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We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and socio-political crisis—climate change, pandemic, extinction, inequality, and repression—yet everywhere it is underpinned by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the persistent refusal of Indigenous authority and sovereignty. Bringing together concerns about bio- and necropolitics, habitat destruction and animal cruelty, corporate-colonial modes of conservation, whitened food systems, and settler-colonial systems of land, business and environmental law, this special issue highlights enduring structures of injustice and creative lines of Indigenous resistance, authority, and cultural-political transformation.
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Between Ecology and Indigeneity

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This article examines the intersecting forms of social and environmental injustice shaping the lifeworld of Indigenous Marind communities and their more-than-human ecologies in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. Over the last decade, large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion have radically undermined Marinds’ intimate and ancestral kinships with sentient forest plants and animals, as well as the moral principles that undergird interspecies relations. These transformations are exacerbated by conservation practices that are undertaken in the name of corporate sustainability but that are problematically premised upon an assumed divide between humans and the environment. The exclusion of Marind from natures both exploited and preserved sits in turn within a long-standing and ongoing history of violence and discrimination perpetrated against West Papuans under Indonesian rule. Drawing from Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols of more-than-human relationality, I examine how Marind conceive and contest the possibility of justice now and in the future—for themselves, forest organisms, and oil palm—amidst multiple, overlapping, and intersecting injustices provoked by capitalism, conservation, and colonialism. I invite an expansion of the scope and subjects of justice beyond the human that remains nonetheless acutely attentive to the persistence of capital-colonial regimes systematically positioning Indigenous peoples as killable before the law.
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Can There Be Justice Here?

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This article describes and analyses the Pelorus experiment, a recent restoration project in which dingoes were used to eradicate goats on a Great Barrier Reef Island. Before they were taken to the island, the dingoes were implanted with a poison capsule that was intended to kill them after they had killed the goats; they were both pest and ‘pesticide’ (Mavhunga 2011). Subsequently, freehold land on the island was marketed as a tourism development site. We contextualise the Pelorus Island goat eradication program within the cultural–political history of carceral colonialism in Australia and show how this experiment relates to ideas about the special role that islands play in conservation. We also piece together the story of what happened to the goats and dingoes involved. Our analysis reveals the ways notions of animal pesthood and ecological restoration are co-opted by conservation and tourism interests. The Pelorus experiment illustrates how illusions of idyllic island sanctuaries, which appeal to contemporary tourism tropes of seclusion within a ‘pristine’ environment, are predicated on the violence inherent to, but obfuscated within, settler-colonialist visions of land for the taking and remaking.
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Colonialism and Conservation

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Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named <italic>Honouring Land Connections</italic>, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that <italic>Honouring Land Connections</italic> represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period disregards Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with and responsibilities for Country. The artworks signify contested spaces, places and knowledge of Country, culture, and waterways. Honouring Land Connections maintains cultural connections and speaks back to White preconceptions of Indigeneity. The artists wage war on the selective readings and colonial amnesia in Australia to directly challenge notions of <italic>terra nullius</italic> and <italic>intellectual nullius</italic>. This article shows how art can facilitate interaction through which Aboriginal artists can affirm, negotiate, share, and explore their identities while challenging dominant Eurocentric preconceptions of place and identity.
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Signifying Aboriginal Identity, Culture and Country in Central Queensland Through a Public Art Project

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Aotearoa New Zealand acknowledges mātauranga Māori in the two Acts and one Memorandum of Understanding recognising the ‘personhood’ status of three geographical regions—Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga. They blend the legal fiction of corporate personhood with the already always understanding of human-nonhuman kinship and entanglement of M!ori philosophy, Māori knowledge and wisdom, and Māori epistemology. Through kaitiaki (trustees) these three entities have volition in their ongoing maintenance, development negotiations, and ‘land-use’, and ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. These attributes suggest something more than mere volition in self-management and protection: they suggest <italic>agency</italic>. This article explores the implications of nonhuman agency as <italic>potential for political voice</italic>. As representatives of entanglement for all being—animal (including human), vegetable and elemental—and as a matter of justice they are, perhaps, obliged to participate in democracy and the nation is, perhaps, obliged to give them a ‘seat at the table’. As political agents with equal status to human and corporate persons Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga might unsettle settler politics and challenge the imbalances of the Anthropocene.
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A Seat At The Table

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Borders and bordering practices can be understood as both an act of sovereign authority and establishing the contemporary international system. The drawing of borders also simultaneously legitimizes the state’s sovereign authority, creating a political community ‘inside’ borders through which modern politics takes place. These processes are especially pertinent for settler states such as Canada, whose sovereign authority over its recognized territory is contingent on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. However, Indigenous nations reject Canadian claims of settler authority and legitimacy, instead continuing to uphold their own modes of governance and relationships to territory. This contestation of settler territoriality is practiced in various ways, with this article exploring how energy utility governance and infrastructure act as bordering practices—that is, as a productive means of manifesting and demonstrating territorial authority. Through the British Columbia Utilities Commission’s Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry, we explore the contestation of territory through what we refer to as ‘embedded bordering’. In doing so, we identify a tension between ongoing settler moves to dispossession alongside decolonial potential in the border-making practices of energy governance and infrastructure.
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Embedded Bordering

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Indigenous leaders and scholars demand greater respect for their governance and knowledge authority, with one priority the de/centring of the environmental management research-praxis arising out of natural science traditions (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_029">Latulippe and Klenk, 2020</xref>). That is, to de-centre colonial privilege and centre Indigenous authority. Who can do this and how involves conceptual, political and cultural expertise; yet, natural science disciplinary practices prioritise invisibilizing power, culture and perspective (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_029">Latulippe and Klenk, 2020</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_070">Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew, 2020</xref>). This article is an intervention into this context. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I introduce the analytical tools I use to unpack two core assumptions that confounded my ability to hear what Indigenous mentors were saying about environmental management. With two demonstrations—Xaxli’p (Canada) and Gunditjmara (Australia)—I also show how Indigenous leaders do not just present their own approaches, but re-constitute environmental management itself with their meanings, practices, and priorities, whilst environmental management also influences Indigenous knowledge and governance. My focus is with how knowledge is formed and re-formed within and between diverse knowledge holders, including my work as a reflexive modern scholar. Significantly, this article is not purely for edification: this is justice work—in support of both Indigenous people and nature.
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Terrain

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Since colonisation began in Australia, it has transformed the ecological, social, cultural, and economic bases of the biggest estate on earth, with outcomes driving the disruption of Indigenous food sovereignty, foodways and food knowledges alongside the reproduction of Whiteness. This article critically examines the place of White food, including the case of nanotechnologies, in the expansion of the settler colonial frontier, and its impacts for Indigenous health and relationships with food. To do this, we consider a widely commercialised nano-food application: the addition of nano-scale titanium dioxide to make foods White. Nano White food provides a unique lens to examine White authority and control across settler colonial food systems. We consider some of the impacts arising from this global colonial power matrix—to which Whiteness is organising principle for domination—for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, justice, and rights. We argue that unsettling Whiteness is vital to redressing the violence wrought by settler colonial agri-food systems, and for re-centring living ecologies and interconnected systems across foodways.
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Nano White Food and the Reproduction of Whiteness

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Given histories of settler violence towards Indigenous nations following acts of Indigenous refusal, work from settler scholars regarding what animates settler responses to Indigenous governance must come alongside our calls for the return of land and authority. This article explores the affective responses of settler workers in the western Canadian wild mushroom industry as it transitions from its long-time unregulated status under settler law to Indigenous regulatory control. I draw ethnographic insights from morel mushroom harvesters on the unceded Territories of Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nations in British Columbia during the introduction of an Indigenous-led permitting programme in 2019. I argue that settler aversion to Indigenous regulation results from the challenge to their ‘settler common sense’, which is produced and performed within the mushroom camps that line forest highways during the harvest. On NSN Whut’en Territories, harvesters’ attachments to their common sense were weakened along two lines—their positions as precarious workers in a capitalist industry and their ambivalence to the Canadian state. I outline how Indigenous regulation leveraged these fissures, leading to the protection of local peoples and ecologies and hope for the most precarious of settler workers.
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Understanding Settler Workers’ ‘Common Sense’ Responses to Indigenous Governance in the Western Canadian Wild Mushroom Industry

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 2 (January 2019)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Borderlands Journal

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since then, it has fostered radical thinking across the borders between disciplines, nations, sexualities, economies, identities, peoples and species, and fostered interplay between rigorous scholarship in philosophy, law, cultural studies, politics, sociology, geography, international relations and the environment. Borderlands' profile in areas such as refugees, indigenous politics, post-and de-colonial theory, biopolitics, post-Marxism, queer theory, race and gender, is especially strong, but the journal remains open to a range of concerns and disciplines.  As the complex discourse and reality of the Anthropocene evolves, Borderlands is opening its pages to work in the environmental humanities, posthumanism, STS, and environmental politics, theory and law. It aims to foster new conjunctions of justice, power, theory and bodies; to connect theory, event and structure in compelling and thoughtful ways.  You can read the Borderlands' manifesto to get a sense of the vision with which we began.  Writing for Borderlands  Borderlands has a global reputation for first-class theorising and innovative conjunctions of theory, event and situated analysis. Borderlands' editorial board includes some of the world's most important social theorists including Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claire Colebrook, Michael Hardt, Donna Haraway, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Adi Ophir, RBJ Walker and McKenzie Wark. Our rigorous standards and double-blind peer-review process ensures that only the highest-quality work is published. Your work will be published with an open access license - for free - ensuring global and equitable access to your work from readers around the world. And, by publishing with Borderlands, you help support a radical publishing space untainted by big corporate profitmaking and neoliberal elitism.  Past issues of Borderlands  Borderlands issues from 2002-2019 were published under the ISSN 1447-0810 and can be viewed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive.  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and all users are free to share the work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. The material published in the journal may not be altered or built upon.  All authors who wish to publish in Borderlands must agree to the licensing terms stated above.  ABOUT SOCIETY  The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Environment and Governance Research Group brings together leading international researchers in environmental politics, law and policy, biodiversity, climate security, food systems, and environmental ethics. Our work has a common focus on improving law, public policy and international cooperation in protecting ecosystems and managing the impact of human-induced environmental change. With planet Earth having entered the Anthropocene - the epoch of dramatic human impacts on the Earth’s ecology and systems - our work crosses disciplines and charts paths for improved governance that can support ecological sustainability, and key human interests in health, justice and security, into the long-term future.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.