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Posts Tagged ‘Indigenous’

Hunting Magic, Maintenance Ceremonies and Increase Sites Exploring Traditional Management Systems for Marine Resources in Northern Cape York Peninsula

Emerging archaeological evidence from archaeological sites in northern Cape York has the potential to shed light on indigenous cultural practices relating to turtle hunting. This paper explores the nexus between cultural practice and indigenous ecological knowledge and ‘lost’ knowledge which has implications for how Traditional Owners may chose to manage resources today. Often when we hear of Indigenous environmental management techniques the focus is on management ‘practices’ e.g mosaic burning, rather than ‘systems’. While not denying that some practices may be useful or cost effective alternatives to other ‘western science’ based land management practices the question needs to be asked: how effective can these be in ecosystem management if adopted in isolation of the other components of Indigenous management systems? Lines (2006) has challenged the efficacy of Indigenous management systems and questioned their sustainability but provides little evidence that he understands the complexity of such systems and the interrelationship of nature and culture, or indeed that he believes such systems exist. A more valid question is, what happens to these complex systems when key elements are discontinued, lost or destroyed? Perhaps if we, in partnership with Aboriginal communities, explore the changes to such systems over time we can begin to understand the consequences of these changes and the implications for long term species and ecosystem management. This paper provides preliminary outcomes of a current archaeological project which may further this discussion. At the time when European’s were first re cor ding observations along the Cape York Peninsula coastline, Aboriginal people and their Torres Strait Islander neighbours were hunting and consuming turtle and dugong in numbers great enough to be remarked on. Sites comprising heaped turtle and dugong bones were noted and in some cases sketched. Populations of both animals were however extremely healthy, the size of herds of dugong (Thorne 1876; Jack son et al 2001) and the proliferation of turtle were also remarked on. Was this just some kind of coincidence or was there an Indigenous system in place that actively contributed to the sustainability of this resource?
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Empowering Indigenous peoples’ biocultural diversity through World Heritage cultural landscapes: a case study from the Australian humid tropical forests

Australian humid tropical forests have been recognised as globally significant natural landscapes through world heritage listing since 1988. Aboriginal people have occupied these forests and shaped the biodiversity for at least 8000 years. The Wet Tropics Regional Agreement in 2005 committed governments and the region’s Rainforest Aboriginal peoples to work together for recognition of the Aboriginal cultural heritage associated with these forests. The resultant heritage nomination process empowered community efforts to reverse the loss of biocultural diversity. The conditions that enabled this empowerment included: Rainforest Aboriginal peoples’ governance of the process; their shaping of the heritage discourse to incorporate biocultural diversity; and their control of interaction with their knowledge systems to identify the links that have created the region’s biocultural diversity. We recommend further investigation of theory and practice in Indigenous governance of international heritage designations as a means to empower community efforts to reverse global biocultural diversity loss.
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Contexts for change: Paving the way to the 1999 Burra Charter

In this paper, I examine the context in which the proposed amendments to the Burra Charter took place and how in fact they reflected trends in heritage practice as it stood when the Burra Charter review started in 1994/95. In doing so, I will outline work within Indigenous heritage to involve community values and its influence on explorations into ‘social value’ for non-Indigenous heritage undertaken by the Australian Heritage Commission (AHC), and parallel initiatives by Australia ICOMOS. I suggest that in fact many threads came together, particularly in the AHC2 over a decade from late 1984.
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