Understanding Indigenous Nation Building and Governance

“Some of the alliances that we’ve thought about significantly is what I would call the actor networks that we are engaged with.  The actor networks, and I will explain it in simplistic ways, as it’s much more complex than this, but if I put it into four categories. One category would be Indigenous Nations and Indigenous Governance, another category could be the public sector: local, state and federal governments, the third category could be the private sector and the business community, and the fourth, I would argue, is the universities and research so policy driven research and research driven policy shape disproportionally the lives of Indigenous people in Australia and so as we try to understand those actor networks that’s where you see where  the opportunities lie. I don’t think it’s a matter of saying we need to do things that are completely exclusionary of the broader Australian community, it’s looking for those opportunities where you can collaborate cause our futures actually lie together but then at the same time as our futures lying together recognising that there has been oppression, dispossession, land removed and all the other sorts of things that come with colonialism.  Understanding your history, understanding the actor networks and looking for those moments and opportunities.  One of the very big struggles in our context is what I would call the archival politics or the politics of the archive.  When I talk about the archive, I’m talking about those things that frames us, so it’s almost like the authenticating expert.  Who becomes the expert and who authenticates us?  Is it Indigenous people authenticating ourselves?  Yes, we do that, but disproportionately colonial governments also authenticate us in various ways.  Who are the experts?  The experts are the anthropologists, the archaeologist, the lawyer, the ecologist, these are the archival knowledges that are framed that talk about who we are, what we are capable of, how we were structured, what our belief systems are and so on so often when we get into a legal situation in Australian context, for example more recently we are involved in the native title claim.  There has been an overlap put to our native title claim by another Indigenous group.  In Australian law you can’t have overlapping claims and so you have to work out a way of sorting that out and so often an expert is bought in to deal with the part of the claim that is overlapped.  Now I can’t be the expert. I’m Ngarrindjeri, somebody else puts an overlapping claim Ngarrindjeri country, but I can’t be the expert. We have to bring in somebody else outside of the community to be the expert and that’s what I’m talking about by the archival politics.  And the archival politics is not just in legal terms or in terms of academics but it’s in the everyday.  It’s in FB, it’s in snapchat, it’s in print media, it’s in visual media, it’s in reports, it’s in management plans and so on so what we are constantly having to do is rewrite the archive or create your own and so you go out and tell your own story, write your own management report, set your own goals and agendas and that way you put an alternative voice to the archive that has been put there predominantly.”

“I think one of the greatest risks is that in some respects, and it's both a risk but it's also something that you can draw upon, is that we've had our communities damaged significantly by colonialism where the family unit has been broken down, where the collective strength of the communities and the governance structures that have been before colonisation have also been broken down. So what you're doing is rebuilding those things, and in a sense, the rebuilding means that you have to think about who you are, what's important to you, what are your values, your beliefs, your philosophies, what can you draw upon from your own knowledges and your own ways of seeing yourself in the world. For me as a citizen of the Ngarrindjeri nation in South Australia, I use, like my elders have used and my family have used, Ngarrindjeri concepts so we talk about  Ruwe/Ruwar. Ruwe being land and water and Ruwar being body, so land, water and body are connected in the language and then connected in terms of how we see ourselves. That goes into other kinds of concepts like a Yannarumi. Yannarumi for Ngarrindjeri is around how we act lawfully as a country so this artificial divide between humans and nature is not how we see ourselves in the world. And so the way that we then function is that we have to think about the lands, the waters, the animals, the birds, the plants because they're all part of who we are, and we have to have responsibilities to them. So in our language, we call our Ngatjis or as one of our Elders described them as our special friends or people might talk about them as totems in that sense and they can take many different forms, so we have a particular responsibility to those things. All of that means that we've got a really good base to on which to think about how we rebuild our nations – mind you the recognition of Indigenous nations as nations in Australia is a difficult concept for Australian governments whether it's local, state or federal and there is a strong investment from colonial governments in singular Crown sovereignty and that makes it particularly challenging and so thinking about where do you find the opportunities to insert your nation-building principles to build your communities, to build your governance and to the point where you can start to make decisions and act authoritatively over the things that you think are important to you is where it lies…that's the challenge.”

It think it’s everything, it’s in education, it’s in health, it’s in natural resource management, it’s in cultural heritage management.  My background is in education, so the politics of the curriculum, what gets into the curriculum, what’s left out, who gets to make that decision, what gets tested, what gets assessed are all part of archival politics and knowledges.  I don’t see any tests in the Australian context that say “explain the concept of Yannarumi” to Australian students.  It’s not tested as part of that regime.  A lot of my work more recently, even though I’m an educationalist, has been where community needs work done which is largely the big nation issues, land water, country identity and so I’ve been working in natural resource management, particularly water, and thinking about how do we develop systems, that we can insert ourselves into with water related issues, also been working  cultural heritage management, so repatriation issues, working to return Ngarrindjeri Old People which is what we call our Old People who have been removed.  We estimate there is something like 5,000 of Old People who have been moved.  When I say moved, in some cases our burial grounds were ransacked, the State Coroner in South Australia was a collector of our Old People and a distributor of our Old People around the world to his friends and networks. For example, the University of Edinburgh had more than 300 of our Old {eople so we’ve had those returned as a result of being able to track those down and make the case for them to be returned. So these are some of the areas I’ve been working in.  There is always research in relation to that.  One point I’d like to make in terms of repatriation the Australian government has relationships with other governments like the United Kingdom for example around the return of human remains, returning of Old People and that’s terrific. Funded projects, cases made to the institutions, whether they are universities, museums, medical hospitals, wherever our Old People are kept and so we now have something like 400 of our Old People however the Australian government does not fund reburials and so what we’ve had to do, and we’ve had our Old People at a keeping place, but we can’t get them reburied because we don’t have the resources to be able to do that and we have requested resources.  We’ve invoiced the Federal and State governments for what we think is required and a program of reburials, essentially reburials every month because you need to bring in experts as not all the old people that you have have good documentation. Sometimes they have very little and you have to work out which part of country they come from and which family they come from.  Issues around land and zoning, can you actually rebury on places, how do you protect those sites, the creation of new ceremonies as a result of reburial practices as we’ve never had to rebury, we buried, there were practices around that but now reburial is constituters something different that are some of the areas I’ve been working in that are all, in my view, nation building projects.    Certainly repatriation is, when you have to deal with working with communities and families, working out how you are going to be respectful to the Old People, respectful to those families were those old people come from.

Of the things that the Ngarrindjeri Nation has been very good at, in my view, is taking ideas from others, from Indigenous communities and Indigenous nations, from non-indigenous communities and non-indigenous nations, from activists, from academics, from whomever because it’s in the ideas I think that we learn strategy, that we understand the contexts that we are working in and out of that we generate responses to those.  We had a major issue in 1995, in my community, a group of Ngarrindjeri women asserted cultural knowledge to a site where a proposed bridge was to be built from a mainland to and island and those Ngarrindjeri women challenged that. A smaller group of Ngarrindjeri women, largely coming out of Christian backgrounds said we don’t know those stories, they didn’t say the knowledge didn’t exist they simply said we don’t know those stories and questioned it. The women who proposed the knowledge around the site were seeking a banning of the building of the bridge for a 25-year period. That got opened up as a fracture point between the two different groups of women and knowledge.  The South Australian Government conducted a Royal Commission, a very high form of legal inquiry, as to whether Ngarrindjeri women fabricated cultural knowledge at the site in order to stop the development.  Out of that particular exercise, that’s an awful way of putting it because it was actually very hurtful, we learnt a number of lessons and they were the lessons about how policy and legislation works, how the power of the State when it wants to employ it can be used significantly to do damage to Aboriginal populations, we learnt about the archival politics, who were the experts, the museum personnel were the experts on our knowledge and so on.. We also learnt strategies as a part of that response so one our key strategy responses is to say that if policy and legislation doesn’t work for you, not to say you give up on them but if they don’t work for you look for alternative mechanisms.  We turned, under advice from a very good lawyer and other people we turned towards contract law.  We set up legal agreements under contract law.  We gave these agreements Ngarrindjeri names, we call them Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnun Agreements (KNYA’s), which means listening to Ngarrindjeri speak, KNYAs became a standard process that we would engage with other entities, be they local government, our first was with local government, we’ve got KNYAs with state governments, we have one with the federal government, we’ve got them with museums and other institutions and this provided a tool, a mechanism by which we could  assert some decision making authority in collaboration with another party and we could agree to these things and we would write them. Do you recognise, for example, that Ngarrindjeri people are the traditional owners of the lands and waters bounded by, and we’d name that geographically, we would write that down and having got to that point we would ask do you recognise that Ngarrindjeri people have responsibilities for country or their old people or whatever that might be so we use that as a tool. What we have been able to do is to insert things into those contract law agreements and extended them, extended their powers, things like cultural knowledge clauses where we name what is cultural knowledge and we make the distinction between cultural knowledge and intellectual property in legal terms, then we talk about use of cultural knowledge, who gets to decide how it can be used, where it can be used, if it can be used at all and we control that process as part of that.  The contract law arrangements then allow us to work in some contexts where some policy or legislation hasn’t been able to be very effective for us.