The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results. For the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights. Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples' claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging.

"The Mana of the Maori is by water. No one, here, carrying the same thing that I'm carrying today." --Titi Tihu In living memory, before the Whanganui River became a tawny mass seeming to flow upside down, the river bed was clean stone and the water of the river "tasted like kowhai. The trees used to grow over the river and drop into the water, and the water tasted like kowhai." This is a book of many river people--a "hidden" prophet, living with over a thousand followers at a place now deserted; a Pakeha-Maori, making gunpowder using charcoal made from willows grown from cuttings taken from Napoleon's grave; a riverboat magnate, building a fiefdom on 'the Rhine of Maoriland'; a highly decorated soldier, fighting as a kupapa yet fighting for tino rangatiratanga; arsenic and flour poisoners--and always, the river itself.

History, heritage, and colonialism explores the politics of history-making and interest in preserving the material remnants of the past in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial society, looking at both indigenous pasts and those of European origin. Focusing on New Zealand, but also covering the Australian and Canadian experiences, it explores how different groups and political interests have sought to harness historical narrative in support of competing visions of identity and memory. Considering this within the frames of the local and national as well as of empire, the book offers a valuable critique of the study of colonial identity-making and cultures of colonisation. This book offers important insights for societies negotiating the legacy of a colonial past in a global present, and will be of particular value to all those concerned with museum, heritage, and tourism studies, as well as imperial history.