Indigenous nation building for environmental futures: Murrundi flows through Ngarrindjeri country

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the Ngarrindjeri Nation in concert with the South Australian government won the Australian Riverprize for best practice in water management, after leading the development of a co-management approach to the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth (CLLMM) region during the Australian Millennium drought crisis. The purpose of this article is to explain why the prize-winning advances in water management in this region are an outcome of a strategic political process of Indigenous Nation (re)building, pursued by Ngarrindjeri leaders with the ongoing support of a formal research program focussed on Aboriginal governance. The primary insight revealed by the research is that Indigenous contributions to successful environmental management are not best conceived in terms of the protection of ‘cultural flows’ – as is suggested by much of the literature in the field – but instead should be understood primarily in political terms. Like other Indigenous Nations, Ngarrindjeri consider they have an inherent and sovereign right to enjoy, use and protect the flow of water through their Country. Ngarrindjeri have effectively articulated their sovereign Aboriginal environmental rights and have successfully negotiated these rights with the South Australian state by producing targeted legal and political innovations that enable shared authority in the co-development of natural resource management policy. The article argues that Indigenous Nation (re)building and self-governance has positive implications for the development of best practice models of land and water management, both in Australia and internationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal sovereignty
• cultural flows
• environmental policy
• Indigenous Nation-building
• Murray-Darling Basin
• water management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article was produced with support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) for the following projects: ‘Negotiating a space in the nation: the case of Ngarrindjeri’ (DP1094869); ‘Indigenous nationhood in the absence of recognition: Self-governance insights and strategies from three Aboriginal communities’ (LP140100376) and ‘Return, Reconcile, Renew’ (LP130100131). Support was provided by the Goyder Institute for Water Research through the following projects: ‘Preliminary systems inventory and project scoping River Murray Catchment’ – included section on Indigenous flows and environmental flows’ (E.1.5); ‘The development of an Indigenous engagement framework to support environmental water planning, research and management in the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin’ (E.1.7); ‘Incorporating Indigenous knowledge, values and interests into environmental water planning in the Coorong and Lakes Alexandrina and Albert Ramsar Wetland. (E.1.17); ‘Translating Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi into water risk assessment’ (HE-17-03). Additional support was provided by Melbourne University’s School of Government through funding for a research Cluster, ‘Indigenous Nation Building: Theory; Practice and its emergence in Australia’s public policy discourse’.

The authors thank the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority; the South Australian Department for Water and Natural Resources (now Department of Environment and Water); the Australian Government Department for the Environment; Berg Lawyers; the Office of Indigenous Strategy and Engagement, Flinders University; Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS; the Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona, and all the research partners involved in Ngarrindjeri nation building and Caring as Country programs. In particular, the authors thank our colleagues Professor Larissa Behrendt, Professor Robin Boast, Professor Stephen Cornell, Robert Hattam, Professor Miriam Jorgenson, Mark McMillan, Alison Vivian, Luke Trevorrow and Lachlan Sutherland, Sam Muller and all our research partners. We also recognise the enormous contribution of Ngarrindjeri Elders and leaders who have passed. We would like to name George Trevorrow (Rupelli), Matthew Rigney and Tom Trevorrow (all deceased).

We specifically acknowledge the substantial support to the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority’s, Yarluwar-Ruwe Program, from the CLLMM Ngarrindjeri Partnership Project and Riverine (Murrundi) Recovery Project – components of the South Australian Government’s Murray Futures program funded by the Australian Government’s Water for the Future initiative.

2. Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics working with Ngarrindjeri leaders and legal advisors have informed their strategies of political and legal intervention by using concepts, insights and theories drawn from scholarship such as Langton’s (1981) ‘the social scientist’s great deception’; Fabian’s (1983) ‘denial of coevalness’; Attwood and Arnold’s (1992) ‘Aboriginalism’; Foucault’s (1979) ‘governmentality’; Rose’s (1996) ‘deep colonising’; Smith’s (1998) ‘decolonizing methodologies’; Povinelli’s (2002) ‘the cunning of recognition’; Moreton-Robinson’s (2004) ‘the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty’; Latour’s (2004) ‘politics of nature’; Steve Hemming and Daryle Rigney’s ‘de-centring the new Protectors’ (Hemming and Rigney 2010); Bignall’s (2014) ‘excolonialism’; Byrd’s (2011) ‘transit of empire’ and Mark Rifkin’s (Rifkin 2017) ‘beyond settler time’.

3. The Ngarrindjeri Tendi is the peak governance and law body for the Ngarrindjeri Nation. It is a specific traditional decision-making body of senior people who Speak lawfully as Country (see Ngarrindjeri Nation 2006).

4. We recognise that terms such as ‘cultural, ‘economic’ and ‘social’ are problematic western constructs fundamental to the neoliberal settler project. The Ngarrindjeri vision for ‘Country’ resonates with more recent, and broadly cited, non-Indigenous concepts such as Karen Barad’s ‘onto-epistem-ology’ and more generally with the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences (see Barad 2003, 2007; Bignall, Hemming, and Rigney 2016; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 1988, 1997, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council: Discovery Project: DP1094869; Linkage Projects: LP130100131 & LP140100376. This work was also supported by the Goyder Institute for Water Research: Healthy Ecosystems: E.1.7, E.1.17, & H-E-17-03.