Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

Abstract

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.

Nonhuman citizens on trial: The ecological politics of a beaver reintroduction

“…It enables movement beyond simple ideas about species presence and absence to consider other ways nonhumans might be politically conceptualised (Barker, 2010;Lavau, 2011). Furthermore, the categorical and terminological overlap reflects real, persistent entanglements and parallels between discourses surrounding introduced species and those applying to human citizenship, nationalism, and immigration (Crowley, 2014;Franklin, 2006;Martin and Trigger, 2015). 11 The retired environmental scientist who first photographed the beavers had, in the intervening months, spent much time observing them.…”

Place, Indigeneity, and Identity in Australia's Gulf Country

“…We draw on the results of such studies to first depict continuing connections to land among Aboriginal people, considering how these relate to both inherited indigenous cultural traditions and an intercultural history shared across this sector of Australian society. While noting the richness of adapted indigenous identities that are anchored in the land and waters of the Gulf (Martin and Trigger a), we find landscapes with common affects shared by those descended from settlers. We turn first to a consideration of the distinctive indigenous tradition of Catfish Dreaming to depict the intimacies of indigenous engagements with place, the locus of which Dreaming is shown in Figure alongside named sites and cattle properties.…”

“…Amid much change over generations, collective tribal or language group relations with areas have emerged, each encompassing the claims of extended families whose members assert specific connections with sites and tracts inherited through one or more deceased forebears. Our research has produced much documentation of these tradition‐based ties to what is termed “country” in Aboriginal English in association with a range of land transfers, land claims, and legal land use negotiations with the wider Australian society (Martin and Trigger b). Close ethnographic analysis reveals such inherited rights in place to be also informed by a complex set of mobility and succession processes, demonstrating flexible interpretations of tradition in the context of changing relations with land and waters (Trigger ).…”

The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Material Life and Emergent Cultures

“…Richard Martin and David Trigger () analyzed how trees were conceptualized as native or introduced in a region of northern Australia with a mixed population of Aboriginal people, whites, and people of Afghan and Chinese descent. How people viewed a tree depended upon its history, its relationship to particular groups, and its contemporary uses.…”

“…One contribution of multispecies ethnography has been to problematize rigid taxonomic classifications (Yates‐Doerr ). Richard Martin and David Trigger () questioned the distinction between indigenous and introduced species, Lyle Fearnley () that between domesticated and wild birds. Emily Yates‐Doerr () called into question definitions of meat.…”