Addressing the offending-related needs of non-violent Indigenous offenders

This report examines publically-available research literature from North America, Australia and New Zealand on the effectiveness of measures that aim to reduce non-violent offending by Indigenous people. It identifies culturally safe and relevant principles for the design and implementation of measures that have been found to be promising in terms of reducing this category of offending. These principles are important for policy-makers and practitioners to understand, given that many Indigenous people come into contact with the criminal justice system in relation to non-violent offences such as public order and driving offences. The principles set out in the report include: incorporating Indigenous culture, family and community into treatment programs; combining Indigenous approaches with effective Western treatment models such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; and addressing the substance abuse, trauma, and historical and social context often associated with offending by Indigenous people. In addition to promoting these principles, the report provides an overview of Indigenous people’s contact with the criminal justice system in relation to non-violent crimes, as well as a discussion of specific programs that have been used with this group of offenders.

The con-stitutional re-cognition (s)cam-pain: The campaign for the hidden recognition of first nations peoples' racial inferiority

The constitutional recognition campaign has received party-wide support and its efforts have been promoted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott as being something that would ‘complete our Constitution.’ The broader rhetoric surrounding this campaign suggests that it will result in a just, albeit delayed, recognition of indigenous peoples in the Australian legal system. However, beneath the surface of this seemingly benevolent gesture, is a reaffirmation of the colonial subordination and erasure of the several hundred original nations’ peoples and ways of being.

Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Volume 2, Number 1, 2009"

Over the past two decades neo liberalism has shaped global economic activity. The international reach of the current economic crisis propelled by the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States has affected Indigenous communities in different ways to those whose investments were depleted by the Wall Street activities of an unregulated corporate and banking sector. Throughout this roller coaster economic ride the low socio-economic position of Indigenous peoples continued in Canada, the United States of America, New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia. The logic, or illogic of capital, failed to extend the boom of the economic upturn to Indigenous peoples, but is poised to extend the repercussions of the current downturn deep into Indigenous lives. The consistency of the Indigenous socio-economic position across these countries, even where treaties exist, indicates that the phenomenon is based on a shared Indigenous reality. In this special edition, the commonality in the way in which Indigenous people are engaged in and positioned by market forces and regulation by their respective nation states is proposed as one of the foundation plates of that Indigenous positioning...

Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Volume 4, Number 1, 2011"

This special edition of the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies highlights the work of emerging scholars in the field of Indigenous Studies. The five featured authors were all finalists for the prize awarded by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) to the best post-graduate student paper at the NAISA meeting held in 2010 in Tucson, Arizona. While the breadth of scholarship encompassed by the term ‘Indigenous Studies’ and the global representation of Indigenous peoples at NAISA mean that the topics and approaches vary widely, a common thematic of fraught post-colonial relations can be discerned within all five articles.

Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Volume 5, Number 1, 2012"

The first two articles of this edition of the journal testify to the lengthening reach of the discipline of Critical Indigenous Studies that is, remarkably, still in its nascence. Emiel Martens examines the development of Maori filmmaking since the 1980s and takes the opportunity to explore this Indigenous cinema in the context of developments in the New Zealand film industry generally. Shifting from cultural production to renewable energy, Steven M. Hoffman and Thibault Martin remind us that in the effort to satiate the demands for energy, it is often Indigenous peoples who bear adverse consequences. Using a social capital framework, the authors examine the impact of the development of hydroelectric power upon a displaced Aboriginal community and conclude that displacement has resulted in an erosion of cohesive social bonds that once ensured a sustainable way of life.

Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Volume 4, Number 2, 2011"

This special edition of the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies focuses upon the work scholars within the growing discipline of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health studies. The lamentable state of Indigenous health in Australia is reflected in Indigenous populations elsewhere, especially where settler colonialism has left an indelible mark. This special edition therefore speaks to where Indigenous health outcomes and the efficacy of remedies are causing concern. Common to all is the demand that Indigenous people are placed front and centre of all attempts to improve health outcomes and that improvements are sought in culturally sensitive ways. Terry Dunbar presents findings from a research study that set out to investigate the Indigenous experiences of health and family services in the Northern Territory, Australia. The study asserts that cultural security is an integral and vital element of any policy that will impact upon Indigenous peoples. Dunbar concludes by arguing that in seeking positive change with regard to cultural security or otherwise, the most vociferous champions of that change are likely to be the Aboriginal communities affected. The article by Bronwyn Fredericks, Karen Adams, Sandra Angus and Melissa Walker also highlights the need to involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, in this case women, in the design and development of strategies affecting their lives. Utilising routine communication methods such the ‘talking circle’ and the process referred to as ‘talkin’ up’, where women ‘talk back’ to one another about issues of personal importance, the article argues that the health strategy which emerged through these consultation approaches was more accurately informed by and responsive to women’s health need. Indeed, the resulting strategy reflected the women’s sense of themselves and the clear direction they felt their health services and polices should take.

Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice. Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

Gendering and racialising self-determination: Indigenous women and patriarchal whiteness

Indigenous peoples have the right of self-determination, in accordance with international law by virtue of which tehy may freely determine their political status and institutions and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. an integral part of this is the right to autonomy and self-government. The essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but rather the defense [sic] of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race. The manner in which the defense [sic] is articulated - either as hostility or subtlety - is not nearly as important as the fact that it insures the continuation of a privileged relationship.

Two worlds apart: Indigenous community perspectives and Non-Indigenous teacher perspectives on Australian schools

Our evaluation studies of Indigenous school reform begin from a different starting point: listening to, hearing and engaging with the commentaries, voices, narratives and analyses of Indigenous community as they discuss and recount their experiences and current encounters with Australian state schools. Here we undertake a contrastive documentation of the views of Indigenous community members, Elders, parents, education workers, and young people and, indeed, of the views of their non-Indigenous teachers and school principals. This is a dramatic picture of two distinctive cultural lifeworlds, communities and worldviews in contact, of two very different ‘constructions’ by participants of a shared, mutual experience: everyday interaction in the social field of the Australian school. Taken together, our Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants repeatedly confirmed and corroborated a key theme: that Indigenous peoples continue to be viewed and ‘treated’ through the lens and language of cultural, intellectual and moral ‘deficit’.

Western medicine and Australian Indigenous healing practices

Most projects undertaken by government health organisations are formulated on values and beliefs about health and illness that are derived from Anglo/Celtic culture. Health beliefs differ between cultures and it has been identified that the differences in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous constructs of health impacts negatively on the effectiveness of mainstream healthcare provided to Indigenous peoples [2]. This implies that strategies that incorporate, or better still are derived from, Indigenous health beliefs have a greater potential to be effective. This article introduces a prospective survey project asking how western medicine and traditional treatments interface with each other.

My country

The film is an ode to the history of Indigenous peoples and the meaning and spirit of belonging. Inspired by verbal and documented accounts of Aboriginal experiences from the history of colonialism, MY COUNTRY is the touching story of the lasting impact of one such experience on an elderly Aboriginal man. Triggered by a work of art and its interpretation, his story is a journey through time and cultural dislocation.

Disarming identities : Ethnic identities in conflict resolution: Hindrance or helpful resource?

This thesis proposes that national or ethnic identity is an important and overlooked resource in conflict resolution. Usually ethnic identity is seen both in international relations and in social psychology as something that fuels the conflict. Using grounded theory to analyze data from interactive problem-solving workshops between Palestinians and Israelis a theory about the role of national identity in turning conflict into protracted conflict is developed. Drawing upon research from, among others, social identity theory, just world theory and prejudice it is argued that national identity is a prime candidate to provide the justification of a conflict party’s goals and the dehumanization of the other necessary to make a conflict protracted. It is not the nature of national identity itself that lets it perform this role but rather the ability to mobilize a constituency for social action (see Stürmer, Simon, Loewy, & Jörger, 2003). Reicher & Hopkins (1996) have demonstrated that national identity is constructed by political entrepreneurs to further their cause, even if this construction is not a conscious one. Data from interactive problem-solving workshops suggest that the possibility of conflict resolution is actually seen by participants as a direct threat of annihilation. Understanding the investment necessary to make conflict protracted this reaction seems plausible. The justification for ones actions provided by national identity makes the conflict an integral part of a conflict party’s identity. Conflict resolution, it is argued, is therefore a threat to the very core of the current national identity. This may explain why so many peace agreements have failed to provide the hoped for resolution of conflict. But if national identity is being used in a constructionist way to attain political goals, a political project of conflict resolution, if it is conscious of the constructionist process, needs to develop a national identity that is independent of conflict and therefore able to accommodate conflict resolution. From this understanding it becomes clear why national identity needs to change, i.e. be disarmed, if conflict resolution is to be successful. This process of disarmament is theorized to be similar to the process of creating and sustaining protracted conflict. What shape and function this change should have is explored from the understanding of the role of national identity in supporting conflict. Ideas how track-two diplomacy efforts, such as the interactive problem-solving workshop, could integrate a process by both conflict parties to disarm their respective identities are developed.

Globalization and the Political : in the Borderlands with the Zapatista Movement

This study explores the meaning, content and significance of the political as manifest in the Mexican Zapatista movement as historically and geopolitically situated struggle. The case study undertakes a critical analysis of the development, organization, practice and discourse of the movement by drawing on fieldwork experiences, interviews, discussions, documents, films and other material produced by the movement, and the critical engagement with the research of others, especially in Latin America and Mexico. The dissertation poses the need to reconsider what constitutes and what we understand by the political , related particularly to the challenges provided by the critical globalization literature, decolonization and the study of social movements. The analysis encompasses several inter-related levels: the theoretical knowledge regarding the conceptualization of the political; the methodological level, regarding how such research can and should be conducted and knowledge claims formulated given the inescapable context and effects of global power relations; and the substantive level of adding specific information and analytical insights to existing knowledge of the Zapatista movement. As a result of conceptualization of a range of practices and processes, distinct understandings of the political can be underlined. Firstly, the conception of the indigenous and the struggles as indigenous movements as specifically political, not just a cultural or ethnic identity or a static quality but rather, an active consciousness integrally linked both to a longer history of oppression and as political articulation in the concrete context and lived experience of contemporary struggle. Secondly, the practice of autonomy as central to an understanding of the political in the context of the Zapatista struggle as a practical response to the situation of oppression, counter-insurgency, siege and conflict in Chiapas, as well as a positively informed mode of political self-understanding, expression and practice in its own right. Thirdly, the notion of geopolitical positioning as important to understanding of the political that encompasses the historicity of specific context and the power relations which shape that context, developed in two different ways: in regard to the positioning of the researcher and knowledge production with and about the Zapatistas, and in regard to the practice and knowledge of the Zapatistas as a decolonizing force in their encounters, interaction and relations with others, especially the global civil society. Finally, the role of silence, absence, invisibility, revelation and hiding in political practice as a deliberate strategy in response to oppressive power. -

Indigenous Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation

Indigenous peoples with a historical continuity of resource-use practices often possess a broad knowledge base of the behavior of complex ecological systems in their own localities. This knowledge has accumulated through a long series of observations transmitted from generation to generation. Such ''diachronic'' observations can be of great value and complement the ''synchronic''observations on which western science is based. Where indigenous peoples have depended, for long periods of time, on local environments for the provision of a variety of resources, they have developed a stake in conserving, and in some cases, enhancing, biodiversity. They are aware that biological diversity is a crucial factor in generating the ecological services and natural resources on which they depend. Some indigenous groups manipulate the local landscape to augment its heterogeneity, and some have been found to be motivated to restore biodiversity in degraded landscapes. Their practices for the conservation of biodiversity were grounded in a series of rules of thumb which are apparently arrived at through a trial and error process over a long historical time period. This implies that their knowledge base is indefinite and their implementation involves an intimate relationship with the belief system. Such knowledge is difficult for western science to understand. It is vital, however, that the value of the knowledge-practice-belief complex of indigenous peoples relating to conservation of biodiversity is fully recognized if ecosystems and biodiversity are to be managed sustainably. Conserving this knowledge would be most appropriately accomplished through promoting the community-based resource-management systems of indigenous peoples.

Modelling the long-term sustainability of indigenous hunting in Manu National Park, Peru: landscape-scale management implications for Amazonia

P> Widespread hunting throughout Amazonia threatens the persistence of large primates and other vertebrates. Most studies have used models of limited validity and restricted spatial and temporal scales to assess the sustainability. We use human-demographi