From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

Returning to that which was never lost: Indigenous Australian saltwater identities,a history of land claims and the paradox of return

In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of ‘urgent patience’ as resistance against ‘social death’, this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples.     

Kincentric Ecology,Species Maintenance and the Relational Power of Place in Northern Australia

This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology?     

Tools for the Disempowered? Indigenous Leverage Over Mining Companies

Rather than passively accepting development, some Indigenous communities have forced their demands into corporate decision-making. Accordingly, recognising and responding to community expectations becomes a matter of prudent strategy and ‘enlightened self-interest’. This paper examines the case of Century Zinc Mine in Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria where the miner undertook negotiations and reached agreement with local Indigenous communities. It was later held to account by communities concerned about insufficient implementation of this agreement. Discussion then explores the campaign against Jabiluka uranium mine in Australia's Northern Territory, especially why multinational miner Rio Tinto deferred to local community wishes surrounding development. These experiences show that Indigenous communities are most effective in bringing leverage over mining companies when they impact upon profit or future profit (often related to reputation with specific audiences). The parameters and consequent limitations of a company's responsiveness to community demands reinforce fundamental roles for the state as ultimate regulator and provider.     

Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross‐Cultural Research in Geography

Decolonising research in geography is part of a broader ‘reflexive’ process which continues to question the positivist status of ‘researcher as observer’. This paper contributes to this reflexive turn, drawing on the particular experiences of a cross‐cultural Honours thesis. The paper is pursued through a parallel journey involving a non‐Indigenous researcher (and author of the cross‐cultural Honours thesis) engaging Indigenous research 1 with interpretative insight from an Indigenous adviser or ‘on‐looker’. The methodological difficulties revealed by the parallel journey are emphasised to highlight both the complexities and reflexive possibilities of cross‐cultural research but also to consider potential institutional and pedagogic implications that stem from the experience. One of the substantial findings of the paper is that, by linking Indigenous community priorities to research and coursework, conventional (and often unequal) research relations are minimised and colonising tendencies reduced. By challenging the conventional way that cross‐cultural research is conceived, and the way that institutional practices and research frameworks are implemented, geographers can continue their prolonged and complex efforts at decolonisation of the field and their own practices.     

A Fluid Sea in the Mariana Islands: Community Archaeology and Mapping the Seascape of Saipan

This paper applies both a community archaeology and seascape approach to the investigation of the sea and its importance to the Indigenous community on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands in western Oceania. It examines data collected during a community project including archaeological sites, oral histories, lived experiences and contemporary understandings of both tangible and intangible maritime heritage to explore Indigenous connections with the sea and better define the seascape. What the seascape of Saipan conveys in the larger sense is the true fluidity of the sea. In this instance fluidity has more than one connotation; it refers to the sea as both a substance and an idea that permeates and flows into all aspects of Indigenous life. Chamorro and Carolinian people of Saipan identify themselves as having an ancestral connection with the sea that they continue to maintain to this day as they engage in daily activities within their seascape.     

‘Our home,our way of life’: spiritual homelessness and the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada

In this article, I examine the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous home and homelessness through a case study of increasing visible homelessness in two northern Canadian communities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research on Indigenous homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik, two regional centres in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, I suggest that Indigenous experiences of homelessness are at once collective and immediate. In particular, I draw on the concept of ‘spiritual homelessness’ (Keys Young 1998) to examine the multiple scales of homelessness experienced among northern Indigenous people. Research participants highlight several key elements of rapid sociocultural change that have an enduring impact on a collective sense of home and belonging, and play integral roles in shaping the experiences of homeless Indigenous people. Social and material exclusion, breakdowns in family and community, detachment from cultural identity, intergenerational trauma and institutionalisation are all woven throughout the personal narratives of homelessness articulated by research participants. I argue that the alleviation of Indigenous homelessness in the NWT depends on a decolonising agenda that specifically addresses contemporary colonial geographies and their expressions in the key institutions in Indigenous peoples' lives.     

Vacuums and Veils: Engaging with Statistically ‘Invisible’ Indigenous Population Dynamics in Yamatji Country,Western Australia

Although much is known about broad trends in Australian Indigenous geographies, particular aspects of Indigenous spatiality continue to be rendered invisible by standard statistical measures. The national census, for example, only registers moves at one and five year intervals. Any mobilities enacted within these timeframes are not measured. Yet these statistically ‘un‐captured’ mobility processes are often integral to Indigenous lived experiences and have a significant dialectical relationship to government service delivery processes. Understanding these population dynamics is therefore a critical, though underdeveloped, consideration within geographic enquiry and contemporary debates about State and Federal Indigenous policy directions and initiatives. This paper presents qualitative research findings regarding local experiences and perceptions of Indigenous spatiality in Yamatji country, Western Australia. Within this grounded framework, the paper builds on existing literature by drawing out some of the common spatial, temporal and demographic characteristics, or dimensions, of statistically un‐captured Indigenous mobility processes. With this discursive, albeit generalised and malleable, typology established, the analysis turns to a reflection on some of the methodological and conceptual complexities of measurement, interpretation, and translation of these mobility processes across the policy‐research nexus.     

Indigenous health organizations,Indigenous community resurgence,and the reclamation of place in urban areas

Research around the world has been nearly unanimous about the positive impacts of Indigenous‐led health organizations on Indigenous peoples' qualitative experiences in health care, in the face of often negative experiences in non‐Indigenous‐led health care settings. Urban environments, including health care environments, are areas of increasing attention with regard to Indigenous peoples' health in Canada. In this study, which took place in the northern city of Prince George, British Columbia, 65 Indigenous community members and health services workers participated in interviews and focus groups, describing their experiences with urban Indigenous‐led health organizations—defined in this study as non‐governmental organizations that prioritize the values and practices of local Indigenous communities. Employing perspectives on place and relationships drawn from Indigenous critical theory and Indigenous community resurgence to analyze the findings of this qualitative study leads to a focus on how relationships impact and can even constitute places, enabling new understandings of the roles of Indigenous‐led health organizations in urban Indigenous community resurgence.     

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.     

Schomburgk’s Chook: the entangled South Australian collections of a German naturalist

Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.     

The Nick-Squared Test for Indigenous Education’s “Goodness of Fit” with Environmental Education in Canada

This article explores the personal experiences using a currere model of two new academics and their investigations into the relationships between Indigenous education and environmental education. It outlines the challenges of Indigenous education within the contexts of higher education in the Coast Salish region with a specific focus on the Canadian role in Indigenizing education. We suggest that an intervention in our current practices is necessary in light of the ongoing violations of the Universal Declaration of Human rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We provide language and insights into cultural schizophrenia, authenticity, and the complexities of Indigenization.     

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.     

Settlers unsettled: using field schools and digital stories to transform geographies of ignorance about Indigenous peoples in Canada

Geography is a product of colonial processes, and in Canada, the exclusion from educational curricula of Indigenous worldviews and their lived realities has produced “geographies of ignorance”. Transformative learning is an approach geographers can use to initiate changes in non-Indigenous student attitudes about Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. This study explores non-Indigenous student perspectives concerning a field school and digital storytelling as transformative experiences within the context of an “Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Management” course; they were asked to reflect on their course experience. Findings indicate that students found both to be effective and important steps in the transformation of their own worldviews.     

Is cultural democracy possible in a museum? Critical reflections on Indigenous engagement in the development of the exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum

Recent museological scholarship emphasises visitor participation and democratic access to cultural heritage as key to securing the ongoing relevance and future sustainability of museums. But do legacies of colonialist collecting practices and hierarchical conventions of representation in museums afford the possibility of genuine cultural democracy? This paper explores this question via detailed analysis of the Encounters exhibition, developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the British Museum and promoted as an unprecedented partnership between the institutions and Indigenous Australian communities. Drawing on an extensive and emerging literature on museums, community engagement, participation and democracy, in tandem with analysis of public critiques and Indigenous responses to the exhibition, the paper suggests that the extent of Indigenous agency within the collaboration fell short of the articulated goals of the project. It concludes that the concept of maximal participation and release of agency to communities of interest may be difficult to achieve within existing museum frameworks.     

Ways of Belonging: Reconciliation and Adelaide's Public Space Indigenous Cultural Markers

As an arguably ‘post colonial’ society, Australia is evolving its particular identity and sense of self, but reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples remains a significant political and cultural issue. Social inclusion or marginalisation is reflected in the construct of the civic landscape and this paper traces and contextualises public space Indigenous representation or ‘cultural markers’, since the 1960s in Adelaide, South Australia, the Kaurna people's land. This paper identifies social phases and time periods in the evolution of the ways in which Indigenous people and their culture have been included in the city's public space. Inclusion of Indigenous peoples in civic landscapes contributes not only to their spiritual and cultural renewal and contemporary identity, but also to the whole community's sense of self and to the process of reconciliation. This has the potential to provide a gateway to a different way of understanding place which includes an Indigenous perspective and could, symbolically, contribute to the decolonisation of Indigenous people. An inter‐related issue for the colonising culture is reconciliation with the Indigenous nature of the land, in the sense of an intimate sense of belonging and connectedness of spirit through an understanding of Indigenous cultural landscapes, an issue which this paper explores. The paper also sets out suggestions for the facilitation of further Indigenous inclusion and of re‐imagining ways of representation.     

Mission-Based Indigenous Production at the Weipa Presbyterian Mission, Western Cape York Peninsula (1932–66)

Previous research on remote nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Indigenous missions in northern and central Australia point to their often tenuous existence and the complex nature of engagements between Christian Missionaries and Indigenous people. This paper explores the contribution and significance of Indigenous production of wild foods in the context of one such settlement located at Weipa on Cape York Peninsula, north eastern Australia. It is premised on the assertion that investigation of the economies of these often remote settlements has the potential to reveal much about the character of cross-cultural engagements within the context of early mission settlements. Many remote missions had a far from secure economic basis and were sometimes unable to produce the consistent food supplies that were central to their proselytizing efforts. In this paper it is suggested that Indigenous-produced wild foods were of significant importance to the mission on a day-to-day basis in terms of their dietary contribution (particularly in terms of protein sources) and were also important to Indigenous people from a social and cultural perspective. We develop this argument through the case study of culturally modified trees that resulted from the collection of wild honey.     

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.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Memory as Archaeology: An Experience of Public Archaeology in the Atacama Desert

Conducting archaeological projects in areas inhabited by Indigenous Communities who dislike both excavations and archaeologists leads to an ethical conundrum, one requiring a reconsideration of the research methodologies utilized in these settings, and a turn toward Public Archaeology as a means to find alternative pathways. This article describes a research project conducted in the Indigenous Atacameño Community of Peine, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, where, through a principal methodology of Participatory Action Research, it became possible to explore the past of this community in ways that were both meaningful and valid for its members. The results drawn from this experience differ markedly from traditional archaeological approaches (i.e. excavations, analysis of material culture), both in terms of the nature of the knowledge recovered and the temporal depth achieved. In this particular instance, collective remembrance and embodied memory featured prominently in accounting for the past of Peine.