Environmental Legacies and Aspirations for Country with the Iman and Butchulla. What an Archaeology and Anthropology of Ecologies Could Contribute.
Abstract
In navigating changes in the environment, in Country, and in heritage, communities work according to remembered pasts and envisioned futures. As the representative bodies of these communities assert increasing leadership within management of the changes they face, the place of the past in the future begins to look very different from what we’ve come to expect from mainstream approaches and their received top-down priorities. In southeast and central Queensland, communities are strategically repurposing opportunities provided by climate adaptation, disaster resilience, and caring for Country programs to further land and sea management in pursuit of their own aspirations. My research details interview and participant observation with members of the Iman and Butchulla communities working towards such aspirations for their heritage, environments, and Country, exploring opportunities and barriers faced in making their goals reality. As archaeologists increasingly find themselves brought into discourses of the environment, practitioners and researchers alike must engage with community conceptualisations of how study and management of the past can contribute to Indigenous futures. Doing so raises long-contested questions of self-determination, heritage-making, and environmental justice, and prompts us to reflect on to what extent environmental crises can be separated from the original crisis of colonisation.
About the Presenter
Tom Dooley is an MPhil candidate at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on how people work within their environments in the renegotiation of social relations, applying archaeological, ethnographic, and historical methodologies. His interests include environmental legacies, community archaeology, decolonial studies, and discourses of the place of human communities within their ecologies. He has also worked for several years as a cultural heritage consultant and commercial archaeologist, most recently in the role of Community Projects Coordinator and Grants Officer with the not-for-profit Everick Foundation.
About Archaeology Working Papers
The Working Papers in Archaeology seminar series provides a forum for dissemination of archaeological research and ideas amongst UQ archaeology students and staff. All students are invited to attend the series and postgraduate students, from honours upwards, are invited to present their research. The aim is to provide opportunities for students, staff and those from outside UQ, to present and discuss their work in an informal environment. It is hoped that anyone interested in current archaeological directions, both within and outside the School and University, will be able to attend and contribute to the series.