Towards Decolonisation of Australia's Protected Area Management: the Nantawarrina Indigenous Protected Area Experience

Management of Australia's National Parks and Protected Areas originally developed according to the United State's ‘Yellowstone’ model. Aimed primarily at preserving ‘wilderness’ areas, this form of protected area management has excluded indigenous habitation and land management, effectively colonising these landscapes. Since the 1980s indigenous exclusion from protected area management has been contested in the public sphere. Indigenous peoples have become involved in protected area management in various ways, such as the joint management of national parks. However, greater indigenous control is necessary to truly decolonise protected area landscapes and fully recognise the importance of indigenous Australians in land management. This paper explores a new initiative in protected area management: the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program. IPAs are established through voluntary declaration of indigenous land with the aim of enhancing indigenous control of protected area landscapes. Nantawarrina, the first declared IPA, is considered as a case study. Although some manifestations of colonialism are still evident in the Nantawarrina IPA, the program has made some significant contributions to the decolonisation of protected area management in Australia.     

Cartographies of the Colonial/Capitalist State: A Geopolitics of Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia

'Indigenous self-determination' is a multivalent term that has come to represent various meanings in different political and cultural contexts. Indigenous peoples' strategies for self-determination have become increasingly prominent in the domestic polities of many 'first-world' nations, and in the sphere of international law and human rights. These strategies have challenged the cartography of the nation-state with competing claims to land ownership, sovereignty, and self-governance. In Australia, indigenous strategies for self-determination are diverse and holistic and revolve around issues including land rights, law, environmental management, and control over service provision. These are evident in a variety of both 'elite' and 'popular' geopolitical texts. Meanwhile, Australian governments have created new structures that have attempted to encapsulate meanings of 'self-determination,' allowing some indigenous decision-making control, whilst entrenching the nation-state's ultimate hegemony over land. The geopolitics of indigenous strategies for self-determination, and tensions concerning the meaning of the term, are examined, revealing some ways in which discursive trends and material structures interact in locally produced relations of power.     

Claiming indigenous rights through participatory mapping and the making of citizenship

This paper considers how participatory mapping, through the notion of indigeneity, is involved in the making of participants' political agency and the possible implications for local struggles over customary land and resources. Empirically, the paper draws on a field study of participatory mapping as a cartographic-legal strategy for the recognition of the customary rights to land and resources of the Dayak, an indigenous ethnic group in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. In this paper, we use citizenship as a basis for our analysis. On this basis, we discuss how the notion of indigeneity has assembled actors across different scales and how this has enabled indigeneity to develop as a site for claiming customary rights to land and resources through participatory mapping. One of our main arguments is the need to understand indigenous citizenship as a process that develops over time and through networks of actors that transcend the borders of the state and expand the formerly exclusive relationship between the state and its citizens in the making of citizenship. We challenge Isin's clear distinction between active and activist approaches to making claims of citizenship, suggesting instead that these approaches are mutually constitutive.     

Reconstructing the Politics of Indigenous Identity in Chile

Current research questions how archaeology has reconstructed social identities based on material culture and ethnic groups. Recently, some Native populations from the Tarapacá region, Northern Chile, have claimed their indigenous rights and recognition as Andean First Nations. Using existing laws and programs developed by the Chilean government, they have redefined themselves as organised local communities. Their claims question archaeological practice in the production and reproduction of scientific knowledge, and its social repercussions in the property of land, water and cultural heritage. Within the Latin American social context, archaeology sometimes has avoided playing a political role, consequently conceding certain histories above others. As a social science, the discipline needs to evaluate its impact on archaeologically based identities which are sometimes politically alienated, modified, and appropriated to create new representations of the past legitimised in present time. This paper furthers a discussion of the politics of identity by focusing on the Chilean Aymara case and the legitimacy of its appropriation strategies.     

WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE? COUNTER-MAPPING FOREST TERRITORIES IN KALIMANTAN,INDONESIA

This paper examines the politics of land and forest rights in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Forest mapping by government forestry planners allocates rights of resource use and land access according to forest types and economic objectives, only rarely recognizing indigenous occupancy rights or forest territories customarily claimed or managed by local people. As maps and official plans based on them ignore, and in some cases criminalize, traditional rights to forest, forest products, and forest land for temporary conversion to swidden agriculture, indigenous activists are using sketch maps to re-claim territories - a process that requires re-defining many traditional forest rights. The paper considers the political implications of mapping and the implications of a focus on land use rather than forest use.     

Indigenous free prior informed consent: a case for self determination in World Heritage nomination processes

Free prior informed consent is a critical concept in enacting the rights of Indigenous People according to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This paper outlines a case for the inclusion of free prior informed consent in World Heritage nomination processes and examines issues that are problematic when enacting free prior informed consent. Case research was used to analyse current issues in the potential nomination of certain areas of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. The authors’ reflexive engagement within this case offers insights into the praxis of developing a World Heritage nomination consent process. The outcomes of this research were: preconditions need to be addressed to avoid self-exclusion by indigenous representative organisations; the nature of consent needs to account for issues of representation and Indigenous ways of decision making; the power of veto needs to have formal recognition in the nomination process; and prioritising self-determination within free prior informed consent ensures the intent of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The paper contributes to the human rights agenda of Indigenous People and conservation management processes by helping address the issues that will be raised during a World Heritage nomination process.     

(Re)asserting Indigenous Rights and Jurisdictions within a Politics of Place: Transformative Nature of Native Title Negotiations in South Australia

Australia's dominant politics of place has largely failed to give meaningful recognition to Indigenous peoples. The Native Title Act 1993 required governments, industry and others to (re)consider the basis and extent of their authority, unsettling the non‐Indigenous systems’ assumed dominance. While Indigenous hopes about Native title have diminished as a result of subsequent judicial, legislative and administrative responses, Native title negotiations have been pivotal in redefining politics of place and Indigenous–settler relationships in Australia at several scales. Focusing on South Australia's Statewide Indigenous Land Use Agreement Negotiation Strategy, this paper considers such a redefinition. The paper identifies four strategies as critical to success in transformative spatial politics: getting process right; recognising and supporting Indigenous jurisdictions; engaging and transforming non‐Indigenous scales; and shifting Native title process away from legalities, towards people and relationships. Since 1999, these strategies have transformed the politics of place and built more equitable inter‐cultural relationships and networks based on mutual recognition and respect between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous rights and interests in land and waters.     

Control of Indigenous Archaeological Heritage in Ontario,Canada

Few Indigenous peoples have control over their heritage, despite international recognition of this right in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007. In Ontario, Canada, the Ontario Heritage Act, R.S.O. 1990 regulates archaeology and grants licences to archaeologists to investigate archaeological heritage. Indigenous people want more control of their archaeological heritage in Ontario. To uphold Indigenous rights to archaeological heritage in Ontario, heritage legislation and policy needs to be revised and site protection increased. This paper recommends that Indigenous archaeological heritage in Ontario would be best protected by strengthening Ontario government land development policy and legislation to require the free, prior, and informed consent from affected Indigenous communities before removal of significant archaeological sites and remains from their ancestral territories.     

EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes – tenure building and renewal processes – are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments.     

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.     

Who's indigenous? Whose archaeology?

Abstract

The International Labour Organisation, the United Nations and various indigenous Organisations have raised and/or objected to diverse criteria through which indigenous groups have been defined and the rights that should be accorded to them. This paper discusses the implications of these issues in relation to archaeological research and heritage management and uses this to position the other papers in this volume. Specific themes that are addressed include: the impact of colonialism and nation-forming on indigenous groups; the continuing influence of 19th and early 20th century social evolutionary concepts on the representation of indigenous groups and the role of archival material from this period today; the contrasting processes of cultural continuity and assimilation within ‘dominant’ societies in which indigenous communities have participated, and the effects that this has had on more recent claims over land rights; the cultural differences that surround the concepts of individual and community ownership, particularly in relation to copyright; the role of academia, museums and the media in the representation of indigenous people in the past and the present.     

Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Mixed Outcomes: The Impact of Regional Autonomy and Decentralization on Indigenous Ethnic Minorities in Indonesia

This article examines how indigenous ethnic minorities in Indonesia are being affected by the implementation of decentralization and regional autonomy policies. New legislation transferred responsibility and authority over various issues, including resource extraction and local governance, from the central government to regional authorities at the district level. Members of the growing indigenous rights movement hoped that this decentralization process would allow ethnic minority communities to retain or regain control over natural resources through local‐level politics. Furthermore, some ethnic minorities saw the implementation of decentralization as an opportunity to return to local forms of land tenure and resource management that had been disparaged by the national government for most of the twentieth century. However, these new laws also encourage district level governments to generate income through natural resource exploitation, as they will receive a certain percentage of these revenues. Minority communities could be adversely affected as local governments disregard their land rights in efforts to raise income to cover their new expenses, essentially continuing the practices of previous governments. This article examines the new opportunities, as well as the new threats, posed by decentralization to ethnic minorities throughout Indonesia.     

种族问题研究中三个基本概念的界定与阐释

"原住民"、"土著"和"第一民族"是种族问题研究中常常遇到的三个基本概念。原住民是指最早定居在某地方的族群;土著最初是西方殖民者对当地原住民的称谓,而现在也泛指原住民;第一民族原来是加拿大的一个种族称谓,与印第安人同义,指的是在当今加拿大境内的北美洲原住民及其后裔,后来也可指代其他国家的意在凸显其历史渊源、独特文化和地位的原住民。     

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.     

Insights from Cameroon: Five years after the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In September 2007, after 23 years of negotiation between nation states and indigenous peoples' organizations, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly finally adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among its most significant assertions were indigenous peoples' rights to self‐determination; to lands, territories, and natural resources; and to free, prior, and informed consent. Activists and organizations concerned with human and minority rights saw the adoption of the declaration as an important step toward the improvement of the precarious situation of many minority groups. Today, five years have passed since the declaration's adoption. What difference has it made? Have the activists' expectations materialized? How has the declaration been implemented? Which are the responses of governmental and civil society actors? Drawing on institutional developments at the United Nations as well as the case of Cameroon and the Mbororo as a national minority group, I aim to provide some answers to these questions.     

Working Towards Regional Agreements: Recent Developments in Co‐operative Resource Management in Canada's British Columbia

Canada's experience with ‘regional agreements’ has attracted considerable attention in Australia as a means by which Indigenous people can secure their native title rights to land and sea and ensure they can participate in the development and management of their homeland territories. However, regional agreements implemented in Canada thus far have often taken years to negotiate. To provide a degree of certainty for resource management and decision‐making while the native title claims process is underway, Canadian governments have proceeded to establish interim resource use and management agreements with Indigenous communities. While both governments and Indigenous people stress that interim arrangements do not replace or limit the scope for future claim settlements, it is recognised that the development of such co‐operative relationships will make long‐lasting formal agreements easier to achieve. This paper draws on several recent examples of interim agreements that have been negotiated for the salmon fishery resource in the Skeena River catchment, and considers how these local experiences offer useful approaches for resource management and native title issues in Australia. These examples demonstrate the importance of building shared understandings of resource values and management approaches prior to cementing co‐management partnerships in formal settlements. They also show some of the problems and prospects facing Indigenous peoples in their efforts to benefit from such co‐management agreements.     

Unstrategic essentialism: material culture and Hawaiian articulations of indigeneity

Often rendered synonymous with deep historical attachments to particular landscapes, indigenous identities are inseparable from questions of geography. The meeting ground of place and nativeness is fecund with politics. All over the world, claims of indigeneity have become indispensable in struggles over territory, natural resources, and basic political rights in place. This article focuses on both a handful of cases from the secondary literature and empirical research on Hawai′i's Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail. It discusses essentialist expressions of indigeneity around the preservation and interpretation of Native Hawaiian material culture. Engaging with the literature on articulation theory and indigeneity, it suggests that these essentialisms emerge unintentionally rather than strategically. Its central claim is that the materiality of heritage objects, artifacts, sites, and landscapes plays an unnoticed role in shaping discourses around indigenous identity. The article concludes by suggesting that such unstrategic essentialisms pose real political risks for Native Hawaiians and offer suggestions for a more intentional engagement with the essentializing properties of indigenous material culture.