Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Annick Thomassin
(The Australian National University)
Frances Morphy (The Australian National University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 1 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
In settler-colonial contexts, the coexistence of diverse worlds, and the implications of their entanglement, is being explored through collaborative mapping and digital storytelling projects. This panel explores how mapping these new ontological relationships can redefine settler-colonial futures.
Long Abstract:
This panel will be an occasion to explore and share information about the potential of digital tools such as collaborative mapping and digital storytelling for the representation of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with their territories of life (akin to ‘Country’ in the Australian context) in settler-colonial contexts.
The coexistence of heterogeneous settler and Indigenous worlds, and the implications of their enmeshed and co-constituted existence, are increasingly being explored through the use of such digital tools. Informed by contemporary Indigenous movements of everyday resurgence, inscribed in actions that revitalise, maintain, strengthen or generate meaningful relationships with territories of life and all the relations they encompass, this panel will feature projects which challenge dominant settler understandings of and engagement with territories of life.
Digital tools may be deployed, initially, to illuminate Indigenous relational and reciprocal engagements with the land, the sea, the sky, and with humans and other-than-human beings. But the contributors to the panel will be encouraged to go beyond a discourse that seeks recognition of and respect for Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, perspectives and practices, and their integration into the frame of settler ontologies, to consider how such tools can be employed in supporting the renegotiation of the terms of coexistence between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonial institutions. They will reflect on the entangled relations between co-existing settler and Indigenous worlds and on the need for a transformation of the dominant settler-state worldview that will result in a genuinely new ontology. Contributors to the panel are thus strongly encouraged to consider how their work, using these approaches, might be useful for instigating a shift in persistent settler-colonial worldviews and for negotiating new ways of being and engaging with the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 1 December, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In 2019/2020 bushfires raged across the country. In Duduroa country, Victoria, in an act of Indigenous resurgence, Traditional Custodians have partnered with State Government to heal country, and heal people. This presentation is an account from a young Duduroa academic
Paper long abstract:
In 2019/2020 bushfires raged across the country. In the Upper Murray district in north eastern Victoria, those fires ravaged over 2,700 sq km, devastating communities and ecological health of the region. The traditional custodians of those lands, the Duduroa peoples, are a strong and vibrant peoples. Colonial settlement has meant that Duduroa access to land has been reduced in the recent past, and cultural fire and Indigenous management of land has been minimal as a consequence. When the fires burned a significant portion of Duduroa traditional lands, the community were concerned about the health of the land, and about damage to cultural sites and storylines. When the smoke had cleared and recovery began, funding was announced by the State Government for bushfire recovery. The Duduroa Dhargal Aboriginal Corporation (DDAC) were awarded a grant under the Victorian Bushfire Biodiversity Relief and Recovery (BBRR) program. DDAC’s project, the ‘Reading and Healing Country’ Project, allowed them to heal through reading Country and to applying ecological knowledge. In an act of resurgence, the project supported DDAC members to reconnect with Country, map and identify culturally significant species and biodiversity values and the impact of fires. This in turn informed on-ground actions to heal Country and support recovery. The project utilized both western science and Indigenous Research Methodologies, and is an example of the synthesis of different world views, that has meaningful change to heal Country, but also importantly, heal people. This presentation is an account of this project from a young Duduroa academic
Paper short abstract:
Could a map produced for a native title case potentially be a representation of a ‘genuinely new ontology’ of place/space? Or is it inevitably hybrid – an artefact of attempted translation between two incommensurable ontological (and legal) systems? This paper attempts an answer.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 2000s I was an expert witness in the Blue Mud Bay (BMB) native title case. One of my responsibilities was organising the preparation of the map of the clan estates and associated ‘songlines’, both on land and in the sea, of the Yolŋu applicants. This map was, self-evidently, produced in and for the context of the case. The initial research was a collaborative effort between the ‘experts’ and a subset of the applicants. But the final object, the map itself, was a ‘translation’ of a Yolŋu ontology of place/space into an essentially Western artefact that matched the expectations of native title evidence with respect to Yolŋu ‘laws and customs’. It provoked varying reactions from Yolŋu who had not been closely involved in its production. One woman of my own age commented that seeing the Yolŋu system displayed in this way made her realise just how complex it was and how much knowledge it represented. On the other hand another, very senior, woman was singularly unimpressed: ‘What are all these [clan estate boundary] lines? You’ve rounded us up like cattle in a paddock.’
Is a map like this a representation of a ‘genuinely new ontology’? Or is such a map, as I have argued elsewhere for the court document known as the ‘witness statement’, a hybrid artefact, resulting from attempted translation between two incommensurable ontologies, that ‘belongs fully to neither of its authors’? The paper will explore these questions in the process of providing a (third) answer.
Paper short abstract:
We focus on processes involved in the articulation between different ontologies. In mapping Yolŋu names in a way that reflects how they remember, what might that ‘map’ look like? We consider what products might fit the dynamic trajectory of Yolngu society in its articulation with the state.
Paper long abstract:
The map produced for the 2005 Blue Mud Bay case led to collaborative project on place names and personal names. The map, as a court document, relied heavily on European traditions of spatial mapping of country. However it was welcomed by the Yolŋu applicants both for its utility as an explanatory tool (to non-Yolŋu) and for its reference to Yolngu ontology conveyed through miny’tji (designs) and manikay (songlines). The ‘Western’ map’s utility is reflected its adaptability to new contexts – such as native title court cases and ranger land and sea-management programs. Moreover, significant changes are occurring in the intergenerational transfer of Yolŋu knowledge, with the adoption of literacy and digital technology as modes of transmission.
In this paper we focus on emergent processes involved in the articulation between different ontologies, which might have the capacity to create new possibilities for both. If we were to map Yolŋu names (yäku), in the contemporary context, in a way that closely reflects how names are remembered and recalled by Yolŋu people, what might that ‘map’ look like? The paper will consider what the tangible products might be, and how they might reflect the dynamic trajectory of Yolngu society in its articulation with the encompassing settler Australian state. Arguably indeed the development of Western topographical mapping has itself been a product of global processes of articulation and cross-cultural communication – processes that have been masked by Western-centric perspectives from modernity.