| Summary: | This book provides the first comprehensive study of Indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia. It puts the idea of constitutional recognition into broader historical and theoretical perspective. After telling a wide-ranging history of Australian debates on Indigenous recognition, the book develops a theoretical account that sees constitutional recognition in terms of Indigenous peoples' struggles to have their identities respected within the settler constitutional order. When studied through Indigenous peoples' historical and contemporary struggles for recognition as citizens and peoples, constitutional recognition emerges not as a postcolonial endpoint but as an ongoing process of renegotiating the basic Indigenous - settler political relationship. With first peoples continuing to press for the recognition of their sovereignty and peoplehood, the future of their relationship with the Australian state is best captured in the ideal of federalism.
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