Mining Giants, Indigenous Peoples and Art: Challenging Settler Colonialism in Northern Australia Through Story Painting
Environmental Impacts of Transnational Corporations in the Global South
ISBN: 978-1-78756-035-2, eISBN: 978-1-78756-034-5
Publication date: 13 December 2018
Abstract
The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe (2006, p. 388) writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all of the artists involved in producing the works discussed in this paper, including Jacky Green, Therese Ritchie, Nancy McDinny, and Stewart Hoosan, for their generosity in giving insights into their works. Kirrily Jordan would like to offer them particular thanks for allowing her to survey visitors to Open Cut. Both authors also thank the reviewers of this article for their very helpful comments and advice on an earlier draft.
Citation
Kerins, S. and Jordan, K. (2018), "Mining Giants, Indigenous Peoples and Art: Challenging Settler Colonialism in Northern Australia Through Story Painting", Environmental Impacts of Transnational Corporations in the Global South (Research in Political Economy, Vol. 33), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 35-71. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0161-723020180000033003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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