Disrupting Colonial Environmental Research and Teaching,Yarn by Yarn

The Circle—a new research and learning institutional presence

The Circle was established as a place for Indigenous participants to be comfortable in some aspect of the physical and intellectual milieu of the academy. As it has gone on, the Circle has created opportunities for Indigenous participants to exercise their priorities and values as Indigenous people. For example, a custodian Circle has been established within the Circle, comprised of participants who identify as Indigenous, whether they are Indigenous to Australia or another continent. The custodian Circle ensures Circle outputs and activities reflect Indigenous ways. For example, reviewing and approving guidelines for acknowledging country, an Indigenous diplomatic practice, which is now a standard protocol for public events. Similarly, the Circle developed a working on Country protocol, which provides thorough practices for environmental research, and this was read and approved by the custodian Circle before circulation.

The Circle was also established to build non-Indigenous capacity. Before Circle participation, non-Indigenous scholars particularly had rarely considered how their work could benefit from taking Indigenous intellectual or research approaches seriously. Participating in the Circle has given researchers ideas and information to consider how they could decolonize their research and teaching practices in a nonjudgemental, approachable space. These ideas can be as simple as properly seeking permission from the relevant Indigenous people to conduct research, or extending to understanding more complex ideas such as Country, what it means to work on Country or how to work with Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems.

Yarning as a method of attending to Indigenous experiences and each other

The monthly yarn is a periodic walang bringing us together. Yarns are predominately based around Indigenous-led research. A long established Indigenous pedagogy, yarning is a method of learning, sharing, decision-making, and conflict resolution.^13,14 Although some aspects of yarning may appear similar to the settler-state academic traditions of lecturing, tutoring, laboratory work, or workshops, it is a pedological approach demanding an ethics of reciprocal care rarely found in academic settings. The profound difference between these two knowledge generation and sharing traditions is yarning requires that key Indigenous practice of attending to Country and kin. ¹⁵ In this context, attending means “to listen, to feel and to act, to understand oneself differently, to care, to respond” in alignment with Country.¹² There are no expectations of academic excellence, or even direct contribution at the yarns. Indeed, simply attending to listening is encouraged and in keeping with Indigenous practice. ¹⁶

Through the yarns, Circle members have been supported to attend to Country. This practice means to keep refusing to slip into the assumption that our work is produced for a colonialist gaze and education. Through ethics of attending, we understand ourselves differently, while also supporting each other’s decolonization journey thoughtfully and with care. Circle members recognize such yarns, where the conversation is not for non-Indigenous peoples, need to be normal not novel, and seek to learn to listen deeply and respectfully so as to appropriately contribute. Indigenous and non-Indigenous members are learning together from their different positionality.

Changing together through deep reflexivity and positionality

The ability to effect change in Fenner, and ultimately the academy, individually and collectively, requires non-Indigenous researchers and educators to understand their positionality in an academia that has long systemically ignored Indigenous sovereignty. Being reflexive about research, teaching values, practice, and yourself, can prompt important changes in your academic choices and conduct. Professional and private lives are inseparable.^17,18 Knowing your motivations, values, biases, and how they influence your research priorities and perspectives, frees you to conduct your work with integrity and clarity.

In environmental studies, it is long overdue to examine what it means to yindyamarra (honor and respect) Country and each other from our different standpoints. The tradition of suppressing subjectivity to study a separate environment has curtailed expertise in reflexivity and positionality in much of environmental studies. Academia disincentivizes the substantial commitment to learn anew by promising secure positions and power through entrenched specialization. ¹⁹ This work can be discomforting. It involves critically examining yourself and your research/teaching motives through ongoing self-reflexivity and learning. There can be fear of making mistakes, hesitancy about contributing to discrimination, and the backlash of “white fragility.” ²⁰ This is why yarning is so important. We do not always get it right with each other, but we know that when we make a bung suggestion or get ahead of ourselves, we are led by the ethics of Indigenous authority.

Reflexivity and positionality work do not happen systemically in the school; however, with small but significant walang we can change our environmental school, as collectively we make Fenner. In this, we need to not just know ourselves but know our school. Generative learning from our immediate research and teaching context sustains the yarns, providing material for clarification and analysis. In turn, this supports action informed by this knowledge. Through the yarns, we grow our skills and comfort with centering Indigenous sovereignty in academia together. As a collective, we use our influence to establish different standards in environmental studies.

Shifting editing and publishing norms

Publications are a central and centralizing regulation of who is considered an “expert” and what “expertise” is appropriate in the academy, and, thus, are an important platform for maintaining the subjugation of Indigenous knowledge.^21,22,23 For example, journal editorial standards for expert evidence creation are renown for jarring with Indigenous pedagogy, most notably the linear method-and-findings model of scientific and some social science ontology. The Circle too has its own regulatory standards. All Circle publications require a collective and collaborative writing process led by Indigenous authority and praxis—whether for a publication by one or more authors, or an edited collection.

We have created a publishing platform on our school website to share information about decolonizing environmental studies, while also modeling a non-traditional, Indigenous-led editorial process. The Circle publishes a monthly decoloyarns: short, public audience articles, crafted in a strongly collegiate and relational manner. Decoloyarns began as an Indigenous sovereign space in the Fenner School newsletter and website. Anyone in Fenner, and beyond to the larger Australian National University (ANU) bilabang, can propose a decoloyarn. Authors are taken through a deep-thinking process by the decoloyarns editorial circle to ensure they answer key criterion, including how their contribution reflects decolonial practices. The editorial circle crafts “top and tail” material that frames the contribution. The top generally highlights to readers the key theme of the contribution and links it with some relevant aspect of the colonial/decolonial experience. The tail usually offers the readers ways to follow up on the content, be it further reading or tangible actions. Every decoloyarn is at least either developed with Indigenous oversight or read over and approved by the appropriate Indigenous authority; bringing editors, authors, and decoloyarn participants into repetitively respectful relations in Indigenous sovereignty. This editorial process has only been possible through the trust and purpose we have developed through the yarning circles.

The Circle has also produced what is essentially a journal special edition, with contributions exploring what Circle participants have realized about their research through their involvement with the Circle. Authors were primarily non-Indigenous scholars articulating their “academic shortfalls” in relation to Country and Indigenous knowledge(s). To attend to this, all bar one of the peer reviewers were from the custodian Circle. Most contributions do not follow a traditional publication format for structural reasons that are logical to each specific piece and respecting Indigenous authority. Exemplifying this editorial approach was the decision that some contributions require publication with Indigenous peer-review comments and author responses in situ. We did not expect it would be easy to publish; neither did we expect it to be so difficult. We have been rejected by an Indigenous journal for having too many non-Indigenous voices, an environmental management journal on the basis they “recently” had an Indigenous issues themed publication, and by the ANU press for not fitting the standard format. These rejections have offered insights to understand the standardization imperative of publication platforms and their politics of positionality.

Observing, naming, and discussing the interpenetrative spaces between the Circle and the university is generative work for the Circle. It allows Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to form a positional analytic with which to speak about and strategize in relation to white settler-colonial discursive power, together. The Circle’s mixed publication experiences have similarly demonstrated to Circle members that decolonizing academic knowledge spaces is refractive, uneven, and often a matter of regrouping. For example, despite the striking popularity of decoloyarns evident in Fenner website traffic, a recent decoloyarn drafted to announce the release of the working on Country protocol remains unpublished, as the school wishes to negotiate provisions and caveats to the wording (pers. comm, 2023). This response does not recognize decoloyarns as a sovereign space, and instead positions the decoloyarns as subject to the school’s institutional authority. We are now developing—through a whole-Circle decision making process—an autonomous site to continue decoloyarning.

Creating space

The Circle is unlike any other university group the authors have experienced. Neither a reading group, working group, nor a professional network but a place to engage intellectually and strategically with contemporary academia with the presence of Indigenous sovereignty. For us, the Circle is akin to a group of trusted critical friends. Every member brings unique valued contributions for rich discussions from different viewpoints. Yarns run the gamut, from engaging and funny to challenging and moving. This space is the first ripple in the Fenner bilabang.

For Indigenous scholars, the Circle provides a space where they can unapologetically privilege their research and teaching practices and priorities, within a system that rarely values or incorporates Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing. For postgraduates, their research is challenging enough without this discrimination. The Circle also can, and does, give Indigenous scholars a sense of community, again contributing to protection from the vicissitudes of the academy. This is especially important when living and researching away from Country, friends, and family. One of the Indigenous co-authors has experienced very difficult, culturally unsafe moments throughout their PhD, rooted in situations where their Indigenous ways and those of academia clash, yet not understood as such by others. Knowing that there is a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike who have their back is powerful. As this scholar has so eloquently said: when I stand alone I am weak, but by being part of a community, I carry the strength of all. It is important to note here that Indigenous scholars and students also benefit from decolonizing their mind; however, it is not appropriate to discuss further in this article.

For non-Indigenous scholars who started their decolonizing journey with the Circle, they have found their expectations about the potential power and value of decolonial research reinforced here. This contrasts with the academic silences fostered by the aforementioned ontological supremacy ²⁴ . They have also experienced the academy positioning decolonial research as strange, possibly illegitimate—another reinforcement of the arguments made in the decolonial scholarship. One of the non-Indigenous co-authors shared that “Much of what I have learnt about whiteness, settler-colonialism, and working for Country, has been guided by Indigenous scholarship and supported by mob who stood by me outside the academy. The Circle made my learnings feel real and welcome in an otherwise alienating university experience.” “Mob” is a multifaceted Aboriginal English word describing a group of Indigenous people.

The Circle’s approach to combine Indigenous leadership with Indigenous practices and with all participants welcome has been the bedrock to carving a culturally safe place for Indigenous people to engage with non-Indigenous people about respectful research and learning practices. When someone joins the Circle, it signals their willingness to listen to Indigenous people and work to decolonize the academy. Given that non-Indigenous participants come with sincere intentions and cultural humility, they are less afraid to ask questions, “silly” or otherwise, and the Indigenous participants do not have to fear that the questions and comments are coming from a place of malice or neglect. This means the Circle is a culturally safe place for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to explore the decolonizing space together.

Safety and discomfort

Simply, the Circle is a place in the academy where Indigenous peoples are free to be their full selves, with the non-Indigenous participants and others outside the Circle discomforted and, indeed, encouraged to embrace discomfort. When interrogating research and learning approaches, the Circle neither excuses nor minimizes the discomfort caused to non-Indigenous researchers who have participated, willingly or not, in exploitative and unethical research practices. Over the years, we have seen how this discomfort is often a decisive moment for individuals—to embrace decolonizing their mind and journey or to see an insurmountable obstacle that encourages the researcher to not engage further.

As a general practice, it is critical that those guiding non-Indigenous researchers through discomfort, including correcting mistakes, are Indigenous, and, further, do so voluntarily. Indigenous members can engage as little or as much as they want and have full autonomy over when, where, and how they engage. The Circle is not an exploitative space for White researchers to demand Indigenous peoples show them how they are wrong and give fully formed solutions/corrections, as often expected in academic spaces. This approach fosters our growth, confidence, and understanding for all without exploiting Indigenous peoples in the process.

Research contextualized by the longevity of Indigenous peoples decolonial insistence means that non-Indigenous academics, specifically White settler-colonial scholars, understand that staying engaged after mistake-making is not charity work, nor is it service work or reparations. Staying is accessing the education that should be embedded in every university class. Staying engaged in the decolonial research agenda is to take seriously the fact that we all, as a collective of Aboriginal voices in the 1970’s asserted, have liberations tied up with each other. ²⁵

Connection and collaboration across difference

Many Circle members expressly include Indigenous ontology and/or research methods in their environmental research and teaching. Several Fenner undergraduate courses now have a positionality component introduced by Circle members, sometimes as an assessment item, with student feedback reporting the value of this activity. Similarly, many Circle participants include Indigenous perspectives in their teaching material. For undergraduates who have been exposed only to material produced within the “western” environmental science paradigm, this material introduces a new intellectual world. Positionality is also something many Circle participants deliberately include in their research practice, including publications. For postgraduates, bringing these methodologies into their doctoral research means introducing supervisors to their value and consequence.

The Circle has offered non-Indigenous people the power of learning good colluder or conspirator behaviors. In turn, this can lead to research and teaching collaborations, other shared activities, and enduring relationships. The connections also offer avenues for non-Indigenous researchers to leverage their privilege guided by Indigenous leadership. Many non-Indigenous members are now capable, and willing, to do some of the educational work that non-Indigenous peoples (and other colonized minds) require before engaging with Indigenous peoples in research and other professional capacities. Circle co-founders, particularly the Indigenous co-founders, are confident and comfortable with our non-Indigenous colluders and conspirators doing this work.

Having a cohort of non-Indigenous colleagues who can challenge and educate others in the school was one of the outcomes the co-founders had hoped for when establishing the Circle. This effectively increases the cultural and intellectual safety for Indigenous peoples beyond that articulated in the walang walang section, by actively tackling the issue of invisible labor and minority tax that Indigenous researchers carry. This increased capacity of the non-Indigenous cohort represents yulang after yulang as they influence students and move to other institutions.