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Nature, Place and the Recognition of
Indigenous Polities
Lisa Palmer
a
a
University of Melbourne , Australia
Published online: 21 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Lisa Palmer (2006) Nature, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities,
Australian Geographer, 37:1, 33-43
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049180500511954
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Nature, Place and the Recognition
of Indigenous Polities
LISA PALMER, University of Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal
recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent.
However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practices
remains firmly based on commonsense settler understandings of nature as an external
domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could be
otherwise, this paper examines ideas about political landscape formation and the
implications of the changing role of the nation-state and civil society in relation to the
recognition of Indigenous political subjectivities. Taking the situation faced by Indigenous
peoples in two settler societies as our vantage point, I argue here that we need to move away
from assimilative environmental governance arrangements and politicise the concept of
nature. This will open up spaces for the recognition and active participation of Indigenous
polities in the realm of natural resource management. The paper concludes by contrasting
the situation faced by Indigenous landowners in Australias Kakadu National Park with
the overtly political negotiations occurring in two northern regions of Canada. In the latter,
in a process similar to what Tully calls daily subconstitutional politics, it is through the
recognition of Indigenous polities in environmental governance issues that Indigenous
peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas and institutions of the
broader regional, provincial and national polity.
KEY WORDS Indigenous people; nature; politics; polities; place; Australia; Canada;
environmental governance.
Introduction
In Northern Europe, prior to the sixteenth century, landscape, or landschaft , was
understood to mean a politys area of activity (Olwig 2002, p. xxv). With the
ascendancy of the nation-state, these political landscapes have been subsumed
under natural laws with an understanding of landscape as scenery. This masks other
agendas concerning polities and place (Olwig 2002). Drawing on Anderson (1991),
Olwig writes that when the meaning of landscape changed from commonplaces to
scenic spaces . . . the illusion of a unified space facilitated the mindscaping of
imagined natural state communities fusing nations with a single body politic
(Olwig 2002, p. 218). The living land of people has become the deadened land of
rock and soil, the stage upon which the drama of history is played (Olwig 2002,
ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/06/010033-11 #2006 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.
DOI: 10.1080/00049180500511954
Australian Geographer, Vol. 37, No. 1,
pp. 33/43, March 2006
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p. 220). By the nineteenth century the positivist doctrine of the nation-state
excluded recognition of alternative traditions of governance and sovereignty (Anaya
1996), including the customary polities of those others encountered in the New
World (Martinez 1992). This positivist legal doctrine of civilised nations became
the primary intellectual instrument of nineteenth-century colonialism and remains
today the normative model for the recognition of sovereignty in global politics.
Since the late twentieth century, however, an emerging multi-scalar values-based
politics has resulted in the rise of civil society and non-state actors who are actively
challenging the nation-states dominance in relation to issues of governance and
sovereignty, particularly in relation to environmental issues (Hajer 2003). This is
leading in many contexts to a situation of governance without territorial
synchrony (Hajer 2003, p. 191). Yet the majority of Indigenous peoples continue
to construct their worlds around vibrant socio/physical relationships with particular
places and an embodied politics of unique rights and responsibilities. For these
peoples, adherence to socio-territorial forms of political landscape formation in
many ways challenges both the ideology of the nation-state and the democratic
ideals of an emerging multi-scalar civil society. Recognising the complexity of these
relationships and the ways in which Indigenous peoples are included and excluded
from existing and emerging forms of environmental governance is a necessary step
in prising open spaces for dialogue between Indigenous polities (Langton 2002;
Langton & Palmer 2004), civil society and the body politic of the nation-state.
I am concerned here to elucidate the political inadequacy of democratic projects
that seek to create spaces of inclusion for Indigenous peoples within existing
environmental governance arrangements. In contrast to inclusionary models of
restorative justice, I argue for an acknowledgement of the transformative potential
of recognising and engaging with Indigenous polities in the realm of natural
resource management. I argue that these political engagements have the potential
to refashion the norms and principles of existing governance arrangements. In
doing so, I have drawn from a range of relevant theoretical contributions on the
politics of recognition (Borrows 2002; Kingsbury 2002; Niezen 2004; Povinelli
2002; Rose 1999; Tully 1995, 2004; Young 1990, 1995). I am informed
throughout this paper by Dikecs (2005) exploration of space as a site of politics,
a concept I apply in this case to the space of natural resource management. Space is
a site of politics, not just because it is full of power or competing interests but
because of the ways in which space itself becomes an integral element of the
interruption of the natural . . . order of domination constituting a place of
encounter between those in control and those who have no part in that order
(Dikec 2005, pp. 171/2).
This theoretical discussion is elucidated in the second half of the paper by
examining case study material. Firstly, I draw by way of example on the joint
management situation in Australias Kakadu National Park, a place where I have
undertaken extensive fieldwork (Palmer 2001). I highlight there the ways in which
the already established norms of the national park institution work to naturalise
both the environmental governance project and nature itself. By naturalise, I mean
the process of paralysing politics (Latour 2004, p. 245): To naturalize means not
simply that one is unduly extending the reign of Science to other domains, but that
one is paralyzing politics.
In this particular spatial configuration of nature, the national park, Indigenous
peoples own aspirations for environmental governance are heard merely as noises
34 L. Palmer
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within the established order of things (Dikec 2005, p. 173). I contrast this
situation with examples from Canada, where I have undertaken limited fieldwork
(Palmer & Tehan 2006a,b). I investigate there how the political recognition of
Indigenous polities is enabling these polities to intervene at times to significantly
reconfigure state-based regimes of natural resource management.
Legitimacy and the polity void
Across the globe, non-state actors and civil society institutions are forging new
political spaces that are challenging the ideological and practical hegemony of the
nation-state. Indeed, Hajer argues that with the weakening of the state there is now
an institutional void with no generally accepted rules or norms to which politics is
to be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon (2003, p. 175). In the
context of this void he argues that polity has become discursive: it is created
through deliberation in a way which significantly challenges classical modernist
political institutions (2003, p. 176). Political power now often lacks any territorial
synchrony and is dispersed through a network society (Castells 1996) influenced
by diverse actors including states, corporations, non-governmental organisations,
citizens and the media. Hajer argues that we therefore need to reintroduce issue of
the polity or political setting into the debate (2003, p. 182). Policy, he argues, has
become a site of cultural politics which is turning towards an explicit process of
knowledge deliberation in order to resolve credibility struggles and issues of
political legitimacy (2003, p. 186).
While he argues that issues of political legitimacy in a network society must be
addressed by attention to the process through which policy making occurs (2003,
p. 191), the diverse political make-up of non-state collectives is not addressed by
Hajer explicitly. Yet these issues are central in rethinking key resource management
issues of justice, diversity, sustainability and equity (Howitt 2001). In the case of
relations between Indigenous peoples and the state in settler societies such as
Australia and Canada, deliberative policy applied in the sphere of liberal natural
resource management is based on a stakeholder or interest group model. This
model relies on disengaged reason and modernist deliberative norms to achieve a
symmetry between competing resource users (Young 1990, 1995). Deliberations
occur on the basis of a model of stakeholder negotiations that lacks both the
recognition of ontological difference and the unequal power of symbolic privilege
(Young 1995, p. 141). The consideration of alternative Indigenous governance
mechanisms and polities is not countenanced under such regimes.
Increasingly, however, politics is an important consideration in decision making
within the realm of science and natural resource management. Peter Brosius (2004)
writes that there is an emerging trend in transnational regimes and practices of
natural resource management which recognises that in order to serve as a basis
for decision making, scientific information need not only be credible, but salient
and legitimate as well (2004, p. 10). Brosius (2004, p. 10) takes this process
further by asking why this criterion is not also applied to Indigenous knowledge,
and why their analysis of the political world is not sought as well. He asks: what
if instead of treating our informants as reservoirs of local/indigenous know-
ledge . . . we treated them as political agents with their own ideas about the salience
and legitimacy of various forms of knowledge? (2004, p. 10). The challenge that
Brosius issues involves an explicit recognition of political process, of Indigenous
Nature, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities 35
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agency and the broader implications for knowledge production and deliberation
which recognising active and engaged Indigenous polities would entail (see also
Batterbury 2005).
Similarly, Kingsbury has argued in relation to international civil society, that this
largely unregulated free-for-all is premised on a liberal ethos and vague notions of
forging a cosmopolitan democracy (Kingsbury 2002, p. 187). Such a project fails to
adequately address the political situation of others with more distinctive claims,
such as indigenous peoples organizations exercising governmental power rather
than simply advocating or volunteering (2002, p. 187). He writes that, while not
excluded, Indigenous peoples distinctive claims receive no special status in a
structure dominated by the NGO model (2002, p. 187). In developing new
democratic theories to guide international civil society one important criterion
must be their ability to cogently and robustly meet the dynamic challenges posed
by ascriptive groups (2002, p. 195). Kingsbury argues that the circumstances of
ascriptive groups exercising governmental powers requires a thorough revision of
the theorised constitutional structure for international civil society (2002, p. 183).
Interestingly, he argues that a body of practice within states suggests an
increasingly rich set of possibilities for reconciling democratic theory with the
claims and needs of indigenous peoples (Kingsbury 2002, p. 194). In Australia, for
example, the adaptations of Indigenous groups to the requirements of interactions
with outside agencies are creating a body of public law which addresses the claims
and needs of the Indigenous domain. This is especially the case as the recognition
of property law entails de facto recognition of other governing laws necessary for
the proper functioning of Indigenous polities and the administration of that land
(Langton & Palmer 2003). However, I argue here that while the claims of
Indigenous peoples are increasingly addressed in a public law sense within the
boundaries of the nation-state, at the level of everyday practices in natural resource
management, such as in the context of national park management, there is far less
willingness to recognise the governmental status of Indigenous groups. Rather,
there is a preference for recognising them as stakeholders in the sense of a liberal
sphere public interest model or by naturalising them as apolitical communities, as
discussed below.
Polities and place making: denaturalising landscapes
Natural resource management in the liberal public sphere of settler society nation-
states such as Canada and Australia is underpinned by the powerful effects of a
naturalised concept of nature*/what Willems-Braun (1997) has termed a culture
of nature. In Australia, despite public law remedies which seek to recognise
Indigenous property rights (Nettheim et al . 2002), the pervasiveness of a culture of
nature continues to impede the recognition of Indigenous regimes of environ-
mental governance and Indigenous peoples full participation in local, regional and
national natural resource management regimes. One explanation for this normative
state of affairs relates to the ongoing reification of Indigenous communities. This
reification creates communities as naturalised pre-political spaces whose imagined
authentic voice is excluded from a political landscape whereby peoples are
continuously becoming as subjects of governance (Rose 1999), participating in and
negotiating the processes of place making and norms through which their system of
governance operates (Tully 2004; Berkes 2004).
36 L. Palmer
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Particularly in the context of postcolonial settler societies, Olwigs discussion of
landscape as a politys area of activity makes it clear that the processes of place
making are political, a property of social life (Appadurai 1996, p. 199). For
Indigenous peoples the politics of place making is based on the need to recognise
and negotiate relationships with significant others, including non-human nature
(Merlan 1998). Indigenous peoples relations with place and non-human nature
are not merely expressions of deep-felt attachment to country or vestiges of a
conservative, closed and parochial past, despite essentialist representations to
the contrary. Rather, these relationships are central to the constitution of dynamic
and engaged Indigenous polities, polities which assume relations, flows and
openendedness as their ontological ground (Blaser 2004, p. 38; cf. Escobar 2001;
Niezen 2004). While in postcolonial situations of unequal symbolic and economic
power, the formation of distinct identity boundaries such as Indigenous/non-
Indigenous are necessary as political strategies for cultural survival (Niezen 2004);
Indigenous political boundaries do not seek a closed society.
Indigenous relations with land and each other are, like all other human relations,
produced in part by the objectification of human thoughts and feelings (Olwig
2005, p. 36). This is in contrast to idealisations in the literature which invoke
images of unconscious hunter-gatherers and other primitive societies living within
nature (cf. Ingold 2000). This intimate relationship between the polity and the
land creates a continuously negotiated landscape, where rights and interests in land
are treated as living and changing, open and adapting to dynamic social and
political contexts.
As discussed below, it is the reification of rights in land and the removal of the
idea of landscape as a living and changing area of a politys activity which creates
one of the greatest obstacles for Indigenous governance aspirations on their
ancestral estates.
The case of Kakadu National Park
In places like Kakadu, one of Australias most famous national parks, culturally-
based arguments which assert that the Bininj /Mungguy Indigenous landowners
have a special relationship to the land are formally recognised in the legislative
underpinnings and joint management of the national park. Yet within this domain
of nature conservation, what occurs is a process that Povinelli (2002) theorises
elsewhere as the cunning of recognition; the effective silencing of these cultural
others through their pre-determined mode of inclusion and assimilation into the
dominant order of things. This means that the participation of Bininj /Mungguy in
the joint management of the park has become largely contingent on their
acceptance of the existing hegemonic system of technocratic natural resource
management. In the institutional context of Kakadu, Bininj /Mungguy landowners
must continually struggle to have the park managed according to their own model
of environmental governance. In contrast to an idea of an externalised nature,
Bininj /Mungguy have their own meanings invested in, and relationships with, non-
human nature. While Western ecological rationality seeks a common human
relationship with a universalised concept of other nature, for Bininj /Mungguy
otherness is located in a very differently configured divide of the whole (Palmer
2004b). Yet, despite nearly 30 years of joint management in a place once trumpeted
as the blueprint for progressing Indigenous involvement in national parks, the
Nature, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities 37
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dominant regime of environmental governance prevailing in day-to-day park
management is largely concerned with managing the human impact on and
conserving pristine nature (Palmer 2004a,b).
In the joint management schema, the everyday management of land-use activities
in the park is fraught with contested ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the
land and managing resources. However, attempts by Bininj /Mungguy to manage
land-use activities according to their priorities for resource management are
continuously stifled by the considerable political influence of vocal stakeholder
lobby groups. Prioritising their own understandings of and transactions with
nature, non-Indigenous stakeholders resent Bininj /Mungguy claims to prior and
sustained decision-making rights over the Kakadu landscape. Rather, through their
advocacy and in collaboration with the culture of nature prevalent in Australian
environmental technocracies, the dominant settler societies understanding of
nature becomes the default standard for environmental use and management
(Palmer 2004a,b). Through this process of naturalisation, the mask of an apolitical
nature-centred vision effectively overrides the ways in which Bininj /Mungguy
relate to, and wish to manage, their homelands.
The recognition of Indigenous polities in Canadas north
Canadian political theorist, James Tully (1995) has argued convincingly that when
viewed from the perspective of diverse societies, liberal, nationalist and commu-
nitarian theories of modern constitutionalism serve to reinforce the hegemony of
the European tradition, giving only the appearance of constituting diversity. As a
result of these failures, Borrows (2002), in his treatise on the resurgence of
Indigenous law in Canada, considers the need for refashioning the underlying
principles and normative features of the Canadian Federation. He argues that
within the legal and political framework of a multinational Canadian state, the aims
of cohesion and unity can be achieved only when the underlying principles and
normative features of those systems are themselves open for negotiation and able to
include and respect Aboriginal peoples and their laws more explicitly in its
framework (Borrows 2002, p. 137). He further argues that a limited settler
conception of the jurisdictions of Indigenous polities has contributed to the failure
of the settler state to fully incorporate Indigenous governments as active and
meaningful participants in the Canadian Federation. Borrows is critical, too, of the
narrow approach to participation in the federation that Indigenous Canadian
governments, defined and bounded by their shared ethnicity, often create for
themselves. From his perspective as an Indigenous legal scholar, the exclusive
citizenship and measured separatism of modern-day First Nations self-govern-
ment arrangements is not rich enough to encompass the wide variety of relation-
ships we need to negotiate in order to live with the hybridity, displacement, and
positive potential of our widening circles (Borrows 2002, pp. 144/5).
Significantly for our focus here on natural resource management, Borrows
(2002) argues that a useful starting point in the process of creating a notion of
shared and multidimensional citizenship would be for non-Aboriginal Canadians to
recognise and incorporate the Indigenous notion of landed citizenship. He writes:
Many Aboriginal groups have well developed notions about how to
recognize the land as citizen. In the Ashinabek language, the land is
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animate and perceived as having rights and obligations in its relations with
humankind. Aboriginal peoples may be able to persuade other Canadians
to consider the adverse impact of their activities on the land itself, as an
entity in its own right. Aboriginal values and traditions could help reframe
the relationship within our polity. Aboriginal people would resist
assimilation through such recognition because their values where the
land is concerned could be entrenched in Canadas governing ideas and
institutions. They could help to reconfigure Canada in an important way.
(Borrows 2002, p. 146)
In countries such as Canada this type of legal and political theory concerning
Indigenous peoples actually has had substantially more uptake in many ways than
in Australia. Indeed, one finds that in the realm of daily, subconstitutional politics
(Tully 1995, p. 28), it is often through environmental governance issues that
Indigenous peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas and
institutions of the broader regional, provincial and national polity.
Landed citizenship and changing governance arrangements
In northern Canada there are numerous examples which draw out Borrowss ideas
regarding the utility of Aboriginal control of Canadian affairs (2002, p. 144). In
2002, a new agreement concerning hydro development and other resource
extraction issues on Cree territory was struck with the Quebec government. This
was an event that surprised many of those familiar with the James Bay Crees long
and vocal opposition to industrial resource development on their lands (see Craik
2004). The agreement is recognised as having been concluded on the basis of a
Nation to Nation relationship. In addition, it significantly expands the recognition
given to the Cree Tallymen, the primary hunting stewards who are responsible
under Cree law for overseeing environmental governance in each of the 300 Cree
family-based hunting territories, or traplines, which continue to be worked across
the whole of Cree traditional territories (see Feit 2004). For example the Cree
Tallymen must now be consulted in the planning of commercial forestry
development and will determine areas to be protected from commercial forestry
development based on their own priorities and logics in relation to environmental
governance. It is an arrangement which will significantly enhance Cree authority
over their respective hunting territories. It strengthens the autonomy of Cree
governance, while at the same time it inserts into the state-based environmental
governance regime the Cree notion of landed citizenship. Similarly, in Nunavik to
the north, the Inuit, along with the governments of Quebec and Canada, are
engaged in negotiations based on a shared citizenship model of public governance,
underpinned by the Inuit notion of landed citizenship. This notion of citizenship is
statutorily protected under the provisions of Canadas first comprehensive
Aboriginal land claim agreement, the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec
Agreement (see Palmer & Tehan 2006a).
Indigenous jurisdiction and natural resource management
In the North West Territories (NWT) there has been a series of comprehensive
land claims and self-government agreements, along with a changing regulatory
Nature, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities 39
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landscape. These have seen Indigenous governments significantly increase their
involvement in the decision making and environmental assessment of resource
management projects. Since 1998, in the lands of the Dene people in the southern
half of the NWT, resource development in the region has been overseen by the
McKenzie Valley Resource Management Act 1998. This act has established a series of
land and water boards for which relevant Indigenous governments are entitled to
nominate one half of the members of every board. In the same region over the last
decade it has become standard practice for project-specific environmental agree-
ments to be negotiated in relation to large-scale resource development projects in
the region. These environmental agreements are intended to be used when needed
as complementary tools for the management of complex projects (INAC 2003,
p. 1). One of their purposes is to encourage local participation in environmental
management. Under the terms of the separate environmental agreements it is
recognised, to differing extents, that affected Indigenous groups have certain rights
and interests in the region, including the right to be involved in environmental
monitoring and review. In many cases environmental agreements are made with
Indigenous governments themselves (see, for example, ATNS 2003).
The steadily increasing recognition of Indigenous governmental jurisdiction in
the management of resources in the NWT has been pivotal in bringing about the
legal, regulatory and political changes which increase Indigenous leverage over, and
participation in, the management and exploitation of northern resources. Perhaps
even more significantly, the developing relationships between Indigenous govern-
ments, state-based regulatory bodies and the resources industry are enhancing the
authority and capacity of Indigenous governments to shape and assert their rights
to full participation in the social, economic and environmental futures of the
NWT (see Palmer & Tehan 2006b). Here and elsewhere in Canada, Indigenous
Canadians are slowly succeeding in ensuring that their foundational beliefs and
underlying principles are either central to or incorporated into the diffuse networks
of power which constitute the broader Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal regional
polity. This is because of the recognition of Indigenous polities, whether explicit or
implicit, through self-government agreements, regulatory change or resource
development agreements.
Conclusion
Olwig (2002, p. 219) has written that whereas the Landschaft , as place and polity,
was built on a law opposed to the bonds of blood that threatened to destroy the
peace of the land, the nation-state sought to reconstitute blood-like ties at a higher
level of abstraction and spatial scale. Once a uni-dimensional citizenship was
constituted within the territory of the nation-state, the management of the
deadened land of rock and soil could also be addressed in a unified manner and
it was this process of naturalisation, the transformation of the political to the merely
physical landscape, which has long underpinned the legitimacy of state-based
resource management regimes. Yet it seems that the nation-state, while still
pervasive in an everyday sense (Painter 2005), is increasingly finding its institutions
embroiled in the new political spaces of values-based cultural politics (Hajer 2003).
For Indigenous peoples an increased attention to values-based cultural politics
offers both risk and opportunity. In relation to issues of globalisation and
international civil society, Niezen (2004) and Kingsbury (2002) highlight the
40 L. Palmer
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challenges to and from Indigenous polities in such settings. Issues of deliberative
legitimacy are equally problematic in the liberal public sphere of natural resource
management where the naturalising effects of a culture of nature linger most
pervasively. However, the emergence of recognised Indigenous polities in Canada
demonstrates that the realm of natural resource management can be fertile ground
to further the recognition of, and productive engagement with, Indigenous polities
if it is recognised as embedded within a process of diverse political landscape
formation.
Those in-between spaces of natural resource management which allow a
productive encounter between Indigenous political subjectivities and a multitude
of others, create for Indigenous Canadians places where they can begin to engage in
conversations about their rights and ways in which these rights can reconfigure the
whole. Such encounters are far from equal, but in contrast to the suppression of
Indigenous peoples political subjectivities under the rubric of existing environ-
mental governance arrangements they do signify a truly political moment when new
arrangements of power are created in the in-between spaces of political engagement
through dialogue across difference (Dikec 2005).
Acknowledgements
This paper draws partly on the authors postdoctoral research carried out under
the auspices of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, Agreements,
Treaties and Negotiated Settlements with Indigenous Peoples in Settler States:
Their Role and Relevance for Indigenous and Other Australians (www.atns.net.
au). I acknowledge and thank Simon Batterbury and two anonymous reviewers for
their comments on the paper. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of
the author.
Correspondence : Lisa Palmer, School of Anthropology, Geography and
Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010,
Australia. E-mail: lrpalmer@unimelb.edu.au
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