people in these different contexts used petitions for similar reasons, I am not sure that we gain much more than that point, one that O'Brien repeats throughout the book but does not probe deeply. Attempting to cover such a wide-ranging landscape ends up draining the particular places and times it covers of their historical specificity; the reader is left wishing for more detail about, for example, the very different Indigenous nations and communities that it covers. It also would be helpful to know if Indigenous petitioners, or their supporters, were aware of the history of the strategy or had been in contact with contemporaries using them. Comparative histories get us only so far: seeing connections can be even more helpful.

The book also demonstrates another challenge of attempting such wide-ranging coverage, that of being well versed in the relevant histories and historiographies. We hear little about the role of missionaries and other humanitarians, for example, in helping (or hindering) petitions, even though there is now a very large and complex literature on individuals and organizations, one that includes Indigenous missionaries and secular leaders. As well, contrary to O'Brien's dismissal of agriculture, not all Indigenous communities rejected it: Canadian historian Sarah Carter's path-breaking Lost Harvests (1990) demonstrates that Plains’ people agricultural success was stymied by settler officials. Moreover, her discussion of treaties tends to be partial and overly sweeping, overlooking, for example, the more lengthy history of treaties of peace and friendship in North America. In her indictment of Europeans’ motives and practices in treaty making, I think O'Brien is too quick to dismiss their significance to Indigenous people, one that persists (at least in Canada) today.

I also wondered why the book does not include images, such as graphs, charts, and maps, that would help readers keep track of the many petitions O'Brien has uncovered, or why there are no reproductions of the petitions themselves (although the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petition is reproduced on the book's cover, it is so small that it is impossible to decipher the words or signature). Finally, the book could have used a much closer copyedit: there are a number of incomplete sentences or ones that are awkwardly worded. While O'Brien is to be commended for the extensive primary-source research she has conducted, we now need more nuanced and historically grounded explorations of these important documents.