Paper short abstract:

In Australia, Indigenous peoples have in recent decades been included in environmental protection models first as stakeholders, and then as partners. This paper advocates the host-guest model (Russell & McNiven 2005) to prioritise Indigenous leadership and control of campaigns and research.

Paper long abstract:

In her keynote address to the 2020 RAI conference, Marcia Langford railed against the destruction of the Juukan Gorge site by mining company Rio Tinto, straining the uneasy and unequal alliance between Indigenous traditional owners and extractive capitalism. Just as traditional owners and mining interests hold what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls incommensurate epistemologies towards land, so too, the history of environmentalism in Australia is often characterised by a similar uneasy ideological incompatibility. From the 1980s, conservationists' highly successful use of tropes of "wilderness" hinged on the erasure of Indigenous peoples from those very landscapes, and claims to "world heritage" simultaneously asserted moral ownership of Indigenous lands to the greater, and presumably better-knowing, world. Progress has been made in the last 40 years, with Indigenous peoples incorporated in environmental protection models first as stakeholders, and then as collaborative partners - both improvements on the erasure of settler colonialism, yet settler-controlled. This paper advocates use of Russell and McNiven's host-guest model in ecological care and climate mitigation efforts. This is predicated on ceding Indigenous control, and the environment movement - and the academy - prioritising Indigenous leadership of campaigns and research. I use the examples of the 1983 fight to save the Franklin River in Tasmania and the 2019 World Heritage listing of the Budj Bim Cultural Site to show the evolution in conservation practice, and the importance of Indigenous-led paradigms, which hinge on recognition that the land - as the saying goes - Always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land