This book focuses on Indigenous self-determined and community-owned responses to complex socioeconomic and political challenges in Australia, and explores Indigenous policy development and policy expertise. It critically considers current practices and issues central to policy change and Indigenous futures. The book foregrounds the resurgence that is taking place in Indigenous governing and policy-making, providing case studies of local and community-based policy development and implementation. The chapters highlight new Australian work on what is an international phenomenon. This book brings together senior and early career political scientists and policy scholars, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars working on problems of Indigenous policy and governance.

Globally, far too many discussions about Indigenous governance and development are dominated by accounts of disadvantage, deficit and failure. This book paints a different international picture, testifying to Indigenous peoples as agents of governance innovation and successful developers in their own right, telling stories in their words, from their own experiences and countries. From Indigenous voices, we hear alternative concepts and measures of effectiveness, legitimacy, success and sustainability. Indigenous stories and voices are captured as case study chapters, written in lively, clear language about what is happening that is promising and productive in Indigenous self-determined governance for self-determined development in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the USA; all English colonial–settler countries.

Over the past four decades Aboriginal people living in remote and regional Australia have been empowered by land rights and native title laws to claim back large tracts of their ancestral lands. Today the Indigenous estate covers over 20 per cent of the continent and includes areas of globally significant biodiversity and cultural value, many now declared as Indigenous Protected Areas in the National Reserve System. But none of the Indigenous estate is in its pre-colonial condition and it faces a myriad of environmental threats.People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures draws on a diversity of perspectives to document a significant social and environmental movement that is quietly gathering momentum across this vast Indigenous estate. This series of essays, drawn from an unusual collaboration between university researchers and Indigenous land owners, tells a little-known story about Aboriginal people who are living on, working on and caring for the lands and seas that they own and manage. The ongoing struggles by Indigenous people to conserve and rehabilitate the outstanding natural and cultural values of their ancestral lands deserve wide recognition and acclaim.This book seeks to reposition Indigenous people and their caring for country activities from the margins to the very core of the growing national conversation on issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion. It challenges the Australian public, policy community and politicians to re-imagine the role that the Caring for Country movement, deploying a mix of western scientific and Indigenous ecological knowledge systems and techniques, must play in the proper environmental management of Australia in the 21st century.______________________________________________________** A short video of Garawa and Waanyi fire management in the Gulf country was released November 2013 as part of the work done by Dr Kerins with the National Environmental Research Program. They have achieved significant results in a highly challenging area. Read Media Release... Watch Video...______________________________________________________*** 2015 Peter Rawlinson Award winner: Jack Wongili Green Read more..."Jacky Wongili Green from Borroloola in the southwest region of the Gulf of Carpentaria is the most worthy winner of the 2015 Peter Rawlinson Conservation Award. Some of Jack's important achievements were regaining ownership of land, the forming of ranger groups, implementing management practices to avoid more vast wildfires and bringing about environmental and social changes in a remote part of Australia. Jacky has used his talent as an artist to express his concerns for the land and culture, especially at McArthur River where the mining is polluting the water and land, and also damaging sacred sites. It has taken bravery and sustained personal effort to speak out and to question government legislation affecting the region. Jacky has truly made an outstanding contribution." - Marnie Rawlinson, Peter Rawlinson Award Presentation, ACF AGM 2015

In the public debate about the success or failure of Australia's Indigenous policies, opinions have been grounded more often in personal experience than in social scientists' research. This work asks: What vision of the good life should guide an assessment of policy?

Land is key to the operations of coloniality, but the power of the land is also the key anticolonial force that grounds Indigenous liberation. This work is an attempt to articulate the nature of land as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing. As a foundation of valuing, land forms the framework for a conceptualization of Indigenous environmental ethics as an anticolonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. This text is an important contribution in the efforts to Indigenize Western philosophy, particularly in the context of settler colonialism in the United States. It breaks significant ground in articulating Indigenous ways of knowing and valuing to Western philosophy—not as artifact that Western philosophy can incorporate into its canon, but rather as a force of anticolonial Indigenous liberation. Ultimately, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land shines light on a possible road for epistemically, ontologically, and morally sovereign Indigenous futures.

Settler societies habitually frame Indigenous people as ‘a people of the past’—their culture somehow ‘frozen’ in time, their identities tied to static notions of ‘authenticity’, and their communities understood as ‘in decline’. But this narrative erases the many ways that Indigenous people are actively engaged in future-orientated practice, including through new technologies. Indigenous Digital Life offers a broad, wide-ranging account of how social media has become embedded in the lives of Indigenous Australians. Centring on ten core themes—including identity, community, hate, desire and death—we seek to understand both the practice and broader politics of being Indigenous on social media. Rather than reproducing settler narratives of Indigenous ‘deficiency’, we approach Indigenous social media as a space of Indigenous action, production, and creativity; we see Indigenous social media users as powerful agents, who interact with and shape their immediate worlds with skill, flair and nous; and instead of being ‘a people of the past’, we show that Indigenous digital life is often future-orientated, working towards building better relations, communities and worlds. This book offers new ideas, insights and provocations for both students and scholars of Indigenous studies, media and communication studies, and cultural studies.

This ground-breaking Handbook explores the key legal, political and policy questions concerning the implementation of Indigenous rights across the world. Expert contributors analyse the complex dynamics of contestation, engagement, advocacy and refusal between governments and Indigenous Peoples, presenting a profound challenge to mainstream policy scholarship.

Singularizing progressive time binds pasts, presents, and futures to cause-effect chains overdetermining existence in education and social life more broadly. Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place disrupts the common sense of "futures" in education or "knowledge for the future" by examining the multiplicity of possible destinies in coexistent experiences of living and learning. Taking place is the intention this book has to embody and world multiplicity across the landscapes that sustain life. The book contends that Indigenous perspectives open spaces for new forms of sociality and relationships with knowledge, time, and landscapes. Through Goanna walking and caring for Country; conjuring encounters between forests, humans, and the more-than-human; dreams, dream literacies, and planes of existence; the spirit realm taking place; ancestral luchas; Musquem hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ Land pedagogies; and resoluteness and gratitude for atunhetsla/the spirit within, the chapters in the collection become politicocultural and (hi)storical statements challenging the singular order of the future towards multiple encounters of all that is to come. In doing so, Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place offers various points of departure to (hi)story educational futures more responsive to the multiplicities of lives in what has not yet become. The contributors in this volume are Indigenous women, women of Indigenous backgrounds, Black, Red, and Brown women, and women whose scholarship is committed to Indigenous matters across spaces and times. Their work in the chapters often defies prescriptions of academic conventions, and at times occupies them to enunciate ontologies of the not yet. As people historically fabricated "women," their scholarly production critically intervenes on time to break teleological education that births patriarchal-ized and master-ized forms of living. What emerges are presences that undiscipline education and educationalized social life breaking futures out of time. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indigenous studies, future studies, post-colonial studies in education, settler colonialism and coloniality, diversity and multiculturalism in education, and international comparative education.

Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.

Awards: One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022. PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020. One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020. Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019. Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world. In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.