Sovereign Signatures: Australian First Nations Petitions
- Publisher:
- Routledge
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies, 2024, pp. 333-351
- Issue Date:
- 2024
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trish Luker, Sovereign Signatures for Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies - revised FINAL.docx | Accepted version | 102.55 kB |
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Australian Indigenous peoples have often used legal documentary practices—including letters, petitions, statements and treaties—as strategies to assert sovereign rights. These documents have often taken both legal and artistic form and have often included signatures. This chapter examines several Australian Indigenous authored petitions and statements, including the 1846 Petition of the Free Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land to Queen Victoria, the petitions and letters written by the Aboriginal people living at Coranderrk mission in the 1870s, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, the Barunga Statement and, most recently, the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Each of these documents employs Indigenous sacred knowledge, in the form of art, and each includes signatures. When First Nations people produce legal documents, collective sovereignty is performed and represented in the artistic expression of First Nations law. The chapter investigates the unique and innovative ways that signatures are mobilised as validation signs intended to transform written and artistic documents into legal actions. I argue that the petitioners’ signatures can be understood not only as identity signs of the individual signatories, but also as signs of collective sovereignty, representing the ancient jurisdictions of First Nations law that pre-exists the Australian state.
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