The identity of indigenous political thought

The European colonization of the New World incited political discourse. In this chapter I examine the creative ways that four indigenous activists from North America and Australasia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adopted settler discourse about society, history and race in defence of their people. When identifying 'indigenous', 'native' or 'colonized' political thought, we can usc authorial and/or intellectual criteria. The latter is a flawed method. Trying to identify the indigcncity of ideas suggests that there are criteria fOr judging ideas to be 'truly indigenous' based on their continuity with pre-contact traditions, their political intentions and effects. In this chapter I will illustrate the benefits of identifying texts by the self-proclaimed indigeneity of their authors.