Historicising Indigenous Political Thought: The Location of Sovereignty

Writing about Indigenous sovereignty says much about how settler colonial governance affects Indigenous sovereignty practices, but less about the relationships among Indigenous Australians themselves. If Indigenous practices of sovereignty are ‘autonomous', they are difficult to observe and historicise. However, we can examine the self-positioning remarks of Indigenous political actors, and we can read relevant ethnography. This paper highlights self-positioning remarks by William Cooper (1861-1941) and Neville Bonner (1922-1999). It then uses ethnography to contextualise a report by Lowitja O’Donoghue (1932-2024). Indigenous political thought is about both the internal order of the Australian states and changes in the Indigenous domain.