During the Spanish conquest of the New World, Spaniards were legally obligated to pronounce a set of statements that, according to their legal system, would entitle them to the conquest of the new lands they encountered. This statement they would pronounce was called requerimiento, or demand. The aborigines had no capacity to understand the language of the demand or the concepts it used. As a result, they couldn’t access or not to it in any meaningful way. But Spaniards still considered the locals obligated to abide by its terms once they heard it.
Today’s land acknowledgements are exactly like that. In the images above, you can see a land acknowledgement used by an Australian writer as an opening statement of her novel. Australian aborigines did not have the concepts of nation and sovereignty. The writer’s insistence on calling them “nations” is actually quite disrespectful. It’s very similar to the Spanish requerimiento because it uses the aborigines as props or mannequins to achieve self-serving purposes.
This is supposed to be a historical novel but now I don’t know if I want to read it because the author’s knowledge of history is scant.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Australian aborigines did not have the concepts of nation and sovereignty”
I’d never heard of Australian aboriginal groups being referred to as ‘nations’ before…. I wonder if that’s normal or a recent NAmerican import…..
Some groups in the Americas did have something sort of like proto-states (not always in the European sense) so it makes some sense in that context (though it is extended to groups who had no concept of nation or sovereignty) I’m not aware of any Canadian group that had something like a proto-state… I could be wrong but even the most materially well-off were pretty far away from that so ‘First Nations’ always sounded a bit suspect…..
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Australians have gone off the deep end in more ways than one. Pity because what a great country and it’s being pissed away like this.
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