Daryle Matthew Rigney

Decentring the new protectors: transforming Aboriginal heritage in South Australia

Disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and history exercise a seemingly disproportionate influence on race relations in settler democracies. In South Australia, this influence has complex and unbroken genealogies linked to the beginnings of British settlement and the Protectors of Aborigines. This colonising character survives, and we argue that researchers working in Aboriginal heritage can be positioned as the new Protectors of Aborigines, reinvigorating a colonising network of power relations that remains critical in determining Indigenous interests and futures. In response Ngarrindjeri are theorising and strategising a transformative programme for decentring the new Protectors that avoids contexts where authenticity is at question or fundamental to the negotiations. Mapping actor networks revealed in everyday meetings and performances, and understanding local/global cultures of governmentality, have been necessary to safely bring Indigenous interests into Aboriginal heritage research, planning and policy, without activating the colonial archive and recycling Aboriginalist myths.

Unsettling sustainability: Ngarrindjeri political literacies, strategies of engagement and transformation

Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the YarluwarRuwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters and all living things. Our Goals are:

Is "Closing the Gap" Enough? Ngarrindjeri Ontologies, Reconciliation and Caring for Country.

Abstract This article is concerned with Ngarrindjeri nation building in the ‘contact zone’ with the Australian settler state by decentring the colonizer within a range of bureaucratic regimes. Ngarrindjeri engagement with natural resource and cultural heritage management will be used to illustrate the relationship between globalization, community governance, education, sustaining ‘culture’, Indigenous well-being, and reconciliation and its links to the Australian government Closing the Gap initiatives. This article connects Ngarrindjeri lived experience to the theorization of processes for self-recovery and social transformation that open possibilities for broad-based local and global coalitions, which include political solidarity in the interests of just Indigenous ‘reinhabitation’ and decolonization.

A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a strategy for river health

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Negotiating Indigenous modernity: Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan—Listen to Ngarrindjeri speak

The objective of this article is to compare Indigenous and Western modernities by examining how contemporary Indigenous polities are finding inventive ways to assert their sovereignty. Our discussion presents an innovation in Indigenous governance introduced recently by the Ngarrindjeri people in Southern Australia. We explain the conditions in which Ngarrindjeri initiated their process of political reformation; we link our analysis to critiques of Western modernism and imperialism; and we then outline some key political technologies created by the Ngarrindjeri Nation to enable its successful influence in matters affecting their Country and community. We find that these resources remain firmly grounded in Ngarrindjeri ways of knowing, being and doing, yet they are expressed in a contemporary hybrid form that is accessible to non-Indigenous negotiation partners. As a consequence, they have established a modern Indigenous framework for intercultural negotiation of interests previously controlled by the South Australian state and other non-Indigenous organizations.

The Postcolonial Time That Remains

Sovereign authority to establish the colony of South Australia was given by Letters Patent (1836), signed by King William IV. The Letters Patent made explicit provision for the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and interests in traditional lands and waters, establishing the basis for a peaceable and respectful interaction between Indigenous and settler societies. However, the preexisting sovereignty of Indigenous peoples was not respected and these written orders were ignored by the South Australian Company in its executive action to establish the Province of South Australia. Accordingly, the potential for development of positive forms of intercultural social relationship remained unrealized in this region, as was also the case throughout the Australian colonies. This essay reflects upon the transformative force of this unrealized potential, which remains immanent within the trajectory of Australian history. It makes use of Agambens conceptualization of time and exigency in The Time That Remains (2005) to theorize directed processes of historical discontinuity. We analyse colonial sources of contemporary Australian society, with a renewed attention to those aspects of political recognition and positively shared social life that were always possible but never came to pass into history. We argue that the experience of time and temporality in the ‘messianic mode’ enables new understanding of the problematic ‘time of the now’ and recreates possibilities for the communal invention of postcolonial futures that respond properly to ongoing and contemporary Indigenous practices of sovereignty and nationhood.