Search results

This chapter draws upon the ongoing gaps and injustices in Western water policy and law, exploring its paucity in recognition of Indigenous Water rights. Exacerbated by National Water legislation and ongoing colonial racism, notions of ‘ownership’ of water resources that are licenced through the Crown represent a site where a paradigm shift is needed to dismiss the myth of aqua nullius and secure Aboriginal Water rights (Marshall, 2017). The Gunditjmara success in obtaining United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of the Budj Bim eel traps and the Yarra River (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Protection Act (2017) are two examples that illustrate recognition of Aboriginal connections to water, but at the same time reveal weaknesses in Australian water policy. Sustainable Indigenous culture requires legal, social and cultural recognition and enactment of Aboriginal Water rights.

What leadership lessons in sustainability can be learned from historical clan survival stories that include elders' responses to survival events? We provide in this chapter analysis of stories of survival in which elders as leaders and advisers convey meanings and morals which serve as educative tools for their clans. The findings relate to current leadership style theories and align with principles of social, economic and environmental sustainability. By observations through an original framework and tabulation, the chapter concisely presents distilled wisdom for the management of current and future crisis events which may threaten supply chains and, consequently, short- and long-term sustainability. The findings are useful to several audiences, such as, organizational leaders, volunteers and community managers who are involved in crisis management and addressing its impact on employees and the broader community. The research also opens the pathway for academics to explore some new areas in survival management. Ultimately, we acknowledge the endeavours and achievements of our elders whose descendants we hope will appreciate the reflection of their contributions. It is the spirit of collaboration, sharing diverse experiences, as we all must do in a crisis, which we hope to learn from and share in the solutions moving forward to future events.

The colonial history of Australia has been a struggle between Indigenous peoples and the colonisers over Country. This is often represented as a struggle over land – it's control and use. Yet, for Indigenous people, land was never simply an economic commodity to be exploited. It was and is ‘Country’ in a deeper sense of the word, a fundamental part of Indigenous cosmology and a necessary foundation to a person's and group's ontology or being in the world. Country, then, can be conceptualised as both a physical and metaphysical domain. Indeed, both domains are inseparably intertwined. The struggle over Country remains core to understanding the social and political place of Indigenous people within Aboriginal law and within the criminal law and institutions of the coloniser. Further, this ongoing struggle goes to the heart of understanding why Indigenous people start their discussions on reform and change within the criminal justice system with a demand for recognition, negotiation and respect for Indigenous self-determination and a demand to see Indigenous people as colonised peoples.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

Traditional fire practices are explored so as to understand transformative relationships to Country and as an analogy for developments in Indigenous Health. Stories of fire encompass the resistance of Indigenous Australians to colonial dispossession. Stories of fire engage Indigenous communities with law and culture and from this with health. Transformative knowledges can be built upon re-kindling Indigenous land and law practices through fire practices. Building relationships with fire and burning practices corresponds with the developing sustainable health and cultural practices across Indigenous communities.