Author: Tania Searle
Searle, Tania, 2024 Unsettling collaborative arrangements for the shared responsibility of nature: Indigenous nation building and the role of settler allies., Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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In the Age of the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis, governments in settler societies are increasingly forming collaborative arrangements with Indigenous sovereigns for the shared stewardship of nature in collaborative arrangements. Settler decision making, however, continues to dominate in what is meant to be a partnership space. Current literature on co-management arrangements between settler and Indigenous sovereigns reports on persistent epistemological, attitudinal, and institutional barriers to successful co-management outcomes. The role of non-Indigenous professionals in such arrangements is rarely examined, and as noted in the literature, there is a need to investigate allyship in the offices and meeting rooms of settler institutions to identify everyday practical action. Most importantly, sovereignty is an issue persistently discussed by Indigenous scholars, but very few studies have investigated the ways in which non-Indigenous people interpret and respond to Indigenous sovereignty when working as allies in partnership spaces.
To address this gap, this thesis asks the question, what are the strategies and innovations employed by non-Indigenous professionals to recentre Indigenous sovereignty in collaborative arrangements? I bring together scholarship from Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, posthumanism and allyship to explore how meanings of humanness are embedded in the concept of sovereignty. Indigenous sovereignty stems from an epistemology of relation, where humans are entangled within a complex network of relationships with more-than-human-entities, such as nature, animals, ecosystems, landscape, climate, and Spirit. Settler sovereignty is based upon Enlightenment ideas that constructs humans in opposition to nature. Thereby, to recentre Indigenous sovereignty in collaborative arrangements non-Indigenous professionals working as allies must unsettle normative settler logics and colonial paradigms.
This thesis employs qualitative methods to investigate two sites – 1) the Kungun Yunnan Ngarrindjeri (Listen to Ngarrindjeri Speaking) Agreement (KNYA), South Australia, and 2) the Columbia River Treaty (CRT), United States of America and Canada. Across both sites, twelve non-Indigenous participants, largely academics, government employees, and legal experts, offer unique insights that showcase practical strategies and innovations that recentre Indigenous sovereignty and foster a decolonising practice of allyship. I am guided by Martin Booran Mirraboopa’s (2003) Indigenist methodological framework of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. By adjusting to this inter-related triad, I argue, participants unsettle co-management arrangements through practical action in the following ways. In knowing the overlay of settler and Indigenous sovereignty the participants unsettle epistemological barriers by understanding their complicity in settler colonialism. They come to understand the mechanisms of structural injustice, and challenge everyday exclusionary practices of settler knowledge hierarchies to build ontological pluralism. Being attentive to proper forms of conduct in relationships with Indigenous sovereigns unsettles attitudinal barriers by embracing feelings of discomfort as a cue for critical self-reflexivity, engaging in multiple forms of listening, and building an ontology of truth. Doing work within settler institutions unsettles institutional barriers by following Indigenous leadership, transforming settler institutional frameworks, funding regimes, technological applications, and social networks.
This study will make an original contribution to knowledge that has cross-over contributions – it fills an important empirical gap, while also providing insights for praxis, policy and informing solidarity pedagogy internationally.
Keywords: Indigenous nation building, allyship, environmental co-governance, co-management, natural resource management, settler colonialism.
Subject: Australian Studies thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Dr Monique Mulholland