Environmental Engagement: Towards Community and Place in India and - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental Engagement: Towards Community and Place in India and Australia Michael Davis

Local Connections: memory resides in

• chre
• In the Dubbo Regional Museum, a lone piece of

yellow ochre is among a small collection of Aboriginal cultural objects largely unprovenanced;

• Out of context, and with an absence of story and

history, yet this ochre speaks powerfully of local Aboriginal peoples’ connections to this place.

Aboriginal community, place and ecology

• In the rural region of Dubbo, NSW, Tubba-Gah people talk of a special

connection they have to ochre. This connects people, place, ecology and cultural heritage.

• Ochre was, and still is important not only as a marker of place for Tubba-

Gah Wiradjuri people, but also as a signifier for the name they give

• themselves. Ochre was a very significant resource, and the Dubbo area

was noted for quarries for red and yellow ochre. This material was important in Tubba-Gah society for ornamentation for body and material culture items, for ceremonial and ritual use. It was also an important trade item, and its access and use was governed by strict cultural norms. An early local historian Garnsey had written that ‘the ochre was traded extensively along trade routes [and] there is evidence of it being located hundreds of kilometres distant from Dubbo’ (Garnsey). The association between the Tubba-Gah people and ochre is important in linguistic as well as symbolic and cultural senses. The clan/band name Tubba-Gah, rendered as Dubboga by Garnsey, was named for the red ochre deposits ‘quarried from the banks of the Macquarie River near Eulomogo Creek’. This is also the site of an important stone axe grinding industry.

The connectedness of things

• For Tubbah-Gah, ecology, material culture,

environmental stewardship and rights, person, place and cosmology are all powerfully intertwined;

• Wiradjuri have strong and enduring

connections to rivers and riverine ecologies:

Wiradjuri, environment & place

Tubbah-Gah form one of the clan groups of the large Wiradjuri Nation.

• Wiradjuri identity is closely associated with geographical and topographical features, especially rivers:
• –

Three great rivers, the Macquarie, the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee, intersected Wiradjuir country and gave to the families associated with them some common bonds as river people. (Read, 1988, pp. 2-3).

• Read (1988, pp. 2-3) suggests that for Wiradjuri, identity is formed by connection between people, name

and place:

• –

These associations between people and local area are for the most part ancient. ... The essence of modern Wiradjuri unity, therefore, is not boundaries on a map, not even a common Aboriginal culture, (which is shared by near neighbours) but the old Wiradjuri kin-groupings, now bearing European names, which identify with certain regions.

• Anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald:
• –

Wiraduri consciousness of space, and of the ways in which it is constructed, is a system of knowledge that Wiradjuri people share but, like all systems of knowledge, it is not equally accessed or

• distributed. Various discourses are available by which Wiradjuri speak of the divisions within the

landscape that make that landscape meaningful. These are frequently and not unexpectedly

• contradictory. They may emphasise the autonomy of the local area but also the commonalities of the
• region. They may prioritise economic or political or spiritual relations at different times, depending
• n context.... (Macdonald, 1998, p. 163).

Indigenous people and environmental justice

In Australia Indigenous peoples and environmentalism has been shaped by the following themes:

• Claims for rights & recognition (incl. Land,

native title, heritage)

• Calls for greater participation & decision-

making

• Protection from development for for

significant areas, sites & places

• At the heart of many of these campaigns and

claims is a call for recognition of Indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledge (sometimes referred to as ‘traditional ecological knowledge – but see critiques of this).

Alliances with ‘green’ movements (e.g. FoE, ACF, WWF, etc) Some key moments:

• Jabiluka: Kakadu Uranium mining
• Ngarrindjeri Coorong Lakes
• Qld ‘Wild Rivers’ legislation, role of TOs
• Murray-Darling Basin management & planning

• Tubbah-Gah people have maintained their ecological

knowledge away from their country, while being dispersed

• ver past decades;
• The ‘universal’ quality of knowledge is captured by 19th

century English poet John Clare who wrote:

– “Knowledge gives us a great number of lessons for nothing like Socrates she is not confined to Halls or colledges or forum(s) but like him accompanys us in our walks in the fields and attends on us at our homes ... in fact she is every where with us ready to instruct and assist our enquireys ... we have only to feel a desire to come at the means of her acquaintance and she is instantly ready to instruct us how to meet with the matter. (Robinson and Powell, 2004, p. 242).

The fate of knowledge

• Tubbah-Gah and other Wiradjuri people have

suffered immense historical dispossession, dislocation, and loss of culture through missions and re-settlement;

• Many were moved away from their country

around Dubbo;

• Others dislocated from elsewhere now live in this

area;

• This has resulted in a loss of knowledge and

heritage, and a complex local politics of Indigenous identity and self-representation.

“I live somewhere else, but I’ve never left here”

• The complex articulation of place and being by Tubba-

Gah is articulated powerfully by one Traditional Owner in conversation, who expressed her identity by stating ‘I live somewhere else, but I’ve never left here’*

• This statement captures a sense that identity resides

both in place, and out of place. It is also referenced to Tubba-Gah history, which has been one of dispossession, dislocation, exile and loss of knowledge. The Traditional Owner who expressed this sentiment currently lives away from Dubbo in another part of Australia, but retains her strong connections to country and people in place.

*(Mrs Narrell Boys. I am grateful to Mrs Boys for giving me permission to quote her for this presentation).

“…out of my knowledge…”: the locality

• f knowledge

But there is also a sense from Clare’s work, of knowledge being connected to particular place, as he wrote in his autobiographical fragments: “I lovd this solitary disposition from a boy and felt a curiosity to wander about the spots were I had never been before ... I remember one incident of this feeling when I was very young ... it was in summer and I started off in the morning to get rotten sticks from the woods but I had a feeling to wander about the fields and I indulgd it ... I had often seen the large heath calld Emmonsales stretching its yellow furze from my eye into unknown solitudes when I went with the mere

• peners and my curiosity urged me to steal an oppertunity to explore it that

morning ... I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it ... so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures and discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water ... so I eagerly wanderd on and rambled among the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me and I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys...”

Towards geographies of place

• The Tubba-Gah ochre connection draws

attention to the power of place in thinking about Indigenous identity, knowledge and culture;

• Reconciling specifics of place and locality with

global:

• e.g. “relational geographies …” (see Massey

2004, Castree 2004 for example)

The identity of place

• “If space *& place+ is a product of practices,

trajectories, interrelations, if we make space [& place] through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local and the (so-called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable … and inevitably historically changing” (Massey 2004: 5)

Global/Local

• There is a dialogue between universal or global

discourses on Indigenous environmentalism, human rights and ecological knowledge, and specific local, community interests;

• Indigenous peoples’ claims and interests for

recognition and rights in knowledge, heritage and culture are also political claims for recognition of difference within the nation-state;

Knowledge ‘in’ and ‘out of’ place

• The UN Convention on Biological Diversity states at

Article 8j that signatory countries shall ‘as far as possible and as appropriate’:

• Subject to national legislation, respect, preserve and

maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge innovations and practices.’

Indigenous ecological knowledge and the discourses of biodiversity and IPR

‘... it is possible to examine “biodiversity” not as a true object that science uncovers, but as an historically produced discourse’ – Escobar 1998, p. 54

Constructing local and Indigenous knowledge in legal discourses

• Indigenous and local ecological knowledge is

constructed within the CBD, and related international treaties, laws, and work in progress (e.g. WIPO) in the context of debates about

• wnership and property, trade and

commoditisation;

• Often, this alienates these forms of knowledge

from their particularisation as elements of environment and culture, and connectedness to memory, history, being and community

Aboriginal ecological knowledge as ‘property’

In much of the current literature on Indigenous ecological knowledge, it is discussed as within a framework of legally constituted property rights. IPRs is the commonly used framework for considering ways to ‘protect’ Indigenous ecological knowledge

Overlapping discourses on Indigenous ecological knowledge

• In a separate, but related discourses, Indigenous

ecological knowledge is constituted as an element of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights (Janke 1998);

• This is an integrated sense of Indigenous

ecological knowledge in which it is (re-) connected to cultural heritage;

• Consistent with/drawn from Declaration on the

Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

• Art 11(1): Indigenous peoples have the right

to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

• Art 13(1): Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize,

use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies....

• Art 29: right to environmental protection & conservation…
• Article 31(1):... right to maintain, control, protect and

develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, .... They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.

Moving between international, universal discourses and specifics of the local

• I have been arguing for a deeper and more

nuanced engagement between the rights based discourses of international legal norms and treaties, and the specifics of local community knowledge and practices, embedded in place, memory, belonging and identity