Cartographies of the Colonial/Capitalist State: A Geopolitics of Indigenous Self‐Determination in Australia

Abstract

‘Indigenous self‐determination’ is a multivalent term that has come to represent various meanings in different political and cultural contexts. Indigenous peoples' strategies for self‐determination have become increasingly prominent in the domestic polities of many ‘first‐world’ nations, and in the sphere of international law and human rights. These strategies have challenged the cartography of the nation‐state with competing claims to land ownership, sovereignty, and self‐governance. In Australia, indigenous strategies for self‐determination are diverse and holistic and revolve around issues including land rights, law, environmental management, and control over service provision. These are evident in a variety of both ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ geopolitical texts. Meanwhile, Australian governments have created new structures that have attempted to encapsulate meanings of ‘self‐determination,’ allowing some indigenous decision‐making control, whilst entrenching the nation‐state's ultimate hegemony over land. The geopolitics of indigenous strategies for self‐determination, and tensions concerning the meaning of the term, are examined, revealing some ways in which discursive trends and material structures interact in locally produced relations of power.

Tamworth, Australia's ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rurality, and resident reactions

“…The 'squattocracy' (land-claiming settlers) also sought to impose on the landscape imported European production systems, populating country with hoofed animals that carved up soil and damaged habitat. They enacted, through the development of an Australian pastoral industry and in cartographic practices, notions of Australian rurality that ignored and/or erased indigenous meanings of place and landscape (Gibson, 1999). An ability to survive, and force the Europeanisation of landscapes, conveyed a sense of permanence and sovereignty-a new, but certainly European nation made by appropriation and continual exercise of ownership and land use.…”

Producing Forests

“…On the contrary, Aboriginal people have waged ongoing campaigns for the return of lands, their increased involvement in land management, their rights with respect to cultural heritage protection, and the recognition of their own specific knowledge bases (for more information on the Aboriginal struggle, see Bandler 1989;Broome 1982;Carroll 1983;Toyne and Vachon 1983;Hawke and Gallagher 1989;Howitt, Connell and Hirsch 1996;Jacobs 1988;Gibson 1999;Atkinson 2002 The continued production of Nyah Forest as a forest (available for timber harvesting according to its use class) through planning's technologies of knowledge production, boundary delineation, and the scientific categorization of things in Nyah Forest thus constitutes a continuity of colonial power and domination over Aboriginal interests. Defining what is a natural place, how we know it as natural, and how it is to be acted on powerfully shapes the visibility or otherwise of an Aboriginal presence in and responsibility for place.…”

Capital assets and intercultural borderlands: socio-cultural challenges for natural resource management

“…In Australia, there are examples of joint Anglo and Aboriginal management of natural resources (Chester, 2000;Szabo, n.d.). However, because these arrangements unsettle and transform entrenched cultural dispositions that typify many white Australians' relationships with indigenous people they are not the norm (Rintoul, 1993;Gibson, 1999).…”