Abstract
European colonisation played a fundamental role in Indigenous marine dispossession and the entrenchment of unequal and state-dominated marine governance regimes across diverse bodies of water. This article charts this process, utilising examples from waters and communities across the globe that experienced disparate forms of European colonisation and marine dispossession. These examples span between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries and traverse waters from the Caribbean to Oceania. This long historical context is necessary to interrogating how colonisation has produced unequal access to marine space, resources, and decision-making in different ways through different methods across time and space, which continues to this day. One of the article’s main contentions is that marine dispossession played out vastly differently across each locale and that it is only with deep and highly localised historical study that the heterogenous impacts and ongoing legacies of colonisation on the marine rights, governance, and access of specific Indigenous Peoples and local communities can begin to be grappled with. While the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to marine spaces and resources have received some affirmation within recent international legal instruments, including the protection of customary marine tenure and access to aquatic resources, there continues to be key constraints surrounding the definitions, representations, and jurisdictions of Indigenous or ‘customary’ marine rights as they have been codified or ‘recognised’ within national and interstate frameworks. This has led to fundamental challenges that need to be navigated time and time again in order to attain, claim, or protect Indigenous and ‘customary’ marine jurisdictions. As this article outlines, the emergence of these issues is intrinsically tied to the colonisation of terrestrial and marine spaces. To understand these ongoing struggles, we need to pay close attention to the deep entanglements of law, colonialism, and marine rights in the past and present.
Highlights
The author wishes to make it explicit that he is not Indigenous and neither does he represent the perspectives of or claim to speak for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, or representative groups
The author is speaking from Glasgow, Scotland, as an historian undertaking historical research into British colonisation and its impact on coastal communities, marine space, and ocean governance
The exercising of Indigenous and customary marine rights remains subject to the ongoing regulation, ‘toleration’, and promotion of the state
Summary
There needs to be a highly localised and nuanced understanding of the very real impact that colonialism had and continues to have on the laws, recognition, and practices of coastal communities in diverse regions across the globe This is a complex process that has developed over centuries, embedding layer upon layer of Indigenous dispossession and non-Indigenous presumption of rights within highly specific contexts across modern governance frameworks. As this occurred differently across distinctive times and spaces, deep and comprehensive historical interrogation is needed to grapple with how this process played out in specific waters and how this has given rise to disparate perspectives and ambiguities on the ground and at sea that exist in tension and often in contradiction, predominantly to the detriment of Indigenous Peoples and local communities Before delving into this examination, we must remember that while the mobilisation of law was a fundamental component of colonisation and the extension of colonial authority over Indigenous lands and bodies, it was only one element of the multifaceted structures of oppression and dispossession that facilitated European colonisation.
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