Indigenous nations have always and continue to assert their sovereignties to resist colonialism. This paper makes explicit the ways in which environmental management has been and continues to act as a tool of colonialism, particularly by privileging Western science, institutions, and administrative procedures. We argue that to decolonise environmental management, it is crucial to understand and challenge the power relations that underlie it—asking who makes decisions and on what worldview those decisions are based. Indigenous ways of being deeply challenge the foundations of environmental management and the colonising power structures that underlie it, and invite further thought about posthuman and relational ontologies. We provide a range of case studies that showcase the role of Indigenous nations in redefining and reimagining environmental management based on Indigenous sovereignties, knowledges, and ways of being. The case studies emphasise the crucial connection between Indigenous decision‐making authority and self‐governance for the enhanced protection and health of the environment. We argue that Indigenous agency, grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignties, is driving innovation and decolonising environmental management by making space for new ways of thinking and being “in place”.

ABSTRACT. Indigenous involvement in Australian water management is conventionally driven by a top-down approach by nonIndigenous government agencies, that asks "how do we engage Indigenous people?" and has culminated in the ineffective "consult" and "service delivery" processes evident in mainstream water management planning. This is a hopeful paper that identifies the critical importance of a "nation-based" approach for effective Indigenous engagement in water planning and policy through the work undertaken by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) in the Murray Futures program. The NRA is an Indigenous government in the "settled-south" of Australia. Over past decades, the NRA has developed a range of political technologies that act as tools for redeveloping Ngarrindjeri Nationhood after colonial disempowerment and dispossession. These tools enable better collaboration with nonIndigenous governments, especially in natural resource management policy and practice. In turn, this has better enabled the NRA to exercise a decision-making and planning authority over the lands and waters in its jurisdiction, therefore, more effectively exercising its ongoing duty of care as Country. This paper presents a case study of the Sugar Shack Complex Management Plan, codeveloped by the NRA and the South Australian Government in 2015, to demonstrate the benefits that accrue when Indigenous nations are resourced as authorities responsible for reframing water management and planning approaches to facilitate the equitable collaboration of Indigenous and nonIndigenous worldviews. As a marker of the success of this strategy, the Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe Program, in partnership with the South Australian government, recently won the Australian Riverprize 2015 for delivering excellence in Australian river management. The Ngarrindjeri "Vision for Country" quoted above encapsulates the Ngarrindjeri philosophy of being (Ruwe/Ruwar) at the center of Ngarrindjeri innovations in water management. Its ancient but radical message has far-reaching implications for Australian water planning. Originally developed as part of the whole-of-country strategy expressed in the Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan (Ngarrindjeri Nation 2007), it asserts a sovereign vision for healthy Ngarrindjeri country, based on valuing Ngarrindjeri lifeways, values, and knowledge. Ngarrindjeri country is in the "settled south" of Australia, at the end of the iconic River Murray (Murrundi), the longest river in Australia and third longest navigable river in the world.Freshwater flows through the Murray-Darling system into Ngarrindjeri lands are, for Ngarrindjeri, the life blood of the living body of Murrundi. The mouth of the Murray and its nearby region is a place of great spiritual and cultural significance known and formally registered as the "Meeting of the Waters" where the salt and fresh waters mix. For Ngarrindjeri, the reproduction of wellbeing is inextricably linked to interconnectivity, estuarine mixing, and the overall health of Murrundi as a living bod...

To facilitate engagement across diverse philosophical cultures, this paper expands points of alliance between the ‘ecosophical’ perspectives shared by Deleuzo-Guattarian posthumanism and by Indigenous thought, here exemplified by the expressivist philosophy of Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi or ‘Speaking as Country’. Indigenous philosophies of existential interconnectivity resist simple incorporation into the Western ‘post’-humanism that they in fact precede by millennia; instead they contribute fresh material for a more cosmopolitan or globally ecosophical (and therefore less Eurocentric), nonhumanist conceptualisation of humanity. We begin by discussing the humanist political ontology subtending the neoliberal-capitalist notion of ‘service benefit’, which informs much contemporary policy for environmental governance. We then consider how the ‘three ecologies’ described by Félix Guattari define a relational ontology of complex co-implication that is Spinozist in its inspiration and is characteristic of contemporary Continental posthumanism. Finally, we explain how the Indigenous Ngarrindjeri Nation in Southern Australia have begun a process of environmental policy reform by communicating a traditional philosophy of ecological well-being and prioritising this in contemporary political negotiations concerning the responsible management of their Country. An understanding of human responsibility for action realising interconnected benefit is manifest in the Ngarrindjeri Nation's striving for self-governance of their social, economic and environmental affairs, and is exercised transversally in the three interactive ecologies of self, society and nature.

No abstract

The objective of this article is to compare Indigenous and Western modernities by examining how contemporary Indigenous polities are finding inventive ways to assert their sovereignty. Our discussion presents an innovation in Indigenous governance introduced recently by the Ngarrindjeri people in Southern Australia. We explain the conditions in which Ngarrindjeri initiated their process of political reformation; we link our analysis to critiques of Western modernism and imperialism; and we then outline some key political technologies created by the Ngarrindjeri Nation to enable its successful influence in matters affecting their Country and community. We find that these resources remain firmly grounded in Ngarrindjeri ways of knowing, being and doing, yet they are expressed in a contemporary hybrid form that is accessible to non-Indigenous negotiation partners. As a consequence, they have established a modern Indigenous framework for intercultural negotiation of interests previously controlled by the South Australian state and other non-Indigenous organizations.