The 2007 adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples altered the political landscape for Aboriginal peoples and governments. At a national level, a lengthy series of legal decisions in countries such as Brazil, Norway, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have redefined indigenous rights before the law. In many countries, the intersection of indigenous rights, indigenous legal systems, and the legal values and structures of newcomer societies have moved front and center in national political debates. Native Claims is an important contribution to this debate, because it connects what is typically seen as a contemporary development with the historical processes of colonization.

In the introduction to this fine collection of essays, Saliha Belmessous argues, “The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is, of course, well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Whether in North or South America, Africa or Australasia, indigenous peoples made claims to territory and forced Europeans to make rival claims, from the moment European expansion commences in the fifteen century through the final great expansion of the nineteenth century”(3). This is a valuable perspective, particularly because it illustrates the degree to which indigenous people understood the motivations, the European obsession with land and territorial control, and the legal systems of the newcomers.

Belmessous makes a particular contribution in describing the relevance of understanding indigenous concepts of land and territoriality in the context of European concepts of sovereignty, property, and the like. Her introductory chapter, rather than simply summarizing the articles that make up the collection, is a thoughtful and comprehensive discussion of both the historical processes involved in bridging indigenous and newcomer legal traditions and the historiographical challenges associated with understanding early native claims. She also makes clear the indigenous understandings of the intersection of their and European laws and practices. As she concludes, “Our book shows that colonization was opposed not only by force but also by ideas, often by ideas that were easily translated into European discourse, ideas that drew from European discourse, or ideas that were generated precisely from cross-cultural contacts”(15).

Collections of essays are typically diverse intellectual resources, with the contributions varying greatly in quality, and with editors struggling to shoehorn disparate pieces into an allegedly single intellectual contribution. This is not an issue with Native Claims, which has assembled the work of a truly impressive group of scholars. The collection, no doubt through the guidance of the editor, is unusually consistent, both in quality and overall adherence to the central theme. The contributions range widely across the subject field. Lauren Benton studies imperial claims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing particularly on the lingering influence of Roman law. Jovita Baber, in contrast, examines contemporaneous indigenous rhetoric about the law and land rights in New Spain, arguing that “rather than being evidence of native people's reality, legal documents reveal native people's ingenuity and agency”(57). Rolena Adorno explores Andean encounters with Spanish colonial law, whereas Andrew Fitzmaurice shifts the focus northward to look at the claims introduced by the Powhatan. Belmessous's contribution examines the Wabanaki interaction with French and English legal systems, whereas Craig Yirush considers representations to the British crown by Native Americans. Mark Hickford's study of Maori property rights in the transformative period 1840–60 shifts the collection's focus to New Zealand. The study by Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell documents the use of political petitions by Aborigines to represent their interests to government in Australia. Christopher Hilliard explores the unique operations of the Native Land Court in New Zealand. Kristin Mann's study of Lagos in West Africa shows that debates over land tenure were, as in other parts of the world, influenced by the interaction of indigenous and European traditions. The collection concludes with an afterword by Duncan Ivison, a fascinating philosophical examination of the normative influence of historical circumstances on contemporary legal and political challenges. The framing essays—by Belmessous and Ivison—are foundational pieces that deserve international attention. The contributions by Baber and Mann provide particularly original insights, but it does a disservice to the uniform strength of the chapters to signal out several for specific praise.

Native Claims is one of those rare books that change the way we think about the past. The collection makes it clear that historians have underestimated indigenous intellectualism and legal contributions, even as they struggled to document indigenous agency in the face of European encroachment. It adds nuance and depth to the appreciation of indigenous resistance and of their ability and determination to defend their land and territorial rights, both in terms of their concepts of law and appropriate processes and with regard to the legal and political systems of newcomers. By taking a broad approach, and moving beyond the standard focus on the British or Spanish Empires, the book highlights the actions and strategies of the indigenous people in the face of European encroachment around the world. Native Claims challenges historians of Indigenous–newcomer relations to reconsider their most fundamental assumptions about indigenous peoples, their law, resistance, claims, and the very nature of Indigenous–newcomer encounter.