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Nature, Place and the Recognition of Ind igenous P olitiesLisa Palmer aa University of Melbourne , Australia

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Nature, Place and the Recognitionof Indigenous Polities

LISA PALMER, University of Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent.However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practicesremains firmly based on commonsense settler understandings of nature as an external domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could beotherwise, this paper examines ideas about political landscape formation and theimplications of the changing role of the nation-state and civil society in relation to therecognition of Indigenous political subjectivities. Taking the situation faced by Indigenous peoples in two settler societies as our vantage point, I argue here that we need to move away from assimilative environmental governance arrangements and politicise the concept of nature. This will open up spaces for the recognition and active participation of Indigenous polities in the realm of natural resource management. The paper concludes by contrasting

the situation faced by Indigenous landowners in Australias Kakadu National Park withthe overtly political negotiations occurring in two northern regions of Canada. In the latter,in a process similar to what Tully calls daily subconstitutional politics, it is through therecognition of Indigenous polities in environmental governance issues that Indigenous peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas and institutions of thebroader regional, provincial and national polity.

KEY WORDS Indigenous people; nature; politics; polities; place; Australia; Canada;environmental governance.

Introduction

In Northern Europe, prior to the sixteenth century, landscape, or landschaft , wasunderstood to mean a politys area of activity (Olwig 2002, p. xxv). With theascendancy of the nation-state, these political landscapes have been subsumedunder natural laws with an understanding of landscape as scenery. This masks otheragendas concerning polities and place (Olwig 2002). Drawing on Anderson (1991),Olwig writes that when the meaning of landscape changed from commonplaces toscenic spaces . . . the illusion of a unified space facilitated the mindscaping of

imagined natural state communities fusing nations with a single body politic(Olwig 2002, p. 218). The living land of people has become the deadened land of rock and soil, the stage upon which the drama of history is played (Olwig 2002,

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/06/010033-11 # 2006 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.DOI: 10.1080/00049180500511954

Australian Geographer, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 33 / 43, March 2006

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p. 220). By the nineteenth century the positivist doctrine of the nation-stateexcluded recognition of alternative traditions of governance and sovereignty (Anaya1996), including the customary polities of those others encountered in the NewWorld (Martinez 1992). This positivist legal doctrine of civilised nations becamethe primary intellectual instrument of nineteenth-century colonialism and remains

today the normative model for the recognition of sovereignty in global politics.Since the late twentieth century, however, an emerging multi-scalar values-based

politics has resulted in the rise of civil society and non-state actors who are activelychallenging the nation-states dominance in relation to issues of governance andsovereignty, particularly in relation to environmental issues (Hajer 2003). This isleading in many contexts to a situation of governance without territorialsynchrony (Hajer 2003, p. 191). Yet the majority of Indigenous peoples continueto construct their worlds around vibrant socio/physical relationships with particularplaces and an embodied politics of unique rights and responsibilities. For thesepeoples, adherence to socio-territorial forms of political landscape formation in

many ways challenges both the ideology of the nation-state and the democraticideals of an emerging multi-scalar civil society. Recognising the complexity of theserelationships and the ways in which Indigenous peoples are included and excludedfrom existing and emerging forms of environmental governance is a necessary stepin prising open spaces for dialogue between Indigenous polities (Langton 2002;Langton & Palmer 2004), civil society and the body politic of the nation-state.

I am concerned here to elucidate the political inadequacy of democratic projectsthat seek to create spaces of inclusion for Indigenous peoples within existingenvironmental governance arrangements. In contrast to inclusionary models of restorative justice, I argue for an acknowledgement of the transformative potentialof recognising and engaging with Indigenous polities in the realm of naturalresource management. I argue that these political engagements have the potentialto refashion the norms and principles of existing governance arrangements. Indoing so, I have drawn from a range of relevant theoretical contributions on thepolitics of recognition (Borrows 2002; Kingsbury 2002; Niezen 2004; Povinelli2002; Rose 1999; Tully 1995, 2004; Young 1990, 1995). I am informedthroughout this paper by Dikec s (2005) exploration of space as a site of politics,a concept I apply in this case to the space of natural resource management. Space isa site of politics, not just because it is full of power or competing interests butbecause of the ways in which space itself becomes an integral element of theinterruption of the natural . . .order of domination constituting a place of encounter between those in control and those who have no part in that order(Dikec 2005, pp. 171 /2).

This theoretical discussion is elucidated in the second half of the paper byexamining case study material. Firstly, I draw by way of example on the jointmanagement situation in Australias Kakadu National Park, a place where I haveundertaken extensive fieldwork (Palmer 2001). I highlight there the ways in whichthe already established norms of the national park institution work to naturaliseboth the environmental governance project and nature itself. By naturalise, I meanthe process of paralysing politics (Latour 2004, p. 245): To naturalize means notsimply that one is unduly extending the reign of Science to other domains, but that

one is paralyzing politics.In this particular spatial configuration of nature, the national park, Indigenouspeoples own aspirations for environmental governance are heard merely as noises

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within the established order of things (Dikec 2005, p. 173). I contrast thissituation with examples from Canada, where I have undertaken limited fieldwork(Palmer & Tehan 2006a,b). I investigate there how the political recognition of Indigenous polities is enabling these polities to intervene at times to significantlyreconfigure state-based regimes of natural resource management.

Legitimacy and the polity void

Across the globe, non-state actors and civil society institutions are forging newpolitical spaces that are challenging the ideological and practical hegemony of thenation-state. Indeed, Hajer argues that with the weakening of the state there is nowan institutional void with no generally accepted rules or norms to which politics isto be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon (2003, p. 175). In thecontext of this void he argues that polity has become discursive: it is createdthrough deliberation in a way which significantly challenges classical modernist

political institutions (2003, p. 176). Political power now often lacks any territorialsynchrony and is dispersed through a network society (Castells 1996) influencedby diverse actors including states, corporations, non-governmental organisations,citizens and the media. Hajer argues that we therefore need to reintroduce issue of the polity or political setting into the debate (2003, p. 182). Policy, he argues, hasbecome a site of cultural politics which is turning towards an explicit process of knowledge deliberation in order to resolve credibility struggles and issues of political legitimacy (2003, p. 186).

While he argues that issues of political legitimacy in a network society must beaddressed by attention to the process through which policy making occurs (2003,p. 191), the diverse political make-up of non-state collectives is not addressed byHajer explicitly. Yet these issues are central in rethinking key resource managementissues of justice, diversity, sustainability and equity (Howitt 2001). In the case of relations between Indigenous peoples and the state in settler societies such asAustralia and Canada, deliberative policy applied in the sphere of liberal naturalresource management is based on a stakeholder or interest group model. Thismodel relies on disengaged reason and modernist deliberative norms to achieve asymmetry between competing resource users (Young 1990, 1995). Deliberationsoccur on the basis of a model of stakeholder negotiations that lacks both therecognition of ontological difference and the unequal power of symbolic privilege(Young 1995, p. 141). The consideration of alternative Indigenous governance

mechanisms and polities is not countenanced under such regimes.Increasingly, however, politics is an important consideration in decision making

within the realm of science and natural resource management. Peter Brosius (2004)writes that there is an emerging trend in transnational regimes and practices of natural resource management which recognises that in order to serve as a basisfor decision making, scientific information need not only be credible, but salientand legitimate as well (2004, p. 10). Brosius (2004, p. 10) takes this processfurther by asking why this criterion is not also applied to Indigenous knowledge,and why their analysis of the political world is not sought as well. He asks: whatif instead of treating our informants as reservoirs of local/indigenous know-

ledge . . .we treated them as political agents with their own ideas about the salienceand legitimacy of various forms of knowledge? (2004, p. 10). The challenge thatBrosius issues involves an explicit recognition of political process, of Indigenous

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agency and the broader implications for knowledge production and deliberationwhich recognising active and engaged Indigenous polities would entail (see alsoBatterbury 2005).

Similarly, Kingsbury has argued in relation to international civil society, that thislargely unregulated free-for-all is premised on a liberal ethos and vague notions of

forging a cosmopolitan democracy (Kingsbury 2002, p. 187). Such a project fails toadequately address the political situation of others with more distinctive claims,such as indigenous peoples organizations exercising governmental power ratherthan simply advocating or volunteering (2002, p. 187). He writes that, while notexcluded, Indigenous peoples distinctive claims receive no special status in astructure dominated by the NGO model (2002, p. 187). In developing newdemocratic theories to guide international civil society one important criterionmust be their ability to cogently and robustly meet the dynamic challenges posedby ascriptive groups (2002, p. 195). Kingsbury argues that the circumstances of ascriptive groups exercising governmental powers requires a thorough revision of

the theorised constitutional structure for international civil society (2002, p. 183).Interestingly, he argues that a body of practice within states suggests anincreasingly rich set of possibilities for reconciling democratic theory with theclaims and needs of indigenous peoples (Kingsbury 2002, p. 194). In Australia, forexample, the adaptations of Indigenous groups to the requirements of interactionswith outside agencies are creating a body of public law which addresses the claimsand needs of the Indigenous domain. This is especially the case as the recognitionof property law entails de facto recognition of other governing laws necessary forthe proper functioning of Indigenous polities and the administration of that land(Langton & Palmer 2003). However, I argue here that while the claims of Indigenous peoples are increasingly addressed in a public law sense within theboundaries of the nation-state, at the level of everyday practices in natural resourcemanagement, such as in the context of national park management, there is far lesswillingness to recognise the governmental status of Indigenous groups. Rather,there is a preference for recognising them as stakeholders in the sense of a liberalsphere public interest model or by naturalising them as apolitical communities, asdiscussed below.

Polities and place making: denaturalising landscapes

Natural resource management in the liberal public sphere of settler society nation-

states such as Canada and Australia is underpinned by the powerful effects of anaturalised concept of nature * /what Willems-Braun (1997) has termed a cultureof nature. In Australia, despite public law remedies which seek to recogniseIndigenous property rights (Nettheim et al . 2002), the pervasiveness of a culture of nature continues to impede the recognition of Indigenous regimes of environ-mental governance and Indigenous peoples full participation in local, regional andnational natural resource management regimes. One explanation for this normativestate of affairs relates to the ongoing reification of Indigenous communities. Thisreification creates communities as naturalised pre-political spaces whose imaginedauthentic voice is excluded from a political landscape whereby peoples are

continuously becoming as subjects of governance (Rose 1999), participating in andnegotiating the processes of place making and norms through which their system of governance operates (Tully 2004; Berkes 2004).

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Particularly in the context of postcolonial settler societies, Olwigs discussion of landscape as a politys area of activity makes it clear that the processes of placemaking are political, a property of social life (Appadurai 1996, p. 199). ForIndigenous peoples the politics of place making is based on the need to recogniseand negotiate relationships with significant others, including non-human nature

(Merlan 1998). Indigenous peoples relations with place and non-human natureare not merely expressions of deep-felt attachment to country or vestiges of aconservative, closed and parochial past, despite essentialist representations tothe contrary. Rather, these relationships are central to the constitution of dynamicand engaged Indigenous polities, polities which assume relations, flows andopenendedness as their ontological ground (Blaser 2004, p. 38; cf. Escobar 2001;Niezen 2004). While in postcolonial situations of unequal symbolic and economicpower, the formation of distinct identity boundaries such as Indigenous/non-Indigenous are necessary as political strategies for cultural survival (Niezen 2004);Indigenous political boundaries do not seek a closed society.

Indigenous relations with land and each other are, like all other human relations,produced in part by the objectification of human thoughts and feelings (Olwig2005, p. 36). This is in contrast to idealisations in the literature which invokeimages of unconscious hunter-gatherers and other primitive societies living withinnature (cf. Ingold 2000). This intimate relationship between the polity and theland creates a continuously negotiated landscape, where rights and interests in landare treated as living and changing, open and adapting to dynamic social andpolitical contexts.

As discussed below, it is the reification of rights in land and the removal of theidea of landscape as a living and changing area of a politys activity which createsone of the greatest obstacles for Indigenous governance aspirations on theirancestral estates.

The case of Kakadu National Park

In places like Kakadu, one of Australias most famous national parks, culturally-based arguments which assert that the Bininj / Mungguy Indigenous landownershave a special relationship to the land are formally recognised in the legislativeunderpinnings and joint management of the national park. Yet within this domainof nature conservation, what occurs is a process that Povinelli (2002) theoriseselsewhere as the cunning of recognition; the effective silencing of these cultural

others through their pre-determined mode of inclusion and assimilation into thedominant order of things. This means that the participation of Bininj / Mungguy inthe joint management of the park has become largely contingent on theiracceptance of the existing hegemonic system of technocratic natural resourcemanagement. In the institutional context of Kakadu, Bininj / Mungguy landownersmust continually struggle to have the park managed according to their own modelof environmental governance. In contrast to an idea of an externalised nature,Bininj / Mungguy have their own meanings invested in, and relationships with, non-human nature. While Western ecological rationality seeks a common humanrelationship with a universalised concept of other nature, for Bininj / Mungguy

otherness is located in a very differently configured divide of the whole (Palmer2004b). Yet, despite nearly 30 years of joint management in a place once trumpetedas the blueprint for progressing Indigenous involvement in national parks, the

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dominant regime of environmental governance prevailing in day-to-day parkmanagement is largely concerned with managing the human impact on andconserving pristine nature (Palmer 2004a,b).

In the joint management schema, the everyday management of land-use activitiesin the park is fraught with contested ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the

land and managing resources. However, attempts by Bininj / Mungguy to manageland-use activities according to their priorities for resource management arecontinuously stifled by the considerable political influence of vocal stakeholderlobby groups. Prioritising their own understandings of and transactions withnature, non-Indigenous stakeholders resent Bininj / Mungguy claims to prior andsustained decision-making rights over the Kakadu landscape. Rather, through theiradvocacy and in collaboration with the culture of nature prevalent in Australianenvironmental technocracies, the dominant settler societies understanding of nature becomes the default standard for environmental use and management(Palmer 2004a,b). Through this process of naturalisation, the mask of an apolitical

nature-centred vision effectively overrides the ways in which Bininj / Mungguyrelate to, and wish to manage, their homelands.

The recognition of Indigenous polities in Canadas north

Canadian political theorist, James Tully (1995) has argued convincingly that whenviewed from the perspective of diverse societies, liberal, nationalist and commu-nitarian theories of modern constitutionalism serve to reinforce the hegemony of the European tradition, giving only the appearance of constituting diversity. As aresult of these failures, Borrows (2002), in his treatise on the resurgence of Indigenous law in Canada, considers the need for refashioning the underlyingprinciples and normative features of the Canadian Federation. He argues thatwithin the legal and political framework of a multinational Canadian state, the aimsof cohesion and unity can be achieved only when the underlying principles andnormative features of those systems are themselves open for negotiation and able toinclude and respect Aboriginal peoples and their laws more explicitly in itsframework (Borrows 2002, p. 137). He further argues that a limited settlerconception of the jurisdictions of Indigenous polities has contributed to the failureof the settler state to fully incorporate Indigenous governments as active andmeaningful participants in the Canadian Federation. Borrows is critical, too, of thenarrow approach to participation in the federation that Indigenous Canadiangovernments, defined and bounded by their shared ethnicity, often create forthemselves. From his perspective as an Indigenous legal scholar, the exclusivecitizenship and measured separatism of modern-day First Nations self-govern-ment arrangements is not rich enough to encompass the wide variety of relation-ships we need to negotiate in order to live with the hybridity, displacement, andpositive potential of our widening circles (Borrows 2002, pp. 144 /5).

Significantly for our focus here on natural resource management, Borrows(2002) argues that a useful starting point in the process of creating a notion of shared and multidimensional citizenship would be for non-Aboriginal Canadians torecognise and incorporate the Indigenous notion of landed citizenship. He writes:

Many Aboriginal groups have well developed notions about how torecognize the land as citizen. In the Ashinabek language, the land is

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animate and perceived as having rights and obligations in its relations withhumankind. Aboriginal peoples may be able to persuade other Canadiansto consider the adverse impact of their activities on the land itself, as anentity in its own right. Aboriginal values and traditions could help reframethe relationship within our polity. Aboriginal people would resist

assimilation through such recognition because their values where theland is concerned could be entrenched in Canadas governing ideas andinstitutions. They could help to reconfigure Canada in an important way.(Borrows 2002, p. 146)

In countries such as Canada this type of legal and political theory concerningIndigenous peoples actually has had substantially more uptake in many ways thanin Australia. Indeed, one finds that in the realm of daily, subconstitutional politics(Tully 1995, p. 28), it is often through environmental governance issues thatIndigenous peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas andinstitutions of the broader regional, provincial and national polity.

Landed citizenship and changing governance arrangements

In northern Canada there are numerous examples which draw out Borrowss ideasregarding the utility of Aboriginal control of Canadian affairs (2002, p. 144). In2002, a new agreement concerning hydro development and other resourceextraction issues on Cree territory was struck with the Quebec government. Thiswas an event that surprised many of those familiar with the James Bay Crees longand vocal opposition to industrial resource development on their lands (see Craik2004). The agreement is recognised as having been concluded on the basis of a

Nation to Nation relationship. In addition, it significantly expands the recognitiongiven to the Cree Tallymen, the primary hunting stewards who are responsibleunder Cree law for overseeing environmental governance in each of the 300 Creefamily-based hunting territories, or traplines, which continue to be worked acrossthe whole of Cree traditional territories (see Feit 2004). For example the CreeTallymen must now be consulted in the planning of commercial forestrydevelopment and will determine areas to be protected from commercial forestrydevelopment based on their own priorities and logics in relation to environmentalgovernance. It is an arrangement which will significantly enhance Cree authorityover their respective hunting territories. It strengthens the autonomy of Cree

governance, while at the same time it inserts into the state-based environmentalgovernance regime the Cree notion of landed citizenship. Similarly, in Nunavik tothe north, the Inuit, along with the governments of Quebec and Canada, areengaged in negotiations based on a shared citizenship model of public governance,underpinned by the Inuit notion of landed citizenship. This notion of citizenship isstatutorily protected under the provisions of Canadas first comprehensiveAboriginal land claim agreement, the 1975 James Bay and Northern QuebecAgreement (see Palmer & Tehan 2006a).

Indigenous jurisdiction and natural resource management

In the North West Territories (NWT) there has been a series of comprehensiveland claims and self-government agreements, along with a changing regulatory

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landscape. These have seen Indigenous governments significantly increase theirinvolvement in the decision making and environmental assessment of resourcemanagement projects. Since 1998, in the lands of the Dene people in the southernhalf of the NWT, resource development in the region has been overseen by the McKenzie Valley Resource Management Act 1998 . This act has established a series of

land and water boards for which relevant Indigenous governments are entitled tonominate one half of the members of every board. In the same region over the lastdecade it has become standard practice for project-specific environmental agree-ments to be negotiated in relation to large-scale resource development projects inthe region. These environmental agreements are intended to be used when neededas complementary tools for the management of complex projects (INAC 2003,p. 1). One of their purposes is to encourage local participation in environmentalmanagement. Under the terms of the separate environmental agreements it isrecognised, to differing extents, that affected Indigenous groups have certain rightsand interests in the region, including the right to be involved in environmental

monitoring and review. In many cases environmental agreements are made withIndigenous governments themselves (see, for example, ATNS 2003).The steadily increasing recognition of Indigenous governmental jurisdiction in

the management of resources in the NWT has been pivotal in bringing about thelegal, regulatory and political changes which increase Indigenous leverage over, andparticipation in, the management and exploitation of northern resources. Perhapseven more significantly, the developing relationships between Indigenous govern-ments, state-based regulatory bodies and the resources industry are enhancing theauthority and capacity of Indigenous governments to shape and assert their rightsto full participation in the social, economic and environmental futures of theNWT (see Palmer & Tehan 2006b). Here and elsewhere in Canada, IndigenousCanadians are slowly succeeding in ensuring that their foundational beliefs andunderlying principles are either central to or incorporated into the diffuse networksof power which constitute the broader Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal regionalpolity. This is because of the recognition of Indigenous polities, whether explicit orimplicit, through self-government agreements, regulatory change or resourcedevelopment agreements.

Conclusion

Olwig (2002, p. 219) has written that whereas the Landschaft , as place and polity,

was built on a law opposed to the bonds of blood that threatened to destroy thepeace of the land, the nation-state sought to reconstitute blood-like ties at a higherlevel of abstraction and spatial scale. Once a uni-dimensional citizenship wasconstituted within the territory of the nation-state, the management of thedeadened land of rock and soil could also be addressed in a unified manner andit was this process of naturalisation, the transformation of the political to the merelyphysical landscape, which has long underpinned the legitimacy of state-basedresource management regimes. Yet it seems that the nation-state, while stillpervasive in an everyday sense (Painter 2005), is increasingly finding its institutionsembroiled in the new political spaces of values-based cultural politics (Hajer 2003).

For Indigenous peoples an increased attention to values-based cultural politicsoffers both risk and opportunity. In relation to issues of globalisation andinternational civil society, Niezen (2004) and Kingsbury (2002) highlight the

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challenges to and from Indigenous polities in such settings. Issues of deliberativelegitimacy are equally problematic in the liberal public sphere of natural resourcemanagement where the naturalising effects of a culture of nature linger mostpervasively. However, the emergence of recognised Indigenous polities in Canadademonstrates that the realm of natural resource management can be fertile ground

to further the recognition of, and productive engagement with, Indigenous politiesif it is recognised as embedded within a process of diverse political landscapeformation.

Those in-between spaces of natural resource management which allow aproductive encounter between Indigenous political subjectivities and a multitudeof others, create for Indigenous Canadians places where they can begin to engage inconversations about their rights and ways in which these rights can reconfigure thewhole. Such encounters are far from equal, but in contrast to the suppression of Indigenous peoples political subjectivities under the rubric of existing environ-mental governance arrangements they do signify a truly political moment when new

arrangements of power are created in the in-between spaces of political engagementthrough dialogue across difference (Dikec 2005).

Acknowledgements

This paper draws partly on the authors postdoctoral research carried out underthe auspices of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, Agreements,Treaties and Negotiated Settlements with Indigenous Peoples in Settler States:Their Role and Relevance for Indigenous and Other Australians (www.atns.net.

au). I acknowledge and thank Simon Batterbury and two anonymous reviewers fortheir comments on the paper. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

Correspondence : Lisa Palmer, School of Anthropology, Geography andEnvironmental Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010,Australia. E-mail: lrpalmer@unimelb.edu.au

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