2022 - Karrinjarla Muwajarri Forum
​Public forum held at UTS on the Friday 10th of June 2022
Welcome to Country given by Nadeen Dixon
Speakers: Paddy Gibson, Mr Ned Hargraves, Liz Jarrett, Latoya Rule
Listen to the Karrinjarla Muwajarri Forum Audio Recording
Visit the website: Karrinjarla Muwajarri / Justice for Walker
2019 - Clarence Correctional Centre Forum
Facilitator: Pauline Clague
Speakers: Deb Kilroy, CEO of SistersInside has accepted our invitation to be a member of the panel as have Emeritus Professor Judith Atkinson and her daughter Carlie Anderson Patron and CEO respectively of We Al-li.
2018 - Nation Building forum
hi everyone um my name is Elison Vivian I'm from uh jambana one of the
researchers there and I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming along
today um uh I've I don't know whether the right expression is that I've drunk the Kool-Aid because the Kool-Aid didn't
work out terribly well for the people who drank it but um being a the wrong
the wrong the wrong Koolaid but um uh I'm definitely um an indigenous nation
building conver um think that it has the potential to impact in many areas of um
research and but much more importantly you know has the potential to impact on
um the well-being of I think all Australians but in particular
um Aboriginal Andro Islander Australians I'd like on that note to acknowledge
that wherever we meet in Australia we meet on indigenous country regardless of
whether there are buildings or developments or um other kinds of infrastructures I want to pay my
respects to the gal people of the auron nation um who have responsibility for
this country and to pay my respects to um average or island of people here and
and also acknowledge the the challenges in a particularly hostile environment of
exercising Sovereign uh rights to self-determination um we thought we'd
start off today by just having you guys introduce yourselves and explain um the
work that you're doing because we thought we didn't kind of do this as you can see as like a big fancy Research
Forum we didn't even give you any lunch um you know where we said come along and hear these guys because as I said we you
know really have drunk the Kool-Aid we really do think that this work particularly the 30 years um work that
Steve and Miriam have been involved in um in the United States has something to say in Australia and so what we're
hoping for is a conversation here about how this work might impact on your own
work so we thought we ask you to introduce yourselves talk about um the kind of work and and your own interests
then these guys are just going to give a very short presentation each kind of 10 or 15 minutes about different aspects of
the work and then let's have a conversation afterwards about how we ultimately you know where where from you
is how we might ultimately work together so thanks again for coming so how long are you looking for
each person to tell tell about what they're up to are you looking for 5 minutes 3 minutes oh let's see how it
goes yes my name is Ros sortel I actually
don't know my mob but I've been very lucky to be taken under the wing of um the community on the Gold Coast the
language group up there um mered peoples um and I'm I'm lucky enough to be with
them and the aunties and uncles there have pushed me over the last couple of years to do a bit more so I have decided
to do um my masters of research at the moment and I am looking to find out why
our older urban community members are not going online or taking up the opportunities in the libraries to free
access and the training that's there which is what government's basically saying is the only reason why that we're
not becoming that um learning those skills but there's obviously a reason other than that because there's a lot in
our community that is still not going online even though government's forcing them by making all the uh
services available that way yeah um so that's what I'm just first year um so
I've only just started um but I am thoroughly enjoying it and um meeting
some um people that I've held in high esteem been lucky enough to do that in
the last couple of months because I'm actually from the Gold Coast as I said that I'm down here for this year great
and uh because I only actually applied to do it with John buner um I learned of
your research when I was doing my undergrad and I just wanted to be part of that well that's great so that's me
great thank you so much my name's Matt Walsh I'm an an
man Hills um halfway between where Sydney Sydney and Brisbane
um I have always What drew me to nation
building I guess number one I work ATS and um to he uh Alison's building she really is
a and um and like it for me it was number one what I found interesting with
it was uh that it just seemed like common sense because M have been doing
for a long time using any tool that was available to survive or to flourish or
to express their sovereignty um so yeah so when I came to UTS I I worked
in the employment area here for a long time and I think I feel like that we Ed
concepts of nation building to actually progress that as well the idea of growing our growing our cohorts um here
to be able to express U who we we are within the
framework that is the University uh yeah thanks for
much before I speak I'd like to acknowledge that we're on the unseed land of the gadal people that's phrase
is now coming into when we acknowledge people people's country where where we
my name is Peter Pennington I'm n from South Australia M of the mar like
alexandrina and the kurong uh but I grew up in Nat and there I worked as a social
worker in 1978 and I thought about the health of young AAL men then I'm now doing research in relation to hopefully
going doing research in relation to how they use social media for their health and wellbeing as well and to look at
maybe best practice programs for to do as well there's a book called holding
holding men which is uh Kenyon imper by Brian McCoy who's a Jesuit priest who's
worked in Kim for a long time and written a book about that Health practice Ken Lia and I think that those
are the principles in that in that in that program and that practice are still
exists here on the East Coast but are espoused in different ways
in a way so that's what I hope to do in the next three years
oh thank you um Dean Jarett
um I've been at the UTS since about 2010 I think did
different roles and teaching what not did my masters and stuff but now just about uh sort of most of my thesis now
is at the editor so my date that I handed in thews what's that
what's submission middle of um December so hopefully
that'll be all little better down and tucked away but my mob aanga mob up the
um nabaka from nabaka area on Dad side and other mob from Queensland on uh in
from war vinda the um my study I think has a
probably a direct alignment with what native nations is all about um uh
rebuilding and um mtion rebuilding so in terms of Economic Development um what I
did was a comparison between Native American owned companies that sort of wear off the reservations not on the
reservations but in uh in Regional centers in the southwest corner and um
have indigenous businesses here in in Australia on the east coast in Sydney Brisbane and um
Melbourne so so just a small just a small stud take it May 4
and a half years so uh so um and this afternoon I'm
presenting it um with the Chris oh yeah yeah coming along to that but um uh
that's that's on this afternoon yeah so um yeah I think uh that there's a
clearcut relationship there between what my study is and as as I presented at the
the early sort of preliminary findings I suppose at at native nations over at UA
when I was I'm Allison I'm a gomy woman I grew up
in danadar inworth which are kind of in the northwest of New South Wales up near an um I just came back from the the US
um probably two or 3 months ago and while I was there I was
studying um one kind of nation building and two I was researching uh how
Australian Justice systems respond to police violence in Australia um and I
guess my secondary area of research is indigenous peoples in poetry and literature I'm trying to find a way to
merge the two so far have not been very successful but I'm giving it a red hot
go yeah uh Nathan West um buy man from mid
North Coast but I grew up in New Castle um don't I have a background in
development I guess the nut bols of it but um since working in the field for a while um I did my masters in Economic
Development um anthropology of development um and now I'm second year
uh technically second year PhD here at UTS um engaging quite heavily with
nation building work um looking at you know peras of approaches to Economic Development um I've worked um my masters
was looking at um economic development in um digital communities in the provant
Amazon um spe specifically around I guess the employment of um extractive
projects gasm um I'm currently in a bit of a Crossroads and hope to hope to
um um I guess unpack that a little bit um today for hearing his talk um oh no
thank you thanks I'm Eva Cox I'm attached to John I used to teach here
and taught research methods and advocacy and policy and feminism and various other things and S change things but
about a decade ago I resigned my teaching thing and came over to John because I thought I wanted to learn
something different views of the world I mean my background is is a refugee child was born in Vienna two
weeks before Hitler March in so actually started Life as a refugee in England so
I'm sort of come from the other end of having no sense of those sort of country ties things which is one of the reasons
I think I'm very interested in what in where one goes across those sort of various spect what I I mean I just say I've
taught research methods I've done some evaluation which just been sort of blamed for somebody's arrival here uh of
things like the uh you know the Cash's debit card and the intervention and the various other things and I'm really
interested in in how one sets up structures that don't demolish
people and in particular how we move out of the Assumption of the materialist economic sort of thing being the only
thing that counts and trying to run a campaign at the moment which is based on we are citizens not customers we live in
a society not an economy which I think works very well within both my conception of feminism and my conception
of of indigenous things because we've got to get away from the idea it only occurred to me a few weeks ago if you
think about it a citizenship involves a set of obligations and responsibilities
and rights customer if you think about it really in its full thing is a distrust relationship we're constantly
told don't accept it don't be loyal to your bank don't be loyal to your what's he provided don't be so in a sense it's
not too surprising we have a massive amount of distrust of government coming up because the government keeps telling us to be customers it's also individual
not Collective so I'm interested in trying to and that's the reason the reason I'm coming on today to run
something about how we do we get back to putting the social policy on the agenda part those people doing stuff on
economics I think it's us up better than more or less any other framework because it's materialist has
no way of coping with things like ethics relationships emotions feelings unless you shove some psychology and that
doesn't work different currency interesting this work started
with an economic vent isn't it and and it's kind of turned up and it s of Chang so I at the moment and I've got a card
here um we're trying to put up a good Society web night website so that we can actually collect things and I'd love to
have some of this stuff up there to get people to actually put up proposals about what we want I think we've become
very good at telling people what we don't want but I think we need to actually put down what we want I think
that's a difference because I'm me of the 70s social movements 70s TY stuff
then we optimistically believe we could change things I think at the moment there's much more pessimism around oh
yeah all people are trying to do is stop things but you don't change you don't stop things unless you put up
Alternatives so protests are fine but at some point you've got to say but do X
instead because otherwise they going it up again you know I think that's why you know resarch is interesting so
come along to sort of see how the S something stuff that I could see spreading over of trying to put Society
back on the agenda is oh also did the 1995 boy lectures which was called truly
civil society which is still online there's a pirate copy online if you put it in which is quite interesting because
I predicted then that moving down the economic pathway was going to undermine
the social and this is what's happening and that's why I'm interested because I think it's much more about the social
it's a social Nation you're trying to put together it's not an economic one I
thanks okay uh L UMO man from Northwest and South well
I've been in a original Affairs for just over 20 years um I'm not an academic but
I'm pretending to be we're easy to
imitate I um yeah started out in government um ran a couple of not
for-profit AIG organizations and went over to the dark side with
PWC um four years before I came here with their indigenous Consulting Group
um being a political advisor and different other things but um yeah got the opportunity to come on here February
this year uh with the res jum bu to sort of try to mash all of that stuff learned
across sort of different sectors um and similar to Eva we sort of
while I was trying to sort of think about research and and all this type of stuff I had a handy drop moment when I
heard um I think Hitchens was talking about slavery we had this phrase called how do we make good and it
just had the p drop moment like how do we make good how do we so we're always talking describing problem really well
and then you know something happens there's an apology and you know the population's like well we're done now
that'll go away if he want us to go away he's he's the things want to do and
that's sort of the type of stuff I'd like to really zero in on yeah but still
figuring it out really [Music]
great we sure we should just start by introducing ourselves sure
you hi um it's great to meet all of you and some I've met before many times and
some just a few times so um and some for the first time uh and I'm going to see if I canuse used uh Peter's language
that he just taught me it's great to be here on the Yon SE land the gal people
uh and I want to acknowledge their country and their elders and respected persons um and acknowledge all the
indigenous people in the room who are emerging um Scholars and uh established
Scholars and leaders in their communities my name is Miriam Jorgenson and I work for primarily for native
nations Institute the University of Arizona I'm also um on staff here at Jima um work closely with Allison uh and
I U was originally trained and still hold a title with the harbor project on American Indian Economic Development my
background is was originally in pure economics and the math I did um a a
second undergraduate degree at Oxford where I did all theologies and graphies and a degree that was called human
Sciences which really was a great counterweight to neoclassical economics
um and then I did political economy in my Graduate Studies and International Development which continue to do that
broadening out of sort of you know you kind of go narrow and deep with the classical economics and then the the
breath of all the ways to think about um uh how to how to learn about how human
societies um and I even I I hesitate to even call it human societies how societies operate um so that's been um
kind of the overarching academic frame that I come to my work from like we'll talk more about what that is let see
introduce himself thanks oh wait let me say one more thing which is also um uh
my home is in South Dakota my original home and was in south coota of the United States I work for University of Arizona in Tucson Arizona and for
Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts and virgin Bon C but I live in St Louis Missouri with my
husband and my two children fragmented person yeah um thanks Al um my name is
Stephen Cornell uh from the United States and uh like Miriam I just want to acknowledge the privilege of being in in
this country the country of the godo people and I'm sorry Peter but y people
[Music] un unated yes thank you for
clarifying um no decision made King King George gave explicit instructions to Fed
Arthur who came here to treat us as subjects right no I that's a that's an important
word and I very much appreciate it um but it's a privilege for me I'm not an
indigenous person I'm I'm a pretty uh standard issue white fella and um but
I've had the privilege with Miriam and other colleagues of spending the last three decades plus working with a lot of
indigenous Nations particularly in North America and the US and Canada but also in ATO
New Zealand and and here in Australia and um that's been um an extraordinary
personal experience for me and intellectual experience and I'm very grateful for that and it's a pleasure to
be here in your country and your territory um I'm a sociologist that um is what you
do if you don't really know what you want to do they tell you well if you don't know what you're doing go do sociology because you can do anything
under that so I'm sort of the opposite of Miriam she's the specialist and I'm the person who just you know I'm a
sociologist too you are well there we are um and um did most of my work at the
University of Chicago and then at at Harvard University where I met Miriam and Joseph col and where we started the
Harvard project on American Indian Economic Development um 31 years ago um and I thought I would
just I want to give you just a very quick background on that and then tell you something about some current
thinking and maybe it will resonate maybe not what we found in the late 1980s in the United States was some data
which showed that some American Indian nations were actually doing rather well at accomplishing their own objectives
whether those were economic objectives or social objectives land consolidation
and others were just spinning their wheels and having a great deal of difficulty getting any traction in
pursuing their own agendas and we thought this was
potentially uh an important difference and that it would be worth finding out why what's the difference between the
Nations that are making progress against their objectives and the ones that aren't and that was the origin of the
Harvard project on American Indian Economic Development we are fortunate to get some Ford Foundation funding to do
that research we are fortunate to find Miriam and she came on board and has
been Central to that research um over the last three decades
and some int intriguing results came out of that research and I'll I'll just and
some of you are probably very familiar with this but I think there were three key points that came out of it the first was if indigenous nations are going to
be successful at pursuing their own objectives they have to be the ones making the decisions that as long as
Washington or some other state or national government is deciding for indigenous people don't expect much to
change the second finding coming out of that research um was but they've got to
back up decision-making power with capable decision making capable what we called capable governance you've got to
be able to govern well you've got to be able to mobilize a community on behalf of your objectives you got to be able to
make decisions and stick to them you've got to be able to get things done that wasn't a particularly exciting finding
it came out of some of the development research of the 1970s and ' 80s governance matters but a lot of that
research said yes governance matters and what you need is good old neoliberal governing systems of the sort that the
United States has and so my country went around the world telling people you need better governance in fact you need our
governance so here it is and that was well received of course and has a terrible track record and what our
research showed was yes you do need capable governance but it also has to be
a governance that resonates with the people who are being governed who feel it's their governance that reflects
their ideas about how Authority should be organized and exercise and I think that was actually the key
finding in the Harvard project research because what it really said was if a
central government the United States Canada Australia and too if they're
interested in resolving indigenous problems the first thing they need to start doing is listening to indigenous people about how those problems might be
solved and respecting the right of those people to govern themselves in ways of their own choosing not in ways of
Washington DC's choosing or something like that over the last 30 years we've taken
those findings and done a lot more research and it's led us beyond the United States first into Canada then at
the start of the 2000s here to Australia back in 2001 um an indigenous governance
conference in canbera where we did some presentations on some of the US findings it was a mostly indigenous audience and
basically they said Gee this is interesting maybe there's some residents here
um and I think um a a lot of what we've been engaged in over the last 15 18
years now is actually learning more as we've changed contexts we find that some
of the principles of that Harvard project research have been strengthened
have been repeated have come out of work in other countries but we've also seen intriguing ways that native nations once
turned loose start to solve some of their problems and one of the things that's emerged over the last 15 years is
what I think of as a international network of indigenous Innovation where we find Nations talking to each other
across these International boundaries someone like Dean comes to the US and talks about what his interest is here
and you find indigenous people in the US saying we've got that problem here's how we're dealing with it how are you
dealing with it maybe we can learn something from what your mob has done and maybe we can tell you a bit about
what we're doing and I think that kind of communication is becoming increasingly important as a way of
shortening the learning curve G if Samari have solved the language revitalization problem in New Zealand
let's grab some of their learnings and put them to work so that's part of what we're doing the only other thing I
wanted to to talk about is um and then I'll turn it over to Miriam one of the
things that I think we've really seen over the last 30 plus years is a change in indigenous politics in all four of
these countries when I was in graduate school starting to do work on American Indian political activism in the United
States the politics was all about rights and recognition it was indigenous
Nations going after the US government saying you need to abandon these assimilationist policies you need to
recognize us you need to affirm our rights that was a very productive
politics it had had some momentous occasions in it that many of you know
just as there were here in that kind of politics I think in all four of the countries that I've worked in Canada US
Australia New Zealand we saw that kind of politics but over the last 30 years
we've seen a shift from a politics about rights and recognition to a politics
about governance and at the heart of that shift and I think a a young indigenous Australian man captured it
for me about 10 years ago ago here when he said to me if we wait for cber to recognize our rights we're going to die
waiting so why don't we just get on with doing what we think we need to do and I
think part of what has happened is not abandoning the right struggle but saying
let's just do it let's act like Nations let's figure out how to exercise the
rights we believe we have whether Ottawa Washington Wellington canar recognizes
those rights or not let's beave that way and it reminds me of the um czechoslovak president
president vas Habu who led much of the fight against communist occupation in Czechoslovakia and he wrote a wonderful
essay in which he says the key in life under communism is to live as if you
were a free man just live as if you were a free
man and I think for a lot of indigenous Nations what's happening is they've decided we're going to act like Nations
whether that government recognizes us as Nations or not we're going to live as if we were free Nations doing the things we
need to do and when you make that transition from a rights and recognition struggle to a let's do it struggle a
couple of things happen you stop centering government on what it does and you worry about what are we going to do
and I think we're seeing a new generation of younger leaders who honor what happened in the right struggle and
realize their products of it but are now saying we're less interested in what Washington DC decides and more
interested in what we decide and we're not actually in a worry about them we're going to get on with
our agenda and I think part of what we find our work has evolved into over
these years is a look at okay what do these governments movements by indigenous Nations look like in these
four countries and in others we're starting to do some work in Latin America and beginning to see evidence
from Nations who live under even more hostile environments than what you have
here so we're starting to kind of do that comparative work that says what
does the assertion of self-governing power look like under these different rights regimes with these different
legal Frameworks in these different places and what can indigenous Nations learn from each other as they push that
envelope and struggle to assert those self-governing Powers so that's a lot of
what I think our work is is now kind of evolved into and I'm going to see what
maram wants to add
Tom so a lot of the work that um I've been engaged in in Australia over the last eight years um do work that I was
first brought here um on an arc that uh Li was the lead on um but that was
really written by uh former J um researcher Mark McMillan and also Alice
together wrote a discovery project and asked me to join that um and so that
work turned into um uh some other Grant based Works through Melbourne University and then another Arc linkage and a lot
of that's been focused on asking some really simple questions Steve's kind of giving you some very big picture
information um about the findings from North America uh kind of boiled down to the indigenous uh control matters we
talk about indigenous Nation self-determination so that's the first finding that indigenous nations are in the driver's seat that they back that up
with institutions of governance that work for them um and that those have to be effective and legitimate that
cultural legitimacy we add on other pieces to um that seem to have come from uh less quantitative research those
pieces can have some pretty strong quantitative econometric style research behind them backed up with a lot of
in-depth um community- based uh um case studies too to kind of really flesh out
where those findings come from uh but other pieces that really seem to matter are when a a nation and Indigenous
political Collective has the capacity to do some really long-term strategic thinking and planning and uh when it
adopts a really long-term rather than a short-term view we talk about it that shift from being reactive to being
proactive um from you know thinking about somebody else's agenda to working on your own agenda and then also it
seems to really matter to have people in place and we call them nation building leaders but they don't have to be kind of organizational leader or an elective
leader they really come from any place within the community they're the kinds of people who can uh enunciate that sort
of vision who can um Talk help hold those hard conversations about who are we as a people things like that so um we
kind of have tended in um much of our work in the last particularly in the last decade but it's emerged from this
30 years of work to talk about self-determination uh effective institutions culturally legitimate
institutions uh having a strategic vision and nation building leadership so those principles really are the
underlying um nation building principles emerging from research but that also
have we think uh um usefulness to native nations and have proven useful to native
nations in North America as they're trying to shift toward a nation building framework they can sort of say we're going to start to work according to
those principles and that's going to help us achieve our goals so you can feel that they're both um research
evidence when we ask the question of well when native nations see seem to be doing well what are they what are they doing what what has led to that and it's
these principles and then you can shift that around and say well does applying them then help people get on with what
they're doing there had been a lot of conversation in Australia particularly
during the knots of the 200 2010 Range and this is kind of where the original Arc came from there would have been a
lot of people both in the academy and in the policy sectors where uh academics and policy
makers were saying this evidence is doesn't apply here these findings don't apply here because we have a very
different history there's an extreme there's while they're both you know British settler States the United States
and Canada and Australia that British settler history is somewhat different there's a completely different legal framework within which indigenous
peoples operate between you know the US and Canada and um Australia and uh to
there's different ways that indigenous peoples have organized themselves and have and the you know there might be um
similar uh issues around you know close the gaps or kinds of social concerns but that those those are being addressed in
very different social organization ways um so we really just asked a question
really simply of so does the North American evidence apply I mean in a sense people have kind of jumped to the
conclusion of things are too different here it doesn't apply so we just ask this the question does it and um I think
we really boil it down to two ways of asking that question the first was looking out across Australian saying are
there self-constituted political collectives and you can tell I'm kind of using that sort of Sociology political
sciency sort of language but what I'm talking about is a people is there an indigenous people that has identified
themselves as an indigenous people that has they has achieved self-identified
goals they've set goals for themselves and they've gotten there and that if we really do a deep dive into the history
of how they got to that place of how they achieved those goals do we see that these nation building princip were how
they did it so it wasn't trying to do some big large sample piece of research it was to say is there a self-identified
indigenous political Collective that has achieved success and how did it achieve that success and um that was the Crux
really of the work that we did in our first Arc working with the Narry Nation um so with Peter's Nation um and also
with the Gara people of Southwest um Victoria one of the um gar um peoples
that are in um that Coastal region and it was pretty clear from a lot of
desktop research that those two peoples amongst others that we had identified but those are the two that really seemed to Rise Above the Rest of having
self-constituted as as a people and that were really making tremendous strides uh
Allison in particular was instrumental in reaching out to uh uh leadership and
uh cultural authorities and policymaking authorities within those communities and um we gained the opportunity to do this
kind of Deep di research and our um our research points to the fact that these
the nation building principles really do apply that they were tremendously important part of the way that those
Nations achieve their goals so rather than sort of looking at The Superficial
differences between the United States and Australia we said can we look at what native nations actually did and the
principles de do lot the other piece question way we asked the question has been much more part of the linkage
project that we're uh will close out in probably 12 to 18 months and that project has asked the question of again
Ask looking for these self-identified indigenous political collectives and I'm going to get back to that I keep saying
that I'm going to get back to that because I think that's an important question are there self-identified indigenous political collectives that
have set goals for themselves and do they find the nation building principles useful in moving toward those goals so
again that's the you know there's that the how do people get to where they are and and are these principles useful as
sort of a uh standards for um moving toward success and in conversations um
and research with uh um organizations and individuals within the radry nation
uh individuals and organizations um within the Yar nation and um
uh basically the leadership group within the goab nation so we're really
geographically looking at a lot of different um areas too um and evidence emerging from others who
we have more one-off relationships with it does seem to be that the answer to that question is yes as well that these
principles are useful to those United Nations moving toward their schools so we think that as the
translation has been made to Australia research is pointing to the fact that these principles do apply that they're
useful now we the work I think is really moving toward two new kinds of questions
they've always been present but we're really forced to wrestle with them a lot more now that we feel that we have evidence in hand that this stuff applies
and that first is that vexing question of what it what is a native nation in the Australian context because really
the unit of analysis to do all of this work that they did in North America is what in North America typically gets
called a tribe or a native nation and they have that legal recognition as such that doesn't exist
in Australia we go back to what Steve said is just get on with things and it's clear that a number of self-identified
political collectives and you know you can open up a newspaper or go online or see policy documents from South
Australia and Narry nation is all over stuff there's a self-identified political Collective that that's what
they call themselves right um the gundara people of Southwest Victoria they call themselves the gundara people
so it's really those instances are clear but because of the particular Colonial history in Australia and um I think that
raz's opening statement of I don't know who my mob is but I've been accepted into a mob on the on the Gold Coast Area
that think how typical that is across Australia right um and so this question
of self-identified political Collective is really hard in areas where you've got
just a huge overlay of sterin generation you have these massive urban areas like Sydney and Melbourne where so much of
the Australian Aboriginal population and Tour St Island Islander population lives and so they're not on their original
country they're on they're being hosted on somebody else's unseated territory um
so these questions about what do a self-identified political Collective become really
hard in in in on some levels some of the Native title work starts to resolve it
but that doesn't really resolve it in a place say like Palm Island or in the middle of Newcastle or something so I
think there's some really tough and interesting both theoretical and empirical and community- based work to
be done to say if what is necessary for native nations to achieve or indigenous
Nations or indigenous political collectives to achieve their goals is create that sense of self-identified political Collective those that
self-identification has to occur and there has to be some of those hard conversations around well what role does
that mean traditional owners have does that mean that historical occupants are excluded um does that mean we have one
set of arrangements for Country land Waters plants animals native title sort of types of issues and then we have a
different set of arrangements for um more pan Aboriginal sorts of issues but people collaborate on those things so
that's kind of that big theore iCal and conceptual and practice question I think
the other place that our work has gone and largely because of changes that we've seen in policy at the state level the average of um uh am I was getting
the what's the stand for regional Authority um process in South Australia
the self-determination treaty discussions in Victoria and at some extent the um local and Regional
governance um policies of New South Wales toward indigenous Nations um and I know that there have been some similar
conversations in Northern Territory both Queensland and Western Australia I suppose not surprisingly really haven't
gone there yet um I don't know anything about Tasmania so um uh and the ACT is
just the act right so uh but at least in those three states we see have these emergent conversations that seem to give
rise to an opportunity for self-identified political collectives to engage with the state in New Times of recognition and legal right seeking um
really Thea they M that's right and they did just do it thing too yeah so but at
the level of State policy it's less clear that the states have that kind of
um engagement but a lot of our work right now is trying to engage with those State policy mechanisms and help help
them sort of better understand what the nation building results are and how it meeses with these new policies so I
talked for a lot longer than I was probably supposed to but that's kind of where we think our work is kind of at right
now um I just want to ask a followup question um to that conversation I think
that was very interesting but you know you've you've made the point about the self-identified political collectives um
but how does that start how does that start when you're in an environment where the state wants to tell you what
to do I didn't say it was an easy question oh no I actually have some answers and I
think it it helps actually maybe do some of the work that Allison's interested
in go for it so Alison you raised this thing if you're really interested on one hand in these questions around law and
policy right and on the other hand you're really interested in literature and poetry and um creative arts kinds of
things um and I I actually think that a lot of the work that that get we get to these self-identified political
effectives is not actually ever having first the conversation about law and policy I think we get there often times
by doing things that are feel unrelated but of course they are related so when people are telling their stories and
they and their writing poetry about who they are or they're engaging with their
hands and um harvesting um traditional food or even growing food that's not
traditional but they're working together on it you're getting into that different brain space that creates Community or
reestablishes community and it thickens that um that that social bond between
people and then makes it possible for some of those harder conversations to occur there's an um an Aboriginal artist
in um I think she's ubic so she's from the area now known as Alaska she's
operated and worked out of Minneapolis for years because of her own diaspora um
and she has a performance art series of projects where this is what they do they
do um submitted uh and uh written poetry
and um other spoken word uh art um that begins her the performance series she
curates that then they do um a community project actually I think they first do a community project together usually
environmental then they do spoken word art poetry and then they come together for a dance performance that she and her
company put on um and then they share a potl meal together and it takes place over four days and the point of it is to
build community and it's to reestablish those social boundaries that create
Nation then allow space to develop where that P policy conversation can occur so
I think if your work GIS in the new I don't know how they relate but I look at it and say oh absolutely know how
they Sorry Alison please I was just going to confirm I'm seeing that take
place back home huge cultural Revival is happening around women's waving and arts and dance um and it's it's being led by
against guess nation building leaders um who I didn't even conceptualize as nation building leaders until um what
you just said so leading um weaving practices being able to build economic capacity from that weaving then
funneling those funds into language Revival and doing all these incredible spiraling things that are just building
more and more momentum and the hard part is government uh Commonwealth and state government often times wants it to stop
there they don't want that to turn into the conversation about political Collective they're okay with cultural
Collective they're okay with social boundary and so the challenge for ab original people is then to push that to
the next stage what I was just going to add to what Mariam said was two two other
situations that I think are particularly difficult along the lines of what you just asked Al um and and one is urban
areas where a number of people have either extremely fragmented identities
in the sense that they see links to many peoples through their own genealogy or they really don't know what
those links might be and one of the things we're seeing in actually in AOA
among Mai you know all these economic settlements for example that have been made between some e tribes and if we can
call them that and the New Zealand government those have been focused very much at the level of ewi and there's a
lot of resistance in some of the urban areas among Urban maues saying wait a minute we're being left out of this
because our relationships with ewi may be uh very thin very fragile or we don't
don't even know what they are but what we're seeing lately is some Urban M saying well why can't we be an e what
what's what's sacred about the history that you have as an ewi
at some point when you arrived when those canoes arrived in New Zealand people decided okay the line of descent
will be from those canoes but we've arrived bit like a canoe in the urban
area of Auckland and why can't we assert that that's the origin of our e so what
you're seeing is a kind of very basic nation building that's starting almost
from from nothing in the sense of no obvious template for organizing like
that but conversation is happening because there are so many people who feel those connections to their their
own ancestors that become so thin and so fragile and then of course we've got some situations in the United States
where you have people who've been crammed together and who are facing a
structure in the organization of indigenous Affairs that says no we'll tell you who you are you're the people
of the Flathead reservation in Montana and the fact that that's actually three different peoples forced together under
a treaty to live together but they have made a conscious decision okay we are going to become the confederated Salish
and scrutiny tribes of the Flathead reservation we'll make a decision about how we're going to do nation building
and I think this is part of that self-determination piece is the ability
to determine who the self is that's the most fundamental piece of self-determination is who are we not
just what are our rights and what do we get to do but who are we and we shouldn't assume that that's got
to be limited to oh well if you can't trace your ancestry back then you're nobody and that's not to dismiss that
there are um critical connections all around the world between indigenous peoples and particular country uh one of
the things that um we've seen somewhat in North America is as these self-identified political collectives
solidify and develop a sense of self that there's then also sometimes quickly
sometimes years later that really important conversation resumes of how do people who are who's who have
responsibility for this land but who are not on this land still exercise that
responsibility and so we've started to see um interesting porousness of borders
I'm thinking in particularly about some Cy and their talk called tanaha people north of the Border in um their in
what's now called Canada um they're connected to Cy or Taha people south of the US Canada the border and uh in in
this group that Steve mentioned the confederated tribes of the Flathead reservation their Salish people pandere
people who have also Salish roots and Cy people and so how do those folks from
Canada who have been were on their own country but their country extends South and some it's en encompassed by this
land that's now shared by Cy and Salish people how do they exercise responsibility to that territory well
they didn't there was an Interruption there was an interruption when they couldn't exercise some of that responsibility but now as these nations
have kind of firmed themselves up as indigenous Nations they've started to have external relationships with one
another Cy and Taha people from Canada travel South to exercise their responsibilities on cutney land that's
to to the South and cutney people who are part of that confederated Nation
exercise their responsibilities on that land but also travel North as well so you have these what are political
collectives and cultural iives that intersect and overlap but aren't quite
the same thing uh so that it's taken years to work out some of this stuff but
it does show that there are ways to have um cultural boundaries and political
boundaries that overlap and intersect
so does anyone have any questions or success being recognized it's one of the
like being recognized one of the components or recognizing
yourself the Nations if they're hiding by choice or don't want to participate
and success is survival then does that I guess like I'm
I have a bit of trouble sometimes how important is formal legal recognition by well like I think I think more like is
it a person La is it external um no that two can be running
all the time like guess not like a re a new sense of s or a new sense of nation
exist that it's always existed but the responsibility was stopped because the
responsibility never stop it was it was there was an interrupted in people's inter responsibility was still there
yeah a lot of manifestation I guess of it is different and I I like your term
hidden because I think in some cases people felt they had to hide oh yeah if you didn't hide it it was going to get
smashed and so people in a sense took what was most important to them
underground where it was invisible to power and then when the power Dynamic
changed it began to reemerge again and we see that here too of course don't we
where you know um we sometimes refer to what we see as kind of governing by
stealth because why would you invite um state and federal governments to come
and attack you so you know kind of governing Arrangements decision making arrangements um you know kind of uh sit
sit in corporate institutions and you know are kind of protected from scrutiny
in a way so when you're doing the comparative
stuff is there anything in Australia that stands out as unique either good or
bad I was thinking I went to the permanent forum in
2013 and the Australian um delegates were just zero focused on government and
then Native Americans got up government once you know is that sort of dynamic um
is there anything that sort of really stands out in terms of our governments as opposed to other
indigenous um I mean I guess do you to me the thing that really stands
out is how effective Australia as a nation state is has been in pan abigal iing issues here we in some of our work
we talk about the big a Aboriginal kind of issues and there absolutely are
issues that affect every single Aboriginal person and every Aboriginal political C they're out there and those
are issues that you can create these coalitions around but I think it's been
also a way that the Australian government has destroyed people's ability to self- collect and um and has
focused that that level of protest only at that it's an important type of protest but I I think the experience
suggests it's not the only kind and now I'm kind of going down a pathway Steve did a tremendous amount of work
originally 30 years ago before the harbor project stuff on thinking about the difference between tribalism and pan
Indian stuff in the US and there's a history of that in Canada the United States too but it tribalism in in other
words native nationhood indigenous nationhood indigenous political Collective that then make up the
entirety of an Aboriginal population those things in a sense always had strength on each side there were things
that communities did as communities and expressed their themselves and their political rights there and things that
people did all together and it has just felt until recently until things like the AR policy or the treaty policy in
Victoria and the regional government stuff and New South Whales that the Australian government hasn't
been open then that that I think has been bad
yeah I I think one of the things though which we and and Alison just just
mentioned and one of the things that um we've seen here that I think it really had is instructive for a lot of other
places potentially um has to do with what what Allison called stealth governance we we
um had a group of of Fairly young in 30s 40s um
indigenous leaders from Australia or or people who were kind of trying to change things come over to the United States to
look at indigenous governance issues this was back in about 2008 and um we
took them around to several nations in the southwestern United States and then to three nations in British Columbia to
talk about governance and at the end of the two weeks that they were there um I
I did a debriefing with them in a room like this there were I think nine of them and just on what sort of they felt
they'd learned but I also said to them if we were to take a group of indigenous leaders from the United States to
Australia and do what we just did with you what do you think they would learn
and um one of these one young woman she said I think they learn what's possible
under much more hostile conditions um you know in the United States I think a lot of indigenous
people their experience has been very hostile but it also has provided
through treaty making and other things a kind of a rights framework which becomes a basis for
political action which is missing here and there are other differences between Australia and the United States and I
what what I see here that sometimes is most striking to me is what indigenous communities have done under those
extremely difficult conditions and Allison mentioned something we call stealth governance it's
that okay oric requires us to make decisions in the following way if going
to get funds and that's fine we'll comply but the real decisions will be
made in the shadows underneath the radar where our a way of making decisions that
we're comfortable with our way of making decisions will actually function and
then we'll comply and communicate to you on the right letter head of our traditional owners Corporation or
whatever it might be what that decision is and I think in a way what we've we've learned here
one of the things we've learned here is the possibilities of just doing and that is actually really important and I know
all of you were aware of the Dakota Dakota access pipeline issues the dapple issues one of the aftermath pieces of
that is because there was so much political action around that right a lot of the um Lakota and Dakota tribes in
North and South Dakota um which were those tribes were in a sense created through the recognition process that
created reservation and then had governmental recognition at various periods of US history so those were
tribes that were not originally self-identified political collectives they political collectives that were
identified by the US government and now they're they're operating under that rights framework that exists in the US
but a lot of the post- Apple conversation that I've heard that emerged from the activism of dapp was
those Nations saying to themselves we actually are one really big nation and maybe we we were not
necessarily going to get rid of these structur of recognition that create the aala suit tribe and the Standing Rock
suit tribe and the Cheyenne River suit tribe or whatever but we need to find ways to collaborate more together so one
of the things that H is happening is the creation of stealth governance that emerged from dael that's uniting these
Dakota and L Cod donations which I think is fascinating um I and I think that there's a lot that th those that that
effort could learn from indigenous Nations here and we say that um there a um an
intensive three-week program that's offered at the University of Arizona uh every January and um that's certainly
something that we hear uh when there are Australian participants there that you
know that um the Ingenuity the Poo the radar kind of operations um we get lots
of you do what how do you do that tell me how you do that yeah it's
cool I'll say one other thing which I I think um I'm not sure really IR ly
responds to your question Lincoln but I I think the um Miriam when she elaborated a bit on
the on the Harvard project research results she mentioned this question of what's the Strategic orientation uh as a
a critical thing that Nations face and I I want to go back to something that Eva actually said at in the introductions
here um I think as as Nations get obtain some political opportunity and political
power and I think this is starting to happen here through Nations asserting that power one of the questions they
face is why are we doing this what are we trying to achieve and um what I
thought of earlier was some of you may know sir tipany oan who is a mai Elder
in with the nahu people in the south island of tooa and was one of the architects of some of the economic
settlements there and uh really a major leader of that effort who in a a lexury
did a Charles Darwin University in Darwin here um several years ago uh
really raised this question of indigenous governance indigenous development what are those for what is
our ultimate purpose and he I was teaching a class
over in New Zealand for in a Mai Executive MBA program and he came and did a guest lecture in the class and he
had this line that I thought was terrific he said to these all these Mai students he said do we just want to be
rich pacas that's white people do we just want to be rich pacas with a
suntan or is our purpose and I thought he captured beautifully um One Vision of
purpose or is our purpose the intergenerational transmission of identity and Heritage that transmission
from this generation to the next and the next and the next and the next of what
it means to be who you are and is that the purpose and that's what when we
think about things like economic development that we think about it as giving ourselves the ability the
resources to do that under whatever conditions we face and that then tells
us when we think about things like Economic Development how do we want to develop because we start to measure it
against that kind of thinking and I think that that strategic issue is one
which I think we see now some nations in the US who through things like the
gaming industry which has been a big deal for some Nations and others are starting to confront this question wait a minute what what are we up
to uh a good friend of ours of leader of one of the nations in the US says you know if we're not careful we're going to
end up assimilating ourselves and that's I think that set of issues is another set that we're facing
across these countries over the next decade or two or three this coming generation of leaders are going to have
to wrestle with that question can I just pick up a little bit because
I think it's something that's very much happening at the moment because I think one of the things that give some power
to the groups that you're talking about is the fact that they have been powerless so they do have a sort of
dominant group to extract themselves from but the question then does remain
and I think that's one that's niggling at the back of my mind is how much of
what they originally had is still capable of functioning in a very
different environment which is a very different particularly technologically internationally various
other sorts of things because they were pretty well based on a much more place
located right construction and how does one sort of adapt those things without
taking on one of the things I've just been writing and sort of weighing my feminist hat is looking at Universal basic income using Sim de's concept of
the second sex to say you know as long as women accept it within that sort of masculine version of what's
matters we are not we are the second sex because we're being other defined and I think it's partly also that sort of
thing about how how do you work out who defines what in a sense in a very changing environment because you can't
just go back right to what was because it was of its time it was of its
time yes and and that's what I think that's what I think we need to say okay how do we adapt it so it stays within
our principles which involves actually saying what our principles are very clearly and sometimes that's a bit that
gets missed out along the way it's what we we get what they don't what's not wanted right but not what the and that's
one of the reasons when we do um when we do nation building seminars in community
um we'll frequently share the results of the North American model and tell some stories um but then we really very
quickly get to the discussion of and it's a was a a colleague of mine who
said stop asking the question what are your values phrase it in a way that's better like okay what is that she says
ask everybody what it is that you treasure about being x what do you treasure about being gal what do you
treasure about being goodar what do you treasure about being goo bot and that
starts to get to that what binds people together people and what they want want to protect in that intergenerational way
moving forward there the other Factor You' got in that is and I think it's a really important one is that most of
these societies we're talking about are communal Collective connected and so on
and one of the problems we're facing in the non- Indigenous communities at the moment is the fact that we've had since
the enlightenment of the Protestant Revolution a highly westernized infant
you know sort of emphasis on the individual and on individualism not on a collectivist
model and trying to inter intersect those I mean it doesn't work in our you
know in the non-indigenous communities it's now beginning to fall apart but then you get to the point of what comes
next in a sense because it's you know that that Western so-called civilization well does dominate in many
ways yeah and I think that's that's really one of the challenges of contemporary nation building is how do
we make maintain connectedness in a world which has so many things happening that disconnect us and this is where I
think things like social media and some of those things which you know has all sorts of negative potential and all
sorts of positive potential but it's also a resource which could be if used
in certain ways could be part of what maintains connection among people who are constantly being pushed apart just
by circumstance and by the the necessities of life but that that question of how do you maintain
connection effess which I think of as a critical piece of nation
maintenance nation building and there's reciprocity involved in that but how do you maintain that over time today that's
a really intriguing question de I don't I don't know the detail of of Christopher Lawrence's project but I
think he's looking at something like that there yeah yeah that's right yeah
um I'm noticing the time and um just want to thank everyone
for for coming along I think maybe we need to make sure that we can continue
these conversations um I know that um I'm going to you know happily give these
guys more work but I know that Steve and Miriam are both very good at responding to email um and so if you've got some
followup questions um that was a generous statement how good we are at
responding try to be good at respond I think there are people in this room who experienced the fact that I'm not terribly good at responding you have to
you have to harass us we respond no no not yet no we're in the in
the process of developing it would be an interesting thing to have because that's way you could actually have a discussion
put that in oh one more thing of course of course yes when I've traveled overseas and I studied in Canada in 2003
University s s and when I was talking to the M over there it's like to the Mob here exactly
the same issues they holding up holding up a mirror that's what as in this
internationally that's that's what we share that's that's what makes us strong
that's what makes us strong I think uh it's really important for us as dis to
acknowledge that uh and going back to what I said about my research in relation to my co- supervisor Professor
Broman Carlson I'm MC cor University who natur leading scholar in Social use of
social media she talks about it in relation to building uh Community relationships
and those things as well what you saying before about using social media pluses and minuses at point us all so I think
it's thank you for what you said today and I think it's G me lots of food for
thought Rel know governance and uh that wonderful word that we use here in
austral or self-determination and changing the
politics of we tried Macar back in the 70s when I
sort a treaty and but there may not be an overall treaty for Australia there might be individual
treaties made like Victoria's doing at the moment and governments don't like this and Batman made a treaty in
Victoria that throwing up by the pry Council in England it was given the
local people in M their um access to
resources and more importantly recognition is what he was that they
didn't like about that I said Georgia 3 gave instructions to AR to treat the
subjects when he came here he didn't we've never
seeded the land we've never seeded our politics either or our government it's
time
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