Abstract Indigenous leaders and scholars demand greater respect for their governance and knowledge authority, with one priority the de/centring of the environmental management research-praxis arising out of natural science traditions (Latulippe and Klenk, 2020). That is, to de-centre colonial privilege and centre Indigenous authority. Who can do this and how involves conceptual, political and cultural expertise; yet, natural science disciplinary practices prioritise invisibilizing power, culture and perspective (Latulippe and Klenk, 2020; Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew, 2020). This article is an intervention into this context. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I introduce the analytical tools I use to unpack two core assumptions that confounded my ability to hear what Indigenous mentors were saying about environmental management. With two demonstrations—Xaxli’p (Canada) and Gunditjmara (Australia)—I also show how Indigenous leaders do not just present their own approaches, but re-constitute environmental management itself with their meanings, practices, and priorities, whilst environmental management also influences Indigenous knowledge and governance. My focus is with how knowledge is formed and re-formed within and between diverse knowledge holders, including my work as a reflexive modern scholar. Significantly, this article is not purely for edification: this is justice work—in support of both Indigenous people and nature.

Abstract Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named Honouring Land Connections, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that Honouring Land Connections represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period disregards Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with and responsibilities for Country. The artworks signify contested spaces, places and knowledge of Country, culture, and waterways. Honouring Land Connections maintains cultural connections and speaks back to White preconceptions of Indigeneity. The artists wage war on the selective readings and colonial amnesia in Australia to directly challenge notions of terra nullius and intellectual nullius. This article shows how art can facilitate interaction through which Aboriginal artists can affirm, negotiate, share, and explore their identities while challenging dominant Eurocentric preconceptions of place and identity.

Abstract Aotearoa New Zealand acknowledges mātauranga Māori in the two Acts and one Memorandum of Understanding recognising the ‘personhood’ status of three geographical regions—Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga. They blend the legal fiction of corporate personhood with the already always understanding of human-nonhuman kinship and entanglement of M!ori philosophy, Māori knowledge and wisdom, and Māori epistemology. Through kaitiaki (trustees) these three entities have volition in their ongoing maintenance, development negotiations, and ‘land-use’, and ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. These attributes suggest something more than mere volition in self-management and protection: they suggest agency. This article explores the implications of nonhuman agency as potential for political voice. As representatives of entanglement for all being—animal (including human), vegetable and elemental—and as a matter of justice they are, perhaps, obliged to participate in democracy and the nation is, perhaps, obliged to give them a ‘seat at the table’. As political agents with equal status to human and corporate persons Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga might unsettle settler politics and challenge the imbalances of the Anthropocene.

Abstract This article describes and analyses the Pelorus experiment, a recent restoration project in which dingoes were used to eradicate goats on a Great Barrier Reef Island. Before they were taken to the island, the dingoes were implanted with a poison capsule that was intended to kill them after they had killed the goats; they were both pest and ‘pesticide’ (Mavhunga 2011). Subsequently, freehold land on the island was marketed as a tourism development site. We contextualise the Pelorus Island goat eradication program within the cultural–political history of carceral colonialism in Australia and show how this experiment relates to ideas about the special role that islands play in conservation. We also piece together the story of what happened to the goats and dingoes involved. Our analysis reveals the ways notions of animal pesthood and ecological restoration are co-opted by conservation and tourism interests. The Pelorus experiment illustrates how illusions of idyllic island sanctuaries, which appeal to contemporary tourism tropes of seclusion within a ‘pristine’ environment, are predicated on the violence inherent to, but obfuscated within, settler-colonialist visions of land for the taking and remaking.

Abstract This article examines the intersecting forms of social and environmental injustice shaping the lifeworld of Indigenous Marind communities and their more-than-human ecologies in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. Over the last decade, large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion have radically undermined Marinds’ intimate and ancestral kinships with sentient forest plants and animals, as well as the moral principles that undergird interspecies relations. These transformations are exacerbated by conservation practices that are undertaken in the name of corporate sustainability but that are problematically premised upon an assumed divide between humans and the environment. The exclusion of Marind from natures both exploited and preserved sits in turn within a long-standing and ongoing history of violence and discrimination perpetrated against West Papuans under Indonesian rule. Drawing from Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols of more-than-human relationality, I examine how Marind conceive and contest the possibility of justice now and in the future—for themselves, forest organisms, and oil palm—amidst multiple, overlapping, and intersecting injustices provoked by capitalism, conservation, and colonialism. I invite an expansion of the scope and subjects of justice beyond the human that remains nonetheless acutely attentive to the persistence of capital-colonial regimes systematically positioning Indigenous peoples as killable before the law.

Abstract We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and socio-political crisis—climate change, pandemic, extinction, inequality, and repression—yet everywhere it is underpinned by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the persistent refusal of Indigenous authority and sovereignty. Bringing together concerns about bio- and necropolitics, habitat destruction and animal cruelty, corporate-colonial modes of conservation, whitened food systems, and settler-colonial systems of land, business and environmental law, this special issue highlights enduring structures of injustice and creative lines of Indigenous resistance, authority, and cultural-political transformation.

Abstract Borders and bordering practices can be understood as both an act of sovereign authority and establishing the contemporary international system. The drawing of borders also simultaneously legitimizes the state’s sovereign authority, creating a political community ‘inside’ borders through which modern politics takes place. These processes are especially pertinent for settler states such as Canada, whose sovereign authority over its recognized territory is contingent on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. However, Indigenous nations reject Canadian claims of settler authority and legitimacy, instead continuing to uphold their own modes of governance and relationships to territory. This contestation of settler territoriality is practiced in various ways, with this article exploring how energy utility governance and infrastructure act as bordering practices—that is, as a productive means of manifesting and demonstrating territorial authority. Through the British Columbia Utilities Commission’s Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry, we explore the contestation of territory through what we refer to as ‘embedded bordering’. In doing so, we identify a tension between ongoing settler moves to dispossession alongside decolonial potential in the border-making practices of energy governance and infrastructure.

Abstract Since colonisation began in Australia, it has transformed the ecological, social, cultural, and economic bases of the biggest estate on earth, with outcomes driving the disruption of Indigenous food sovereignty, foodways and food knowledges alongside the reproduction of Whiteness. This article critically examines the place of White food, including the case of nanotechnologies, in the expansion of the settler colonial frontier, and its impacts for Indigenous health and relationships with food. To do this, we consider a widely commercialised nano-food application: the addition of nano-scale titanium dioxide to make foods White. Nano White food provides a unique lens to examine White authority and control across settler colonial food systems. We consider some of the impacts arising from this global colonial power matrix—to which Whiteness is organising principle for domination—for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, justice, and rights. We argue that unsettling Whiteness is vital to redressing the violence wrought by settler colonial agri-food systems, and for re-centring living ecologies and interconnected systems across foodways.

AbstractThe following is a presentation delivered as introductory remarks for my PhD defense of the dissertation, “Weaving our authority together: transforming the prairie Indigenous political order” held in February 2020. The remarks presented a rare opportunity to strike a tone that needed to speak to my dissertation committee, six family members and four community members from Maskwacîs. These community members travelled on behalf of the Board of Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission, my research partner, and the Ermineskin Education Trust Fund, that administered the funding for almost the entirety of my post-secondary education and helped me to access my treaty right to education. My main motivation was to draw a clear picture of how exclusive sovereignty is a legacy of settler colonization that has impacted Maskwacîs and how we confronted that legacy through the articulation and implementation of a relational sovereignty.

Abstract This article contributes to conversations about creative sovereignties by exploring what truly ‘nation-to-nation’ fiscal relationships might look like between Canada and Treaty 6 First Nations if Treaty 6 were taken seriously. Since fiscal relations between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states often perpetuate colonial sovereignty, reimagining fiscal relations in a historical treaty context offers creative opportunities for decolonization. The article first examines the history of the 1876 Treaty 6 and the relationships Treaty 6 created. It is established that Treaty 6 created nation-to-nation relationships that were based on the desire for mutually beneficial relations in a shared space, and that treaty included fiscal obligations for Canada. Since 1876, including today, fiscal relations between Canada and First Nations have generally been inconsistent with the spirit and intent of treaty. The article proceeds to offer examples of changes that could be made to create fiscal relationships consistent with treaty. Some of these recommendations are relatively pragmatic and would come at little political, fiscal, or constitutional cost to Canada, while others are more dramatic, and would involve a fundamental reshaping of Canada as we know it.