Table of Contents
Across Australia, the complexities of Indigenous governance are increasingly recognised. These complexities are apparent in intercultural engagements between Aboriginal people and the Australian ‘mainstream’, but they are also a feature of what is often described as the ‘Aboriginal domain’. This chapter explores governance in central Cape York Peninsula—focusing on the upper watersheds of the Wenlock and Pascoe Rivers—where these two sets of complexities are deeply interwoven and are now manifest as aspects of a single, heterogeneous field of governance.
Kaanju people, who consider the upper Wenlock and Pascoe Rivers to be their traditional country, have recently sought to reestablish their presence there through the development of ‘outstations’ or ‘homelands’. These outstations are small kin-based communities whose populations continue to move between homeland camps and larger communities, including the township of Coen (Smith 2004). Kaanju people have also regained some measure of control of their homelands through land claims and through the development of organisations concerned with the environmental and economic management of their ‘country’. These organisations are the basis of Kaanju people’s attempts to develop sustainable futures, by facilitating their involvement in political processes and through generating economic benefits from homelands-based projects. Given the growing number of projects currently based in Kaanju homelands—many of which include a potentially significant economic component—these organisations have, not surprisingly, become the subject of increasing contestation among the Aboriginal people involved with them.
In addition to contestation over governance arrangements between local Aboriginal people, the contemporary field of governance has also been shaped by a number of non-Indigenous or ‘outside’ organisations. These include various State and Federal government agencies and a series of non government organisations (NGOs) concerned with Aboriginal socioeconomic development and natural resource management. These organisations—and key individuals working within them—have responded to the reoccupation of Kaanju homelands by supporting homelands-based development. Development projects have been supported in a manner intended to lead to a rapprochement between the aspirations of various Kaanju people and what those working in these organisations regard as viable or sustainable forms of Indigenous social and economic development.
The resulting interplay between various local and ‘outside’ interests has produced a field of governance marked by ongoing tensions. In particular, there are tensions between Aboriginal aspirations for what might broadly be described as ‘self-determination’ and forms of support that remain conditional on working within frameworks determined by local and regional organisations and by government agencies. The resulting tensions focus on three key areas of contestation:
the relationship between homelands-based, sub-regional and regional ‘Aboriginal organisations’ (as well as between these organisations and government agencies)
the relationship (both putative and enacted) between contemporary forms of Aboriginal law and custom (‘Indigenous governance’) and ‘mainstream’ forms of governance and government, and
the relationship between different forms of Aboriginal identity—in particular in the articulation of Aboriginal groups of various kinds at various social scales.
Whilst the first of these sets of relationships (between various formally-constituted organisations) involves relatively discrete kinds of social institution, careful examination of the various relationships constitutive of Indigenous community governance suggests that Aboriginal and ‘mainstream’ aspects of governance are now deeply interwoven in a single—albeit complex—field. This is the case despite continuing Aboriginal and non-Indigenous claims to the contrary. Further, despite marked continuities from pre-colonial Aboriginal sociality, it seems that contemporary articulations of Kaanju identities and interests at various scales are now deeply embedded within this contemporary field of governance. In the contemporary region, Aboriginal identities, as well as the field of governance and its constituent institutions and practices, are now markedly intercultural.