Short Abstract

This presentation will explore how community mapping with an Extreme Citizen Science approach draws from anticolonial practice to support Indigenous people to record what matters to them in rural cultural landscapes in areas of environmental change.

Abstract

Indigenous Peoples, while not monolithic, share long histories shaped by interaction with colonisation and continue to face external political and natural threats. Owing to their close relationships with and dependence on local environments, the difficulties Indigenous Peoples already face—human rights violations, loss of land, threats to their way of life, and economic and political marginalisation—are exacerbated by climate change and landscape recording practices which exclude them. WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) practices are deeply rooted in historically close relationships between scientific imperialism, and colonial perceptions of land and territory. Institutional structures in academia, environmental science, heritage management, and landscape recording continue to be inherently hostile towards Indigenous Knowledge, and Indigenous Peoples have been essentially absent from landscape recording policies. Given the impact of environmental change on Indigenous communities there is a growing expectation that institutional systems conduct meaningful collaboration to integrate Indigenous epistemologies into cultural landscape recording, particularly in remote regions. This presentation will discuss how drawing from the Extreme Citizen Science approach to co-design projects, and undertake them with the consent of and respect for the Indigenous community, can support groups of any cultural or literate background to co- collaborate in, contribute to, and benefit from landscape recording. It will demonstrate how engaging anticolonial practices can develop more equitable approaches to Citizen Science mapping of remote cultural landscapes with Indigenous communities supported to produce research that responds to community need, researchers from outside the Indigenous community supporting this, and a focus on Indigenous Data Sovereignty.