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- Convenors:
-
Annick Thomassin
(The Australian National University)
Karen Soldatic (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Kim Spurway (Western Sydney University)
Janet Hunt (Australian National University)
Alicia Johnson (Sydney University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Indigenous knowledge applications, digital mapping and storytelling platforms have become important tools for Indigenous groups to reinscribe their philosophies and lifeways in the landscape. This panel explores the opportunities and challenges linked with such technologies for Indigenous futures.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades, there have been a multiplicity of Indigenous knowledge and environmental stewardship applications, open-source collaborative GIS mapping tools and digital storytelling platforms. These technologies have opened new spaces for Indigenous peoples and their allies to perform their sovereignty by taking the lead in producing data, maps and digital material that support their own life projects. These tools have increasingly been used to reinscribe Indigenous contemporary presence, knowledges, values, lifeways, placenames, languages and stories across land and seascapes. They are also useful to support the revitalisation of environmental stewardship practices, relationships and responsibilities towards Indigenous territories, as well as understandings and approaches to climate change and natural 'disasters', while enabling Indigenous peoples to draw the contours of the futures they wish to see unfold for their territories and communities.
For this panel, we are seeking contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and partner communities whose work explores the opportunities and various challenges (including ontological, social and ethical considerations) emerging from the digital and artificial intelligence environment for the actualisation of Indigenous projects. We are also encouraging contributions that reflect on the ways such technologies have been used or can be used to foster a shift in the relationships that non-Indigenous peoples have with the lands, waters, seas and the non-human entities with whom they share these environments.
This panel will take a hybrid format combining short paper presentations followed by a discussion period during which the panel members will exchange ideas on key themes emerging from the presentations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores some of the opportunities and challenges emerging from the use of digitisation and mapping for the actualisation of Indigenous cultural projects for the Walbanga people of the Yuin nation living on Country on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia.
Paper long abstract:
Members of the Walbanga community have long aspired to strengthen their capacity to influence the development and environmental management decisions across their land and sea territories. At present, they have little influence over the current settler colonial developmental and environmental trajectory practised on Walbanga Country. Walbanga historical and contemporary connections to Country, their environmental custodianship practices and aspirations relative to their coastal urban and peri-urban territories have remained largely invisible to many of the non-Indigenous inhabitants and transient populations of the region. Settler colonial development structures and its imposition on Walbanga peoples and their territories is rarely recognised as a form of colonial dispossession that limits their access to their environment and resources, criminalising cultural practices that maintain a continuation of Indigenous economic and spiritual engagements with Country. The significance of Indigenous stewardship was further highlighted by the 2020 bushfires that devastated Walbanga territories and over 18 million hectares of forest on the Australian east coast. Yet, despite relative invisibility across the transformed geographical landscape with colonial invasion and settler dispossession, Walbanga’s ways of being in the world, sovereignty, knowledge and ancestors continue to co-exist in dynamic and entangled engagements with settlers and visitors to their world. Our team has worked to develop digital biocultural survey, mapping and storytelling tools aimed at making Walbanga lifeways, stewardship practices, knowledge and passions visible to a broader world. This paper critically engages with some of the key ontological, social and ethical issues, opportunities and challenges for the Walbanga people involved in this work.
Paper short abstract:
Indigenous communities and their academic partners have been using machine learning applications like Google Earth Engine to map out the past, and shape the futures of their territories. I interrogate where and how these machine learning visions align with Indigenous interests & future sovereignties
Paper long abstract:
Indigenous communities – and their academic partners – have been using machine learning to help envision the past, and shape powerful stories for the futures of their places, landscapes, and territories. Huge collections of publically available digital imagery of indigenous peoples' territories have been assembled, allowing us to see cloud-free mosaics of the surface of the earth over time. Multi-spectral images and other sensors like LiDAR allows us to see through vegetation and distinguish topographic features at an unprecedented scale. Indigenous communities have harnessed these data through hand-built algorithms and machine learning using the powerful cloud-based application Google Earth Engine to map out their territories culturally significant species like seaweeds, or to detect paleo-shorelines and archaeological sites, or to demonstrate the ongoing cumulative impacts of urban and industrial developments through showing deforestation and urbanization. All of these kinds of ‘seeing’ -- made possible with powerful computational and machine learning platforms like Google’s Cloud -- are instruments to Indigenous world and future-building. They reveal with new depth and scale what is at stake in efforts and processes for reconciliation over land and resource alienation, and provide another avenue for implementing indigenous intentions and sovereignties over ancestral places, cultural landscapes and territories. This paper reveals some of the contours of Indigenous deployment of these tools, and asks a number of questions interrogating where and how these machine learning visions align with the interests of Indigenous communities.
Paper short abstract:
Using digital media, an anthropologist and Visual Arts and Animation students from Mexico and Italy, have engaged through videocalls with a group of cocopah people living in Baja California, Mexico, in order to co-create a digital archive of the cocopah intangible cultural heritage.
Paper long abstract:
Cocopah people living in Baja California face a number of challenges for cultural survival, including their struggle to continue fishing in their historic territory, even if environmental laws render their presence ilegal in their fishing camps. They are also looking for ways to revitalise their highly endagered language as the last cocopah speakers are old and sick: they fear their language -and the knowledge it expresses- will die with its last speakers. Drawing on the panel’s invitation to explore the opportunities and challenges emerging from digital environments for the actualisation of indigenous projects, in this paper I reflect on the collaborative work developed for the past two years, that aims to produce transmedia storytelling about the issues that matter to the cocopah. Using digital media, an anthropologist and Visual Arts and Animation students from Mexico and Italy, have engaged through videocalls with a group of cocopah people living in Baja California, Mexico, in order to co-create a digital archive of the cocopah intangible cultural heritage. In this process, a group of young cocopah, alongside their elders and fellow activists, may become co-researchers and co-producers of a digital archive of their own culture. How could this process help them to critically analyze their present and to create the aliances and visions to help them produce the futures they want for the cocopah people?