What Tradition Affords

Abstract

Over the past three decades, non-Indigenous peoples have repeatedly positioned Indigenous peoples as the bearers of redemptive environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to climate change and natural hazards. In southeast Australia, recent widespread interest in Aboriginal peoples’ fire management practices has been bolstered by these international trends but more directly driven by a succession of severe bushfire seasons as well as popular accounts suggesting that such practices might “save” the fire-prone nation. This situation is one of both continuity and novelty. While the ways Aboriginal peoples burn landscapes have been previously (re)discovered by bushfire managers and scientists, contemporary Aboriginal “cultural burning” initiatives also represent new contact zones of encounter and recognition, offering paradoxical affordances for individuals and groups able to perform different articulations of Indigeneity. As non-Indigenous people search for Indigenous solutions, in Australia and elsewhere, they raise expectations and fuel emerging tensions, with potentially incendiary results.