Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people's lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands in direct contravention to international norms.     

“There are mentalities that need changing”: Constructing personhood,formulating citizenship,and performing subjectivities on a settler colonial frontier

Settler colonial nations are sites of legal pluralism in which encounters between differing constructions of citizenship are formulated. These can involve customary, differentiated, and universal modes of citizenship. But the relationships amongst these are problematic, as are the ways they play out in the performance of subjectivities. To understand these dynamics, we need to think about ideas of personhood that are at their root. Based on research in Nunavik, this article focuses on how, through wildlife management, notions of personhood are being legally codified, particularly in relation to property. It examines the degree to which official ideas of personhood coincide with Indigenous ones in the construction of citizenship, and considers how these combine with property relations in the performance of subjectivities. Enforcing state wildlife regulations has altered the moral codes that define what persons are and determine how they should interact with one another. This research underscores the contradictions that arise as a result of codifying notions of personhood and citizenship in the context of settler colonialism.     

The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.     

“Whiteness” and natural resource management: let's talk about race baby,let's talk about sovereignty!

Issues of race and sovereignty are embedded in every cross‐cultural collaboration in natural resource management (NRM). This article aims to bring these issues to the forefront by incorporating the term whiteness. Whiteness enables a critique of the privileging of Western sovereignty and the so‐called objective and universal value of Western science. By reversing the gaze away from the colonised Other and onto systems descended from colonial authority and its inheritors, whiteness identifies how race privilege works. A critical whiteness lens provides an analytical and practical tool for decolonising NRM. We provide a case study of the South Australian Department of Environment and Water to consider how NRM professionals reproduce and deconstruct whiteness in nuanced ways, where (a) participants are defeated by Western sovereignty when whiteness is seen as normal or as the only way; (b) the privilege of Western sovereignty begins to be unsettled; and (c) the gaze is reversed. Thus,Western sovereignty is problematized, and solutions to persistent problems are found in collaboration. We argue that reversing the gaze is a process that opens spaces to co‐develop context specific solutions with Indigenous nations that decolonise cross‐cultural engagement in NRM and respect Indigenous sovereignty.     

Monitoring to Learn,Learning to Monitor: A Critical Analysis of Opportunities for Indigenous Community‐Based Monitoring of Environmental Change in Australian Rangelands

Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been a central feature in many international attempts to improve monitoring of and local adaptation to environmental change. Despite offering much promise, Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been underutilised in natural resource management in Australia, particularly within the remote, semi‐arid rangelands. This paper discusses contextual social and environmental factors that may help to explain this apparent deficiency, before critically analysing key stakeholder perceptions of the roles for, and challenges of monitoring in the Alinytjara Wilur ara Natural Resources Management region in the north‐west of South Australia. The analysis guides a discussion of responses to better integrate monitoring in general, and Indigenous community‐based monitoring in particular, into regional environmental management approaches. We argue that community‐based monitoring offers a range of benefits, including: better coordination between stakeholders; a heightened ability to detect and respond to climatic trends and impacts; the effective utilisation of Indigenous knowledge; employment opportunities for managing and monitoring natural resources; and improved learning and understanding of rangeland socio‐ecological systems. Identified opportunities for spatial and temporal community monitoring designed for the Alinytjara Wilur ara region could be of value to other remote rangeland and Indigenous institutions charged with the difficult task of monitoring, learning from, and responding to environmental change.     

Remixed methodologies in community-based film research

This paper explores how remixed methodologies can inform research in Indigenous communities using short films, combining archival and contemporary footage. Drawing on the lineages of Indigenous and feminist community-based research methodologies, we develop a three-part conception of remixed methodologies. We emphasize, first, the need to resituate the process of knowledge production within relationships between researchers and Indigenous community members. Second, we stress the importance of reconsidering the intended outputs of community-university collaboration to centre community goals. Third, we underscore how remixed methodologies can disrupt the narratives surrounding settler colonial archival resources, resituating historical footage with relation to contemporary Indigenous contexts. We apply this framework to our collaborative work with the Witsuwit'en Cultural and Language Authority and the Office of Aboriginal Education at British Columbia School District #54, combining archival and contemporary films to create Indigenous education resources. Specifically, we remixed footage of Witsuwit'en traditional activities from two 1927 National Museum of Canada films with contemporary interviews and footage of Witsuwit'en governance and land use activities. We highlight how making archival films relevant to contemporary Indigenous community goals required disrupting the conventions of scholarly authority, designing collaborative outputs to suit community aims, and resituating knowledge production within the context of Witsuwit'en resilience in the face of colonialism.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research

Indigenous methodologies are an alternative way of thinking about research processes. Although these methodologies vary according to the ways in which different Indigenous communities express their own unique knowledge systems, they do have common traits. This article argues that research on Indigenous issues should be carried out in a manner which is respectful and ethically sound from an Indigenous perspective. This naturally challenges Western research paradigms, yet it also affords opportunities to contribute to the body of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. It is further argued that providing a mechanism for Indigenous peoples to participate in and direct these research agendas ensures that their communal needs are met, and that geographers then learn how to build ethical research relationships with them. Indigenous methodologies do not privilege Indigenous researchers because of their Indigeneity, since there are many ‘insider’ views, and these are thus suitable for both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous researchers. However, there is a difference between research done within an Indigenous context using Western methodologies and research done using Indigenous methodologies which integrates Indigenous voices. This paper will discuss those differences while presenting a historical context of research on Indigenous peoples, providing further insights into what Indigenous methodologies entail, and proposing ways in which the academy can create space for this discourse.     

What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

Teaching Indigenous geography in a neo-colonial world

Australian universities are increasingly embedding Indigenous content and perspectives within curriculum to promote Indigenous cultural competency. We present teaching challenges in an Indigenous geography course designed to present an engaged, intercultural learning experience. We critically reflect on student evaluations, informal discussions and observations to complement scholarly debates. Course design and delivery was seen as stimulating and illuminating in terms of course content. While diversity of student cohorts, backgrounds and learning styles remain challenging, the romanticism of some students can override critical engagement with the geographical context of the course material and their positionality. There remains a tendency in both student constructions and the geographical literature to create an Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary that not only essentializes both, but can be culturally unsafe for Indigenous students. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students may share a sense of pessimism in confronting apparently unstoppable development and environmental destruction. We argue for scholarship around the fundamentally intercultural nature of coexistence to contextualize the spatial diversity of Indigenous lives in landscapes, currently obscured by dominant constructions of Indigeneity. Critical reflection on settler educators’ and learners’ positionalities with respect to neocolonial structures will help to transcend both essentialism and pessimism.     

‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’: settler voting rights and the elimination of the Indigenous demos in US Pacific territories

Settler colonialism eliminates Indigenous sovereignty, enthrones itself, and thereby makes Indigenous land ‘ours’. It may do this meta-politically, by absorbing ‘them’ into ‘us’. This article explores three recent lawsuits brought by settlers against Indigenous demoi in US Pacific territories. I show that in each lawsuit, settlers brandished a novel ‘tool of elimination’: individual voting rights. I trace how settlers wielded this tool to deliver a ‘one-two punch’, first condemning as ‘illiberal’ restrictive voting laws flowing from Indigenous sovereignty and then championing race-neutral laws that would in effect enthrone settlers. I show that courts hearing these cases were faced with choosing the appropriate ‘framing of justice’ – with whether the relevant rights-bearer was the universal individual voter or the ‘constitutionally prior’ Indigenous demos. Finally, I show that, because the courts ultimately framed these disputes as individual-rights cases, settlers extended control of meta-politics on the US Pacific frontier.     

“Why would they care?”: Youth,resource extraction,and climate change in northern British Columbia,Canada

Discussion about local decision making tends to overlook rural and remote youth engagement. Resource extractive industries are, however, fixtures in many rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in settler colonial British Columbia, Canada. These industries shape youths' perceived options for social and economic ventures when they are looking towards their futures. By engaging literature on climate change, settler colonialism, and critical Indigenous studies, and drawing on empirics from workshops conducted with youth from northern British Columbia, this paper explores how rural and remote northern and Indigenous youth engagement and perspectives can transform discussions on climate change and resource extraction. The paper documents how rural and northern youth have been engaged in environmental decision making, particularly in light of resource extraction. The paper also suggests that environmental decision making has at times been extractive itself. The paper concludes that when engaged meaningfully, youth desire to work collectively against social and environmental injustices.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

Displacing Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: the Naturalistic Gaze at Fraser Island World Heritage Area

A naturalistic gaze characterises protected area management in Australia, and reproduces the nature–culture dichotomy that is thoroughly criticised in geographical discourse. This naturalistic gaze is exacerbated by the compartmentalism of agency roles and responsibilities in protected areas. This paper maintains that many agencies, either unconsciously or deliberately, perpetuate the naturalistic gaze in a way that displaces Indigenous people from authentic engagement in protected area management. This paper provides an example of such marginalisation of Indigenous Australians in the world heritage area of Fraser Island, which is located in one of the most rapidly urbanising parts of Australia where Indigenous people have limited rights. The paper argues that a new process is required that networks people and place using concepts of nature/culture hybridity to avoid the current conceptual dualisms and the consequent marginalisation of Indigenous people. Such a dialectic and relational approach introduces contexts, meanings and associations that are excluded by current environmental and heritage paradigms that have the potential to marginalise many local voices. It proposes that those responsible for world heritage and protected area planning and management must fully realise or renominate these areas as landscapes in which people, and perhaps especially Indigenous Australians, are always and everywhere embedded and implicated in ‘natural’ environments. This will require changes in governance and in the predominantly technocratically-driven processes by which these areas are currently designated and managed.     

Incomplete Sovereigns: Unpacking Patterns of Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, both the Canadian and United States federal governments introduced modern land claim agreements as a first step forward in the states’ recognition of Indigenous goals for self-determination. Since then, both the United States and Canadian federal governments have incrementally expanded their recognition of Indigenous rights to include Indigenous goals for political self-determination. Yet, despite the fact that both countries began implementing broadly similar policies at approximately the same time, the degree to which Indigenous political and economic self-determination has been realized varies considerably both within and between the two countries. The variation in Indigenous self-governing power and authority suggests that the policy shift towards Indigenous self-determination is incomplete and has faced important barriers to implementation. This paper investigates two key aspects of this variation in Indigenous self-determination in the United States and Canada: (1) institutional histories embedded in geography, and (2) the temporal nature of policy frameworks. I argue that the full realization of Indigenous self-determination has been shaped in different ways and, ultimately, is limited by the intersection of embedded institutional legacies and federal political dynamics.     

Towards Equity in Indigenous Co‐Management of Protected Areas: Cultural Planning by Miriuwung‐Gajerrong People in the Kimberley,Western Australia

Delivery of the potential mutual benefits for biodiversity conservation and Indigenous peoples through protected area co‐management remains challenging, with partnership arrangements frequently delivering inequitable outcomes that marginalise Indigenous interests. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Miriuwung‐Gajerrong people initiated a Cultural Planning Framework to help achieve greater equity in planning for co‐management of the first Indigenous‐owned protected areas managed with the state. Analysis of the negotiation and delivery of this Indigenous‐controlled planning initiative concluded it made a key contribution in shaping an equitable intercultural space for ongoing negotiation of co‐management. A practitioners' model of related design concepts drawn from the analysis identified three factors of significance: a foundation platform of recognition of rights and interests; a set of effective organisations to support the roles of the key actors; and effective mechanisms for working together. The model proved robust when evaluated against international standards for best practice, suggesting it may be a useful tool for guiding better uptake of those standards. Interrogation of the two major theories underpinning these standards – common pool resource (CPR) and governance – demonstrated the theories are synergistic and inform different parts of the model. Both theories highlight the significance of Indigenous‐controlled planning. Attention to relational theory for interrogation of the intercultural space may help illuminate their relative importance. Further investigation of the potential of Indigenous‐controlled planning to build theory and practice in Indigenous co‐management of protected areas is recommended.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

Global Application of Indigenous Archaeology: Community Based Participatory Research in Turkey

What does Indigenous archaeology offer archaeologists who do not work on Native land, at Indigenous sites, or with Indigenous people? This article demonstrates the broad applicability of Indigenous archaeology and the way it can be utilized by archaeologists working in any locale. Through recent fieldwork in south central Turkey working with a non-indigenous community of local residents near the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, I demonstrate ways that the theories and methodology of Indigenous archaeology are a useful and relevant part of practice for archaeologists working in areas that are neither on Native land nor involve sites related to indigenous heritage. It also points to the need for further investigation into collaborative methods for the development of a set of best practices within archaeological and heritage management settings.     

Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt's Australian Exploration

Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.     

Dukarr lakarama: Listening to Guwak,talking back to space colonization

Guided by the Yolŋu songspiral of Guwak, in this collaboratively written paper we argue that the extension of earth-based colonization into space disrupts and colonises the plural lifeworlds of many Indigenous people who have ongoing connections with and beyond the sky. Listening to Guwak, we speak back to promoters of space colonization who frame their projects as harmless according to four core understandings. First, they assume that there are no people or other beings Indigenous to what they think of as ‘outer space’, and that none of the Indigenous people or beings who also live on earth have travelled to or inhabited this space. Second, they assume that space is dead or non-sentient in itself, and that it is incapable of fostering life. Third, they understand that space is cleanly separated from earth, meaning that what happens in space has no effect on earth, or vice versa. Fourth, because of these three assumptions, they do not identify any ethical objections to occupying and exploiting space.We follow Guwak as she undermines each of these assumptions, by moving through and as Sky Country. These learnings emphasize the presence and role of Law, order and negotiation in Sky Country; the active, animate, agential presence of beings in Sky Country; the connectivity and co-becoming-ness of earth and sky; and the ethical obligations to attend to and care for and as Sky Country. We contend that the argument applies to many worlds that intimately connect with, extend into (or beyond) what Western sciences call ‘outer space’. Indeed, we hope that in sharing Guwak we encourage broader conversations about Sky Country and its relations with other Indigenous worlds.