Indigenous Resistance and State Responses

Wherever the British established white settler colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and Kenya, or expanded the territories of those acquired from other European powers, such as from the French in Canada and the Dutch in the Cape Colony, the Indigenous owners invariably made clear their resistance to British claims of sovereignty over their homelands.

While British settlers considered Indigenous land as a commodity that could be conquered, bought and sold, for the Indigenous owners it was the spiritual core of their being that defined who they were as a people. Whether or not Indigenous peoples were induced to make treaties with colonisers, as was the case in New Zealand, the Cape Colony and Canada, their connection to country remained paramount; indeed, the acceptance of treaties did not necessarily imply the ceding of lands to Indigenous peoples but the sharing of their resources. In the Australian colonies, where the British declined to conclude a treaty, the Indigenous people continued to point out that kinship, totem and country defined who they were as people. Across the settler colonial empire, Indigenous reaction to the invasion of their homelands was largely driven by their determination to force the settlers to observe protocols and treaties in relation to their country.

Resistance largely took the form of guerrilla warfare that was common to Indigenous societies: that is, it ranged between small-scale guerrilla warfare, which typically involved payback for failure to observe protocols, and larger- scale traditional militarism that the British recognised as being parallel to its own military strategies. In the Australian colonies, Aboriginal resistance ranged from payback killings for unauthorised abduction of Aboriginal women and small-scale seasonal guerrilla-style attacks on settler farmhouses. These included raids for British rations of flour, tea and potatoes, maiming sheep and cattle and taking maize crops, all in retribution for the loss of food resources from the settler occupation of their hunting grounds.^[388] In the Cape Colony, the well-armed Khoisan warriors carried out large-scale cattle raids and attacks on settler villages as well as conducted up-front battles with British soldiers. In New Zealand, Maori warriors led raids on settler villages and farmhouses, and, when under attack from a large force of British soldiers, they retreated to their pa, or forts, from which they repelled British assaults with singular success.^[389] Before the 1850s, Indigenous peoples' superior knowl­edge of the terrain often placed British forces at a disadvantage, with their limited access to horses and reliance on single-loading firearms.^[390] After the 1850s, however, as the British gained access to long-range repeating rifles, employed larger mounted forces and became more familiar with the terrain, they developed military strategies that were specifically designed to over­come Indigenous resistance. These included a ‘scorched earth' policy used against the Xhosa in the Cape Colony, ‘Flying Columns' of mobile infantry deployed in New Zealand to surround Maori pa, burning down Xhosa and Maori villages in both colonial sites, and, on Australasian frontiers that remained beyond the reach of the law, a strategy of massacre. These frontier wars, however, were often conducted within a framework of legal excep­tionalism in which the concept of legal procedure was modified to respond to Indigenous resistance. Principal among these strategies of legal exceptional­ism were martial law and paramilitary policing, including use of Indigenous forces.