Facilitating Sustainable Disaster Risk Reduction in Indigenous Communities: Reviving Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Practices through Two-Way Partnering.

Dorothy Yuŋgirrŋa,James Arnold Smith,Douglas Paton,Elaine Lawurrpa Maypilama,Stephen Dhamarrandji,Tahir Ali,Petra Topaz Buergelt,Rosemary Gundjarranbuy

doi:10.3390/ijerph18030855

Abstract

The Sendai Framework of Action 2015–2030 calls for holistic Indigenous disaster risk reduction (DRR) research. Responding to this call, we synergized a holistic philosophical framework (comprising ecological systems theory, symbolic interactionism, and intersectionality) and social constructionist grounded theory and ethnography within a critical Indigenous research paradigm as a methodology for exploring how diverse individual and contextual factors influence DRR in a remote Indigenous community called Galiwinku, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Working together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers collected stories in local languages using conversations and yarning circles with 20 community members, as well as participant observations. The stories were interpreted and analysed using social constructivist grounded theory analysis techniques. The findings were dialogued with over 50 community members. The findings deeply resonated with the community members, validating the trustworthiness and relevance of the findings. The grounded theory that emerged identified two themes. First, local Indigenous knowledge and practices strengthen Indigenous people and reduce the risks posed by natural hazards. More specifically, deep reciprocal relationships with country and ecological knowledge, strong kinship relations, Elder’s wisdom and authority, women and men sharing power, and faith in a supreme power/God and Indigenous-led community organizations enable DRR. Second, colonizing practices weaken Indigenous people and increase the risks from natural hazards. Therefore, colonization, the imposition of Western culture, the government application of top-down approaches, infiltration in Indigenous governance systems, the use of fly-in/fly-out workers, scarcity of employment, restrictions on technical and higher education opportunities, and overcrowded housing that is culturally and climatically unsuitable undermine the DRR capability. Based on the findings, we propose a Community-Based DRR theory which proposes that facilitating sustainable Indigenous DRR in Australian Indigenous communities requires Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners to genuinely work together in two-directional and complementary ways.

Highlights

Indigenous peoples have, over several millennia, developed sophisticated ecological knowledge and practices to predict, prepare for, cope with, and survive natural events using their close intimate relationships with the country in which they live [1,2]
While developing and reiterating some of the claims made by earlier studies of Yolηu cultural competencies for disaster risk reduction (DRR) [1,6,8,15,61], our study adds an in-depth historical and contemporary analysis of how these capacities interact and how they are influenced and utilized when they interact with other sub-systems in their ecology
There is an increasing emphasis in the DRR literature on a paradigm shift from reductive approaches to understanding complex socio-natural systems of disaster risk, towards more holistic and systemic approaches [21,25,29,55]. Such approaches are required to better understand the socio-cultural-environmental sources of risks that increase the likelihood of hazardous events becoming disasters and that identify opportunities for marshalling these resources to facilitate reducing the risks that arise from interactions among and between individual, social, economic, environmental, structural, and historical dimensions [25,32]

Summary

Introduction

Indigenous peoples have, over several millennia, developed sophisticated ecological knowledge and practices to predict, prepare for, cope with, and survive natural events using their close intimate relationships with the country in which they live [1,2]. Because our research was conducted with the Yolηu community in Galiwin’ku, who are Australian Indigenous peoples, we refer to Indigenous peoples in this paper) [4,5,6,7] These top-down, hazard-focused, deficitbased, response-oriented, decision-centralized, and agency-driven systems overrode and undermined Indigenous DRR capacities [1,8,9]. The fact that such approaches have failed in Indigenous settings and in broader global contexts [5,10] highlights the urgent need to transform the worldviews underlying traditional and contemporary Western DRR in ways that recognize Indigenous worldviews and utilize Indigenous knowledge and practices in community-based DRR [1].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion