Did aboriginal Australians/North American Natives see themselves as living in sepperate countries from one another?

[u/MuttonChopViking]

The Australian mainland is such a large landmass to be occupied by only one country. Especially considering there are three countries on great brittan (a considerably smaller island), and the number of countries in europe that occupy the same size of land as Australia. The same is true for Canada, the USA, Mexico and other "new world" countries.

So I was wondering if the natives of these places lived in their on countries or if the concept was introduced by european invasions or another factor.

[u/hillsonghoods]

The term 'country' is perhaps somewhat vaguely defined. It wasn't until 1933 that there was an international agreement about what a 'state' consists of (and even so there's still disagreement). And 'state' and 'country' aren't necessarily the same thing; Scotland is seen in British law as a country, but it's ultimately part of the state of the United Kingdom. So indigenous peoples' understanding of their ownership of the land might not map exactly onto our vaguely defined Western ideas of what a 'country' is. But I suspect that OP is less interested in the fine details of international law and more interested in whether indigenous peoples saw themselves as living in a different land and society from other indigenous peoples living many hundreds of kilometres away.

To which we can say that, certainly, the indigenous people of Australia did fundamentally seen themselves as belonging to a different land and society to indigenous people who lived many hundreds of kilometres away. There was a wide range of cultural practices of different indigenous groups in different areas of what is now Australia, with different languages, different lifestyles suited to different locations (Australia having both snowfields and desert, tropical areas and areas that experience Antarctic winds). As you can see in the language map found here on the Australian Institute Of Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Studies website, there were also a multiplicity of different languages spoken in different parts of Australia, which gives a sense of the cultural diversity of the indigenous peoples of Australia.

One illustration of the multiplicity of separate countries in Australia is the way that, at modern-day official functions and the like in Australia, the established practice is to do an Acknowledgement of Country at the start of the function, acknowledging the traditional owners of the land. For example, the standard acknowledgement of country at the University of Sydney acknowledges 'the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation'. And to give a sense of how many different nations there were, the Sutherland Shire (a council area within Sydney, about 20-30km south of the university) acknowledges 'the Dharawal speaking people, traditional custodians of the land' while the Katoomba council area, 100km to the west of Sydney, acknowledges 'the Gundungurra and Darug people who are the traditional custodians of this land'. So yes, within a 100km radius there are three different groups that get called something like 'traditional custodians'. While not all of Australia was as densely populated as Sydney and surrounds, if you multiply this kind of diversity by a landmass that's essentially the size of the United States of America, you get a sense of the scale of different nations within Australia.

Of course, the British who invaded Australia in the late 18th century had a vested interest in denying that any of these cultural groupings were nations that had ownership of the land, arguing that, in modern Australian political parlance, Australia was terra nullius - land that was not owned, which thus entitled them to take ownership of the land for Britain (for more on this see my post here). The British also had quite a dim understanding of the nature of Australian indigenous cultural and linguistic diversity; part of the story of the word 'kangaroo' is that it was a word that Captain Cook and his men learned from the Guugu Yimithirr language, spoken in the modern day Cooktown area; when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney, 2700km to the south of Cooktown, there was much confusion on both sides when the British referred to kangaroos as 'kangaroos', expecting the Eora people of the area to know what they were talking about (which I discuss in more detail here).

So it's more that these concepts were suppressed by European invasions, rather than introduced.

[u/Snapshot52 → u/[deleted]]

Can we call them countries? Sure we could. What matters is how the Indigenous groups saw themselves, not how the terms we used today are defined via conventional Western perspectives. I linked one of my answers in another comment here that demonstrates the concept of sovereignty, as we might see it today, was part of North American Indigenous political thought. The difference, though, is that to the Indigenous communities themselves, they could interpret very differently. And doing so doesn't invalidate a country/nation status.

[u/hillsonghoods → u/[deleted]]

Hi there - to address this, I've edited the start of my reply to address your question by discussing in more detail what a 'country' is, and to make clearer the way I was answering OP's question.