The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Abstract

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.

Co‐producing a fire and seasons calendar to support renewed Indigenous cultural fire management

“…In light of recommendations from the 2020 bushfire inquiries (Binskin et al 2020;Owens & O'Kane 2020), our case study illustrates how it is possible to gain a rich understanding of Indigenous fire culture and practice in southeast Australia, and could provide a practical 'how to' guide for future work in this area. The process of co-production of knowledge for cultural fire management described in this study could also be used by other communities, including those in settler colonial nations countries, such as the Americas and Africa (Christianson 2014;Eriksen & Hankins 2014;Moura et al 2019;Thomassin et al 2019).…”

“…Several studies have sought knowledge of traditional Indigenous practices to inform contemporary bushfire and ecosystem management (Raymond et al 2010;Ray et al 2012;Bardsley et al 2019;Thomassin et al 2019;Nikolakis & Roberts 2020). This paper aims to further this literature by asking the question: Can the co-production of a fire and seasons calendar, using Indigenous and Western knowledges, support cultural fire management?…”

Breathing Fire into Landscapes that Burn: Wildfire Management in a Time of Alterlife

“…Doing so necessarily involves a variety of First Nations expertise, including the ecological and firefighting expertise of Indigenous Elders and youth working as GIS personnel, forecasters, biologists, and more. What is being built is not a future that envisions a return to ecological purity, nor does it frame Indigenous contributions as solely "local" or "traditional" (Cameron 2012;Thomassin et al 2019). Rather it presents a future that contends with the messiness of alterlife and that "acknowledges that one cannot simply get out" but presents an "openness to alteration… to become something else, to defend and persist, to recompose relations to water and land" (Murphy 2017, 324).…”

Indigenous peoples and natural hazard research, policy and practice in southern temperate Australia: an agenda for change

“…These suggestions and are not a result of comprehensive research but reflect particular expertise. Indeed, there is a need for comprehensive research about the Australian context (Thomassin et al 2018). This paper cites the narrower matter of fire management and not the broad suite of natural hazards work that includes planning, preparation, response and recovery as well as resilience.…”