Looking to see,listening to hear,learning to understand: centring Indigenous relationality to pursue a more-than-disciplinary academy

Abstract

Indigenous scholars argue that the reciprocal relationality of life should be taken more seriously in scholarship responding to environmental crisis; however, much of orthodox academia analyses the environment as a separate category through the physical and social science disciplines. This article shows how human exceptionalism, human centrism, racial discrimination, and Euro-American centric privilege interweave in academic institutions and practices, often invisibly and thus insidiously, to dismiss Indigenous scholarship and lived experiences. We explore how to meaningfully address these problematics, presenting examples from our academic practices to overturn colonial and imperial privilege. We present a more-than-disciplinary approach to undiscipline nature, knowledge, and peoples. We argue that this paradigm shift is best led by Indigenous leaders in relationality, whose expert knowledge inheritance already holds nature with society. We present an Indigenous, pedological approach, to help destabilise orthodox academic disciplinary approaches and organisational structures through foregrounding Indigenous learning and knowledge systems.

Introduction

Indigenous peoples relationality, which encompasses what the academy calls nature or the environment, challenges the academy, which in turn makes itself a challenging place for Indigenous peoples’ expert knowledge to be taken seriously. These different challenges arise because the influential separate analytical category of the environment is at odds to the relationality practised by Indigenous peoples. In this article, we focus on how this conceptualisation of the environment, as separate in both analytical and material form, sustains disciplinary boundaries and we respond by recommending pathways towards a more-than-disciplinary academy. Our intention is to build the academy’s capacity to overturn discrimination towards Indigenous peoples’ expert knowledge and address the constraints of disciplinary binds in responding to environmental crises. We use the term more-than-disciplinary to connect with the more-than-human environmental humanities scholarship that is also concerned with how academic knowledge traditions have hyper-separated environment and society, or nature and culture, for analysis and understanding (Plumwood, 2002; Rose, 2004). But we go further to argue that Indigenous leadership about relationality is needed to lead responses to environmental crises by providing guidance beyond the traditional disciplinarily thinking and returning nature and society to each other. Such work involves navigating Indigenous peoples’ presence and authority and the expansionist knowledge and power logics of colonialism and imperialism that seeks to supplant it (Nakata, 2014; Todd, 2016).

Significantly, the hyper-separation of nature and society has co-evolved with the orthodox disciplinary arrangements of the social and physical sciences and is now rusted on in the kinds of expert evidence expected to be authoritative about the environment and environmental crises (Rigg & Mason, 2018; Robin, 2018). For example, anthropogenic climate change research is dominated by the physical sciences, which claim to have the resources and authority to define the problem and our responses to it, despite ethics and values being embedded through everything to do with climate change (Overland & Sovacool, 2020). With the physical sciences having the scientific facts about nature, the social sciences and humanities only have words as evidence, and the creative arts barely rating a mention (Robin, 2018; L.T. Smith et al., 2016). Addressing such skewed disciplinary arrangements has been a priority for many scholars, leading to the growth of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research fields to grapple with challenges across both society and nature (Darbellay, 2015; MacLeod & Nagatsu, 2018). However, with important exceptions, such as Bawaka Country et al. (2013, 2015), this literature, and the academy more generally, is unaware of the consequential reach of Indigenous scholarship and practice in developing a more-than-disciplinary response to environmental crises.

It is time the academy became aware, and respectful, of the consequential nature of Indigenous knowledge and scholarship. Indeed, it is intellectually untenable to ignore the issues of hyper-separated thinking when more ethical approaches are needed to establish more respectful relations with both nature and Indigenous peoples. That is, it would behove the academy to cease discriminatory knowledge practices that discipline both nature and Indigenous peoples, while also disciplining knowledge.

Throughout this article, the importance of matching analytical work with material action is emphasised, including the critical role of understanding one’s positionality (Hankins & Yarbrough, 2009; Muhammad et al., 2015). As a critical first step, we share our positionality, before sharing our experiences with the 2019–20 catastrophic bushfires in Australia. Events which challenged and changed out positionality both individually and collectively. We document why Indigenous scholars are seeking to re-work the academy and anticipate what a more-than-disciplinary academy might be. Finally, we set out how the academy needs to be, as practised in wiradyuri culture: mambuwarra ngaa-minya-gu (looking to see) and wudhagarbinya wudha-dhuray-gu (listening to hear) Indigenous peoples’ pedagogy and epistemology, on its own terms, allowing winhangarra gulbali-gu (learning to understand). We conclude offering some examples of our own work and that of colleagues aligning with a more-than-disciplinary agenda.

Our use of an Indigenous, specifically wiradyuri, pedological approach, and its language, is deliberate. It helps destabilise conventional academic disciplinary approaches and organisational structures through foregrounding Indigenous learning and knowledge systems. Another example of an Indigenous pedological approach from close to where we live, on Ngunawal (a First Nation, and peoples, of the Australian Capital Territory, and the surrounding New South Wales, Australia) Country is 8 ways learning (Yunkaporta, 2012).

Context

The separate analytical and material category of the environment is critiqued by Indigenous scholars who understand all lives as lived in relation with soils, waters, sky, landscape features, and more (Latulippe & Klenk, 2020). The value of the separate categorisation and its disconnection is strikingly confounded by the multiscale reach of environmental crises. The environment is everywhere, as it always has been; all lives live in relation with nature since time immemorial (Bawaka Country et al., 2015). In Australia, country is used to signify this relationality. Country is an Aboriginal English word with layers of meaning, from sovereign territory to the complex web of relationships between human and more-than-human entities in that place or space. Country includes, but is not limited to, water, land, the stars, moon and sun, plants and animals, ancestors and spirits. In an act of Indigenous autonomy, this article uses lower case c; however, upper-case C is also common. In country, we live within lively interdependent worlds where all beings have culture, values, and the capacity to know and act (Tynan, 2021). This is not just an understanding of the world but an ethics for living. In country, Indigenous expert knowledge is generated through institutions, methodologies, and societies which have evidentiary standards (L. T. Smith et al., 2016). While it is recognised that Indigenous customs, laws, and knowledges are always centred on a specific place, this global plurality encompasses a central tenant, relationality. Relationality can be regarded as “the maintenance of relationships within and between human beings and the natural world built on principles of reciprocity, non-exploitation and respectful coexistence” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 12). These relationships are ethical responsibilities for humans to meet as kin to other species, beings, and forms of life (Hoskins et al., 2011). For example, all humans consume materials from their surrounding environs; however, Indigenous peoples’ relationality situates this consumption within a reciprocity that works against extractive relationships and towards facilitating all lives (Tynan, 2021). As such, reciprocity encourages relational accountability. In contrast, the environment as a separate category severs this intimate relationality, actively reducing it to a category servicing human sustenance and activities, casting it as the background of human sucesses.

Undeniably, planetary collapse demands a different approach, and we argue here to take reflexivity further in understanding the orthodox academic disciplines. The challenge at hand is the oppositional hyper-separation of the environment and society—what is natural is not social, and what is social is not natural. The problem is not so much the environment and society categories, but that they are so different as to be hyper-incommensurate (Plumwood, 2002). From this, we get the idea of human exceptionalism, which creates an environment that is lacking human attributes of mind, rationality, and spirit or the outward expression of these in language and communication (Plumwood, 2002). Thus, media headlines follow when a bird uses a tool—for example, a drumstick-making drumming Palm Cockatoo (Williams, 2021), or the collective teaching and learning skills of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos to open rubbish bins (Conroy & Swanston, 2021; Jones, 2019; B. Smith, 2022). Hyper-separation also facilitates and reinforces human centralism, which allows for extractivist approaches to a nature recast as natural resources for human consumption (Deloria, 2001; Scott, 1998). Similarly, consider the ecosystem services construct that recasts natural processes that persist regardless of human existence into something that nature does for humans and that can be commodified (Bekessy et al., 2018). Scholarly notions about untouched wilderness and intact ecologies also rely on a hyper-separated environment that has scoped out society (Fletcher et al., 2021).

We prioritise these conceptual matters because they are always material. Indigenous peoples have been and are living through the environmental destruction of expansionist colonial imperialism and its attendant logics of perpetual economic growth and extractionist relations (Coulthard, 2014; TallBear, 2019; Whyte, 2018). Extractive approaches to country—including soils, waters, trees and minerals, animals and more—have had cataclysmic consequences for Indigenous peoples’ laws, ancestral teachings, economies, lifestyles, mental and physical health, and hearth. At the same time, Eurocentric logics of White superiority depict Indigenous peoples as not modern, whose demise is an inevitable part of progress, or they are primitives collapsed into an unchanging nature (Pascoe, 2014). These layered violences of imperialism and colonialism continue to reverberate through whose knowledge is judged authoritative in the academy and whose research priorities are considered normal and appropriate (Nakata, 2014; TallBear, 2019). To foster paradigmatic change, we need to interrogate how these violences persist.

It is difficult for Indigenous leadership on environmental issues to connect consequentially with the hyper-separated academy and its disciplinary arrangements because Indigenous expert knowledge is routinely dismissed as antiquated noble savage tropes, or patronised as storytelling (Bodkin-Andrews et al., 2016; Rose, 2004). We do not see Indigenous expert knowledge in the scholarship seeking to address disciplinary boundaries (Darbellay, 2015; MacLeod & Nagatsu, 2018). When such knowledge is found useful, it is usually in alignment with the disciplines and extracted from its connected relational responsibilities, “become[ing] more fragmented and specialised as scientists and humanitarians pick at the bits and pieces that fit with their interests and disciplines” (Nakata, 2014, p. 184). From an Indigenous standpoint, these academic encounters are part of the expansionist knowledge and power logics of colonialism and imperialism. This is despite, or perhaps because of, Indigenous peoples’ relational logics also being political-legal rights and responsibilities—matters of territory, social organisation, sovereignty, and self-determination, exercised through judicial codes and diplomatic practices.

Writing from Australia, our experience is that the hyper-separated thinking behind the codes separating the disciplines is rarely seen and remains largely intellectually unchallenged. Influential cohorts of academia are deeply invested in analysing humans and the environment separately. The physical sciences study a nature that is a domain in itself and as authorised through the iconic scientific method that seeks to exclude subjective viewpoints, for example, values, politics, and culture, from its method (Moon & Pérez-Hämmerle, 2022; B. H. Smith, 2016). With exclusive access to this method, the physical sciences claim to be the authority in really knowing nature (Robin, 2018). The corollary is the social sciences and humanities focus on human perspectives and issues, such as in the pursuit of liberalism, without nature being a co-participant with its own voice and ethical responsibilities (Hoskins et al., 2011). With interdisciplinary approaches, nature and society are brought together as discrete categories, without interrogating their form. These hyper-separated codes are iteratively sustained through disciplinary reporting systems, the self-interest of the academic promotions system and the perception that disciplines are competing for favour within a research context.

We find that Indigenous scholars are offered the chance to progress in the academy through curricula and disciplines centred on separating nature and society. By being siloed in faculties, predominately the humanities, even Indigenous Studies units and majors can constrain Indigenous peoples from applying the more-than-disciplinary logics of Indigenous knowledge systems. Many non-Indigenous scholars have missed what these constraints represent: the offerings of the leftovers of colonialism and imperialism.

In response, we call for Indigenous peoples’ relationality scholarship and practice to be respected and made space for in the mainstream of academic practice and broader culture, including by teaching these analytical and operational skills across campus. This is not inclusion which requires fitting within academic orthodoxy, but indigenisation which then leads to the decolonial work necessary to support it (Hoskins & Jones, 2022). As racial discrimination becomes less acceptable in the academy, we ask all scholars—if you are profiting from unjust colonial expansionist and extractionist systems designed to continuously work against Indigenous peoples and nature, what will you do to reject what is despicable and contribute to transforming intellectual inquiry to something more respectful? We are particularly critical of those who profit from an inherently flawed system as they advocate for superficial change in support of Indigenous peoples. Such obfuscation generates burnout for Indigenous scholars seeking to change the academy (C. Smith et al., 2023).

Positionality

In the work towards more-than-disciplinary approaches, it is critical to understand oneself as part of the problem and the solution. This is a self-reflexive practice, which some people formalise through positionality statements. These statements are used to articulate a researcher’s position in relation to their disciplinary practice(s) and research, so as to expose areas of bias, conscious and unconscious, or ignorance, so that the researcher’s relationship to the area can be more readily understood (Hankins & Yarbrough, 2009; Muhammad et al., 2015). Positionality statements are important because all academics bring their own worldviews, networks, resources, and bias to the creation of expert evidence, which includes their institutional context. They are critical to counter arguments about research independence and objectivity to deny colonial and imperial privilege and undermine Indigenous expert knowledge and authority (Hemming et al., 2010). While becoming common in the humanities, positionality statements are less common in the physical sciences.

We write here as close colleagues with overlapping and distinct roles and share how our thoughts and expertise predominately, although not exclusively, reflect the Australian context. We share our situated viewpoints, expertise, and accountabilities. We treat positionality statements as a living document, which is regularly reviewed as part of iterative learning. In the next section, we then describe how our grief, passion and purpose has been motivated by catastrophic bushfires. As an extraordinary lived experience of environmental crises, it informs our positionality, expertise, and motivation for change.

kate, a wiradyuri yinaa (woman), who has never lived on wiradyuri country, courtesy of colonisation, has always felt a strong connection to water, as living entity with its own needs, relationships, and ideas about the world. Respecting interspecies relationships are one of her top three life priorities, sitting at odds with the colonial education system in which she is fluent, and fitting perfectly with wiradyuri ontological understands of country. Her research work is deeply informed by a seminal childhood experience with storm water. As a latecomer to academia, kate encourages us to work beyond the confines of the academy, to work beyond entrenched intellectual hierarchies, patrolled academic territories and exclusionary standards of evidence.

Jess is a White non-Indigenous scholar with Scottish ancestors who flexed imperial and colonial privilege to move here in the 19th and 20th centuries, and who has been taught by Indigenous friends, colleagues, and collaborators for decades. In the 1980s school yard, she was frustrated by social and environmental justice debates having no common language. With social justice motivations but interested in environmental issues, she found no satisfying remedy in her social and physical science geography undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Then, in her doctorate, Jess learnt from Aboriginal mentors that there are no human rights—Indigenous or otherwise—when life on earth is destroyed. With additional assistance from the nascent environmental humanities, Jess learnt to re-thread her knowledge inheritance about nature and society as both together, instead of an either-or relationship. Jess is in this for the long haul, and intends her work to be a decolonial practice.

For Kim this is about changing the notion of what is university music. Kim is of Iraqi and Indian heritage, a Jew who strives for peace with Islam, a man who grew up with what he thought was one of the oldest musical traditions in the world, which of the Baghdadi Jews, only to realise that there are many older traditions all around him. Kim’s assumptions were unravelled through decades of collaboration with Indigenous musicians. As the Head of the Australian National University (ANU) School of Music, Kim is working with this role to profoundly reimagine its First Nations engagement, including with Indigenous led recording and music making spaces, so as to be of service with no strings attached. This work is directed by Dr Chris Sainsbury, from Dharug (a First Nation, and peoples, of Sydney and surroundings, New South Wales, Australia) country, composer, and the Music School’s Indigenous convenor. Kim argues that social change needs spiritual awareness to have any chance of making a lasting transformation and that the arts are pivotal to this.

Co-constituted lives and disciplinary divides

The urgency of transforming academia is amplified by the growth of catastrophic fires whose material presence is now felt far beyond the horrors of incinerated landscapes. In 2023, Canadian wildfires were experienced as smoke choking haze in New York, following on from Australia’s 2019–20 bushfires that brought smoke choking haze to Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. The smoke plumes of coastal and mountain forest fires were blown deep into the eyes, noses, and lungs of the inhabitants of global metropolitan centres (harriden et al., 2020). The so-called separate nature was inhaled and lodged deep into human bodies.

In the wake of the 2019–20 smoky summer, kate wrote about how climate change grief was compounded by grief for the loss of her dog, which was also delegitimized by the non-Indigenous lack of understanding of co-constituted lives (harriden et al., 2020). Paraphrased, she wrote:

The thick smoke suffocating Australia’s national capital was the most confronting, and physically limiting, consequence of climate change I have experienced, so far. As distressed as I was to spend summer evenings wearing face masks while sitting with neighbours on the veranda, part of my despair is for the consequences yet to come. And then, soon after, I was wracked with grief from the death of my dog. We had both adapted ourselves to the other, so that we could live a good life together. It did not matter that we had no obvious shared language. We trusted that the other would fulfil their part of the relationship bargain and respected the other enough to discharge our role diligently.

My understandings about these losses are also the logics of connection that I have been taught by wiradyuri ngurambang (wiradyuri country) and my elders. Through wiradyuri practices such as asking the tree before cutting a gulaman (wooden bowl; also known as a coolamon), totem relationships, recognizing rivers as living entities, and knowing that it is fishing season for a particular species because a certain plant is flowering, it seems evident that Indigenous peoples already function in a world replete with overlapping lives and life worlds. That all species need the others, in some way. That across the huge diversity of known species, communication and understanding is possible and that such communication and understanding is a critical part of different ways of knowing, being and doing.

As I have been experiencing the grief and despair of the smoke and the loss of my friend, I see an obvious link between the unwillingness of academia to accept the reality and importance of interspecies relationships, and the utilitarian approaches to the environment and environmental issues. Both my climate grief and my grief for my dog were experienced by me as transgressing societal norms. They did not fit with the mainstay of non-Indigenous human-centred grief approaches, as experiences with my therapist showed. It seems to me that if interspecies relationships are socially, even philosophically, disregarded or disapproved of by mainstream societal knowledge structures, then we cannot, richly, meaningfully understand what we are all losing with environmental destruction, and thus we cannot articulate and motivate ourselves to action.

Kim also had a visceral response to the bushfires:

I sat with the smoke haze in Sydney, hosting two friends who were fire refugees listening to radio broadcasts and transcribing the rhythms of the fire. I set them to piano music to capture my sense of the earth as a live being, an entity of Gaia [mother earth] in the greatest pain. Musicians and composers have always held important roles to bear witness to the great tragedies and moments of the world for all. Music acknowledges feelings that transcend words, connecting with our feelings, the desires and wisdom of our souls. In doing so music goes beyond the discursive analytics of academic debates. Yet, a great piece of music can ground a process of deep engagement with ideas and critical discourse. These are not separate matters. Music could support kate’s—ostensibly transgressive—response to climate and interspecies grief, and express its importance. But music does not meet what is commonly thought of as academic evidence for action by governments and others, so musicians stand in support of Indigenous sisters and brothers. The music of First Peoples is needed more than ever in artistic leadership, to support the process of redressing deep and callous cultural discrimination.

In that same hot smoky summer, as a bushfire researcher, Jess mobilised with Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues to shift the narrow societal debate about Indigenous peoples’ landscape fire expertise, onto more consequential terms:

In the midst of it all we came together to write—to speak whilst society was listening. With Indigenous leadership, we wrote about the profound grief experienced by Indigenous people with the destruction of forests, because this is also the destruction of law, culture, knowledge and kin, and, further, is layered with the ongoing trauma of colonisation (Williamson et al., 2020). At the same time, we needed to simply show that Indigenous people are present in temperate “settled” Australia for urban populations who assumed Indigenous people lived in “remote” places. We did so with tables and maps of Indigenous residents and rights holders (Williamson et al., 2020). Seasoned journalists were astounded at our results. This was perhaps the first academic evidence published on Indigenous peoples’ experiences of disasters and disaster recovery in temperate Australia, despite most Indigenous people living here, as they always have. We were able to leverage our academic expertise to point out the insularity of bushfire research, policy and quasi-judicial inquiries—insular to Indigenous peoples’ life worlds and scholarship. Yet, this important national conversation was unexpectedly and firmly quashed by the policy response to the microscopic microbes of Covid-19. Themselves another instance of multi-species lives and human suffering, in comparison to the climate crisis I was keenly dismayed by the dramatic diversion of societal attention.

The inadequate recognition of Indigenous peoples and their relationality leadership during this catastrophic event is found reverberating through history from the attitudes brought by the first British explorers in Australia. As Yuin and Bunurong scholar Bruce Pascoe (2014), of the Yuin and Bunurong people in what is now called south-east Australia, writes, “It is clear from their journals that few were here to marvel at a new civilisation; they were here to replace it. Most were simply describing a landscape from which settlers could profit” (p. 13). Then and now, this attitude is wilful ignorance at best. A wilfulness that began with failing to recognise agricultural systems built, harvested, and shared across the continent in relation with country and continues today. To be explicit, the civilisation implanted here through invasion and displacement is not an appropriate place from which to build a compromise through nuanced discussion. There are abhorrent racist attitudes that need to be sought out and overturned first. For example, and disturbingly, the urgency of environmental crises is used to argue against reflecting on how we got here, including the legitimacy of continuing to inscribe imperial and colonial violence and deny Indigenous peoples’ presence and authority (Whyte, 2018). We ask our academic colleagues, why has the mainstream Academy been asleep at the wheel for so long? If climate change is the wakeup call of the times, what will we have to drop personally, institutionally, culturally to build meaning, dialogue, and change with Indigenous leadership about living in relation?

Why the academy?

The academy is both a generator of violence and discrimination and an influential institution for change with its roles in research, education, and public debate. Despite the academy’s contribution to legitimising and facilitating imperialism and colonialism, Indigenous scholars have prioritised understanding and influencing academic structures and processes precisely because they are so influential. To reiterate, the priority is to make space for Indigenous leadership rather than being disciplined by inclusion, so that the reference point for the standards and methods of Indigenous expert knowledge is Indigenous expert knowledge (Hoskins & Jones, 2022).

Torres Strait Islander Professor Martin Nakata (2014) writes about this in Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines. Nakata (2014) documents how the 1890s Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands sought to create “objective” and “accurate” (p. 26) accounts of his people, while also shaping the form of the then infant social science disciplines, whose largely invisible, and thus “all the more insidious” (p. 28) legacy today is evident in how “we have all come to view Islanders and their problems” (p. 11). Nakata interrogates the positioning of Indigenous people as savages by the Cambridge scholars, as necessary to positioning themselves and their scholarship as civilised. In response, Nakata (2014) affirms Islander expertise: “We are not content with being subjected as ‘Other’ to everybody else. We reference ourselves to one entire universe not just to western imperialist projects” (p. 162).

Nakata (2014) is also arguing for the importance of influencing the academy: “We need to understand ‘thinking systems,’ how they position us—materially, discursively and subjectively—and work to understand our position in ways that will allow us to forge political effectiveness in the interests of future generations of Islanders” (pp. 142–143).

In the academy, it is the disciplines where new scholars commonly come to learn the orthodoxy of disciplinary forms, methods, and epistemologies, before being authorised to learn and research interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary studies (Darbellay, 2015). The disciplines reflect the fragmentation of academic expertise as it has become more and more specialised, and then consolidated through qualifications, training, and professional societies (Repko et al., 2020). This includes the cheques and balances that arise from its diverse communities of practice, such as peer-review and professional societies, which establish priorities and standards concerning epistemology and rigour; the organisation and convening of educational programmes to certify qualifications in society; and, the value of different research topics and methods. Through this, the academy determines what counts as academic expertise and what Indigenous expertise needs to do to meet these standards.

Yet, Indigenous peoples’ knowledge is transmitted in ways largely unfamiliar, and therefore usually unacceptable, to the orthodox academy, including through art, music, storytelling, and lines in the sand. This includes taking seriously the knowledge held in the land, water, sea, and sky and by ancestral creators (Reo et al., 2017). Indigenous scholars have documented how it is easier to “other” this Indigenous knowledge in the academy as a cultural case study, rather than take seriously what is being said about academic practice (L. T. Smith et al., 2016; Todd, 2016; Yunkaporta, 2019). Consider also the emphasis on research as service in Indigenous scholarly practice, compared to the focus on quality assurance through international peer review in the academy (L. T. Smith et al., 2016; C. Smith et al., 2023).

Power asymmetries, epistemological discrimination, cultural differences, ontological supremacy (Hird et al., 2023), and the lack of commonality between Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and academic traditions, challenge the relationship between Indigenous people and the academy. Problematically, Indigenous peoples’ knowledge is often defined as mysterious and closed to scrutiny, and, at other times, inauthentic and or with a used-by date (L. T. Smith et al., 2016). This is despite this expertise, as with any expertise, having standards of adjudication and qualification, as generated through institutions, methodologies, and societies (L. T. Smith et al., 2016; Tynan, 2021). Māori (the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith et al. (2016) ask: where does this leave Indigenous knowledge holders, including Elders, who cannot have their expertise certified within academia, or the hierarchies of knowledge in society more generally? To us, the answer is simple: it leaves the people with the most to offer this ailing planet on the side lines of the great debates of our time.

The creative arts, including music, offer a different pathway because their evidence is so different to peer-review journal articles, which generates an uneasy alliance with the academy (Beudel, 2022); yet these too must first come to terms with their colonial and imperial legacies of systemic racism. While music is an important area for Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration, it is almost impossible to undertake music in a university without reading and writing music, locking out the practices of many Indigenous musicians. Musicology, the part of university music making that the Academy best understands, is intimately linked with sociology, anthropology, and the processes of otherness confronted by Said and Barenboim in West Eastern Divan Orchestra (Said & Barenboim, 2024). Music too often continues to inscribe notions of the noble savage, looking to place Indigenous music in a time capsule, depriving it of the chance to grow and respond to the world as it is, as it has always done. Whereas Western art and music is allowed to respond how it wishes, to the world as it is. The music schools will have to also come to terms with their long-standing profiteering from Indigenous musical practices in the search for an Australian sound (Sainsbury, 2019). We would say that this reflects the disconnection that non-Indigenous peoples feel towards the Indigenous peoples they displace (Somers, 2017). In the cases where contemporary Indigenous music is fostered, there is too often a sense of subtle paternalism, this is the music that is fostered to show that we do the right thing, while the daily business of training music makers in the orthodoxies of classical and jazz music continue unabated. We ask what music school would consider its Indigenous music programmes more pivotal than its orchestra or its pop music programme, and if we follow the money, how much of the music budget of a conservatory or arts organisation is spent on Indigenous led and made music? The solution is simple and radical, to move towards parity in music representation in music schools. A similar move across campus would introduce a new intellectual era for the disciplines at Australian universities.

The boundary work of the physical and social sciences is prioritised in this article because it is so fundamental in determining whose evidence matters in response to the climate crisis. Much attention is with debates between the so-called soft and hard sciences (B. H. Smith, 2016), and how this prestige differential skews the evidentiary sets available to society and decision-makers (Weir et al., 2022). In this debate, we have the observational knowledge about what is required to do all the heavy lifting—that is, the scientific facts; without sufficient ethical expertise and evidence about what will be—what do humans want to do in response to environmental crisis, why, and how. Alongside, the creative arts can tell the story, to elevate interpretation and bring us together, as the COVID-19 shutdowns taught us how people found solace, meaning and connection through art and music. However, we need to foreground how all the other co-inhabitants positioned, feeling and acting as part of ethical webs of relational responsibility. And for the academy to take such lives seriously, we need to re-thread the disciplines to address human exceptionalism and centrism.

With nature-society together as the starting point, the environment in its observational and ethical form can be grappled with simultaneously, as the relational approach centres on which relationships are important and why (harriden, 2023; Weir, 2023). This is a deep transdisciplinary that can provide the framing for all academic practice. Within these relational logics, many existing disciplinary practices can be recalibrated to foreground these logics, without foregoing their disciplinary strengths. Fundamentally, instead of adding nature and society together as two separate forms, as we are seeing in interdisciplinary work, it is a reworking of the forms to return humanity to nature, and nature to its cultural and ethical domains (Plumwood, 2002). Our call to be led by Indigenous voices goes further still, to centre being with and in country, driving meaningful action motivated by the inherent morality of authentic relationships with country.

Indigenous scholars identify that relational accountability will be the catalyst for rethinking many assumptions in academic methods, epistemology, and more. This is building into the academy Indigenous peoples’ “legitimate modes of coexistence based in reciprocity, redistribution, and authority as a service” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 106). This approach resituates the purpose of academic scholarship within outcomes that are ethical, useful, hopeful, and have cultural integrity for Indigenous peoples (L. T. Smith et al., 2016).

Applying such logics would mean that for academics, there is potentially no home discipline to take refuge in from this agenda. Disciplinary scholarship is still valuable, but can now be explicitly understood as being conducted with the purpose of more just relations with nature and Indigenous peoples. It becomes re-positioned within Indigenous peoples’ relationality. Through iterative learning, disciplinary practitioners would build expertise in identifying and addressing disciplinary boundaries that work against this purpose. For example, work focused on quantifying a dimension of the environment, such as fire behaviour, can do so with reference to responsibilities with a relational nature, rather than trying to perpetuate the environment as a separate domain. And, we anticipate, will do so by embracing the researcher’s own multiple ethical connections with the world through their lived experience.

Backing Indigenous leadership and compelling decolonial work

Over the last few decades, Indigenous peoples’ resurgence has been achieved through hard work to re-group and centre Indigenous practice in and among territories co-located with colonial authorities, and alongside societal shifts to address racial discrimination (Coulthard, 2014; Nakata, 2014). Indigenous academics are thriving despite the extractive academy (Hoskins & Jones, 2022). Concomitantly, there has been exponential growth in the number of academic publications about Indigenous knowledge since the early 2000s (L. T. Smith et al., 2016). Indigenous expertise is investigating further into mainstream culture, breaking through entrenched racism as more people question the extractive economy and a world of hyper-separated lives. Here, we draw on wiradyuri principles and language to contribute to an academic practice that is shifting in Australia, but needs to be taken further and secured.

mambuwarra ngaa-minya-gu (looking to see): where is the academy?

By mambuwarra ngaa-minya-gu, the academy will find itself on Indigenous land. The academy can look to its campus to build understanding of Indigenous peoples’ situated knowing-being-doing logics with country. These include co-design with Indigenous peoples, multispecies, mutual relationships, totemic and interspecies relationships, place-based work, intergenerational non-hierarchical relationships, and publication as dance, art, and music. In doing so, the academy can also understand that Indigenous peoples have research frameworks, practices, institutions, and specialties: they have their own academies. Their libraries are based in the land, waters, and sky and shared on a continental scale. Then, perhaps, the university can see country, because everything begins with country. Being a literal part of country is a core belief of many Indigenous peoples, sometimes expressed as a sense of oneness and deep interconnectedness between people and place. By acknowledging that you are part of, a product of, country makes you much less willing to harm country, because it is you that is hurt. Critically, it is not only Indigenous peoples who are living within country, but all life.

wudhagarbinya wudha-dhuray-gu (listening to hear): what the academy needs to know

The academy needs to wudhagarbinya wudha-dhuray-gu Indigenous pedagogy and epistemology on their own terms. The best way to understand another way of thinking is to learn and use that language in which those thoughts are expressed. This level of understanding offers a path to unearthing and amplifying the evidence required to prompt changes that meaningfully support diverse ways of knowing, human and other-than-human. It is a focus on the form and structure of how we know, be and do as academics, not just topics and case studies, including by bringing Indigenous pedagogy to teaching practice. The conventional academic disciplinary structure will be challenged by more-than-disciplinary ways of thinking and doing that see the world as connected and relational, and the ethical responsibilities that arise out of this.

winhangarra gulbali-gu (learning to understand): shifting camp with the academy

winhangarra gulbali-gu is about shifting together to employ materially different concepts and practices in academic endeavours, institutionally and individually (A. S. Smith et al., 2020). This is about fostering and extending networks of like-minded scholars across Indigenous and non-Indigenous difference, to effect change and be safe. It is a collaborative approach that can disrupt the academic orthodoxy about knowledge production and evidence status; and, instead, establish hierarchies that foreground relational accountability, including respect for Indigenous peoples.

Many of the ideas presented in this article are currently not yet accepted in academia. Those working in this area are often isolated in their workplaces. Networks of diverse individuals and academics working in flexible solidarity, intellectually and materially, are needed to provide intellectual, practical and moral support; and, amplify change across practices and platforms. Fundamentally, this requires understanding that to conduct research and teach, is to be in ethical relations of accountability and responsibility, which require the transfer power and resources to address systemic discrimination. This can be very personal. It includes addressing the practice of academics appointing their successors according to the knowledge hierarchies that marginalise Indigenous scholars (Battiste, 2018).

Not only is addressing such matters a confronting activity to undertake in our work places, there are some colleagues not inclined to change under any circumstances (McLean et al., 2019). However, we are seeing these shifts occurring through the combination of individual and institutional self-reflection and deliberative action. We highlight a few here that we and or our colleagues have been involved in:

• The compulsory completion of an Indigenous Australian Studies unit for all undergraduates, as part of the curriculum at Charles Sturt University (CSU, 2020) and Western Sydney University.

• The co-convening of academic qualifications with First Peoples, as the wiradyuri nation and CSU have done with the Graduate Diploma in Wiradjuri Language, Culture, and Heritage, established in 2014. Such partnerships can also be formed for individual subjects.

• The Indigenous Creative Arts Honours programme at the ANU, which involves making art and responding to it through an oral exegesis, facilitates a way for Indigenous scholars to work within the system as they change it.

• The formation of Yarning Circles on ANU, Macquarie and Monash University campuses, among many others unknown to us, which centre Indigenous readings and peer support for students and staff engaged in decolonial practice. These provide intellectual, temporal, and physical space to critically explore what decolonising the academy might look like; identify and learn the research practices and priorities of Indigenous people; and create a community of like-minded scholars.

At the ANU music school, we have been seeking to change the academy from the people who work here, to the way we work (Fromhyr, 2022; Newsome, 2022). At the heart of this approach is a recalibration of relations with First Nations’ Peoples and communities through a fundamental reorganisation of relations of power and influence within the institution based in principles of Indigenous self-determination and social justice. This aims to provide a counteractive strategy to historic inequities by opening up spaces for the expression of Indigenous rights, agency, and autonomy within and associated with the work of the institution. (Newsome, 2022).

We share here how Yuwaalaraay (a First Nation, and peoples, north-western New South Wales, Australia) song woman Nardi Simpson, from the Yuwaalaraay and Filipino-Aboriginal musician Rhyan Clapham have reclaimed an historically valuable, in settler-state terms, Henrion piano. Now housed at ANU, this piano was built around 1770, the same year that the British Empire claimed this continent (Ho, 2020). Pianos can be regarded as an artefact of cultural supremacy (Davie, 2021). Mass produced by Europeans, for Europeans, in the 18th century pianos were shipped throughout European colonies. Consequently, the piano contributed to making European music pre-eminent. Pianos provided access to Western harmony and counterpoint, which is the notion that music can have chords which build chord progressions, creating ostensibly richer and more complete that the music of Indigenous peoples. This judgement erroneously presumes Indigenous music to have a lesser harmonic and chordal content than European music, mirroring the physical sciences assumptions of superiority, and the universality of its evidence and standards. Thus, European musicology, reflecting the assumptions of the physical sciences outlined in the context, claims to holds the methodological and intellectual authority in knowing music.

The piano and its compositional techniques are an example of the gunpowder of music’s cultural warfare of imperialism, which remains pre-eminent in music schools globally. In Australian music Schools, for example, there is no programme to offer Indigenous people free tuition on their traditional instruments or vocal styles, despite subsidised one-to-one tuition on Western instruments being offered, including piano. For Nardi Simpson, she found the Henrion piano a

precursor to the erasure and destruction of the oldest compositions in the world. . . . I thought a lot about whether I could create a piece of music for this particular instrument that was useful, significant, interesting and accessible to my homelands. In the end I decided to take up the challenge and try and create this significance. (Ho, 2020, p. 2)

Rapper Rhyan Clapham recorded the story of White colonisation with Scott Davie, as a musical response to the piano’s imperial presence (Davie, 2021, 2022). According to Davie, Rhyan created a new type of music making that he describes as Drapping, which combines rapping and drumming. Both these responses create new evidence about what it means to be on this continent and to have authority, expanding the role and value of non-textual musical evidence. The creative works are the evidence, not the academic and intellectual, or non-artistic, aspects of music. These, and similar works, represent cracks, cracks needing widening to overturn epistemological discrimination. Overturning such discrimination allows learning and generating evidence about connecting with country to become central to academic scholarship, in all disciplines, supporting a more-than-disciplinary academy in Australia, and other settler-states.

Conclusion

More-than-disciplinary approaches that build on Indigenous peoples’ understandings are difficult given the status quo of academic practice, and the institutional and individual shifts it entails. However, as we have shown, more ethical pathways are already under construction. There is no longer any excuse for the academy to not be mambuwarra ngaa-minya-gu, wudhagarbinya wudha-dhuray-gu and winhangarra gulbali-gu. Fundamentally, we argue that if we are benefitting from injustice, we are morally compelled to do something about it. Critically, the time to combat environmental crises is rapidly diminishing. Indigenous leaderships about relationality can help the academy to engage better. It is time for the academy to adopt new, yet well established, intellectual approaches, complimented with material support for Indigenous leadership.