‘The invisible fire’: Indigenous sovereignty, history and responsibility

Birch, Tony

doi:10.4324/9781003117353-11

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…An important role for non-Indigenous people in this regard, alongside dedicating resources to Indigenous organising, is to help change the terms of debate around colonisation and Indigenous political demands, by building a wider understanding of the basic principles at stake (Behrendt, 2003). Colonisation persists, partly because of settler society's refusal to morally and politically reckon with its past and present (Birch, 2020). Any shift in public education/reflection on the ramifications of colonisation needs to include discussion of how colonial histories continue to shape, and are institutionalised into city-building processes (Behrendt, 2003;Mays, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The inheritance and repetition of colonial practices of dispossession

Chatterjee

2023

Environ Plan D

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State processes of land dispossession rely on multiple modes of power such as domination, legitimisation, pacification, and deceit to achieve their aims. This article analyses how governments in Australia have drawn on these varied forms to redevelop inner city areas in Sydney which are important to Indigenous communities. It analyses three redevelopment practices that targeted the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo between 2005 and 2019. First, domineering planning structures used to marginalise Indigenous housing in Redfern. Second, racist tropes that have worked to legitimise this authoritarian approach and the resulting dispossession. Third, community consultations, that attempted to placate residents impacted by redevelopment, with culturally inclusive participation, but that maintained a deceitful silence on the question of colonisation. The article shows how authoritarian state planning, racialised legitimisation, and colonial pacification and deceit wielded in Redfern and Waterloo, are directly inherited from and/or reproduce historic colonial nation and city building agendas. On this basis, the article claims that settler colonialism can be understood as a self-perpetuating process, where practices of dispossession, developed at a given time, can set precedent for and be reworked into later programmes of land dispossession.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The inheritance and repetition of colonial practices of dispossession

Chatterjee

2023

Environ Plan D

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“…Indigenous Australians have ‘ sovereign responsibility’ (Birch, 2007, p. 116, italics in original) for all beings (including more‐than‐human relations) alive and dead in their Country, to their past and future, where ‘country is multi‐dimensional and consists of people, animals, plants, Dreaming, underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water, and air. Country has origins and a future: it exists both in and through time’ (Rose, 2004, p. 153).…”

Section: Indigenous Country Colonialism and The Browse Gas Hub Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lived environmentalisms: Everyday encounters and difference in Australia's north

Pickerill

2024

Geography and Environment

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This paper focuses on everyday encounters between environmentalists and Indigenous activists during a dispute around a proposed gas hub development in the Kimberley, NW Australia, to explore the possibilities of practising environmentalism differently. It makes visible the complexity, contestations and dilemmas of putting environmentalism into practice in particular places and calls for the specificness of how environmentalisms are negotiated and developed through encounters to be more carefully attended to. It draws on 32 face‐to‐face in‐depth interviews conducted with activists from national Australian environmental organisations working in the Kimberley, Kimberley‐based environmental groups, Kimberley Indigenous organisations, participant observations at protest camp site visits and analysis of campaign literature. Closely interrogating lived environmentalisms—how environmentalists put into practice their values in everyday encounters—reveals not only evidence of white environmentalists expanding their conceptions of the environment beyond dualisms and engaging with multispecies justice, but also a hesitancy and complexity in supporting Indigenous self‐determination and a limited capacity to challenge colonial‐capitalist frameworks.

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“…In referring to illegal occupation, I am pointing to the concepts that underpin the unlawful invasion of Australia, in which no Treaties were made, and which were justified via the sinceoverturned concept of terra nullius. In other words, First Peoples in Australia have never ceded sovereignty (Birch, 2007). 2.…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Settler futurity in the local and global: Problematising education for sustainable development in the Australian curriculum

Belcher

2023

Policy Futures in Education

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As global concerns about climate change deepen, Australian sustainability curriculum plays an increasingly significant role in the way students relate to concepts of home, belonging, and the future. Such futures are imagined in a local context shaped both by ongoing colonial processes and the continued presence of First Peoples, in which invader-settler futurity is the dominant force. As such, a global emphasis on Education for Sustainability raises questions of what types of relationships to place and country are produced through policy and curriculum, and what the implications are for students’ investments in the future of place and unceded Country. As a white invader/settler writing from the Country of the Kulin Nations (Melbourne, Australia), in this paper I offer an analysis of UN Education for Sustainability Declarations from the past five decades, alongside Australian national curriculum documents and its translation into state-level curriculum. In doing so, I reveal the ways that sustainability policy and curriculum works to collapse place and Country into the concept of ‘environmental resource’, largely oriented towards the future of the nation. I argue that in the global policy context, resources are framed to deliver equal distribution across nation states, functioning to obscure the operation of patriarchal white sovereignty within states such as Australia. I further identify that the ways this problem of resource management is deployed as a virtuous state policy through local curriculum, which functions to solidify invader-settler use of disembodied Indigenous knowledges, to secure futurity.

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‘The invisible fire’: Indigenous sovereignty, history and responsibility

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

The inheritance and repetition of colonial practices of dispossession

The inheritance and repetition of colonial practices of dispossession

Lived environmentalisms: Everyday encounters and difference in Australia's north

Settler futurity in the local and global: Problematising education for sustainable development in the Australian curriculum

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