Davies, Jocelyn --- "Of Caribou and Kangaroos: Agreements about Wildlife" [1999] IndigLawB 47; (1999) 4(21) Indigenous Law Bulletin 27
Of Caribou and Kangaroos:
Agreements
about Wildlife
by Jocelyn Davies
Wildlife[1] use and management agreements have been a prominent feature of Canadian land (and sea) claims settlements over the past 25 years. In much of Canada, indigenous peoples continue to rely heavily on ‘country food’ (bush tucker) for all or part of their family nutrition, as well as for their individual and collective well-being, through maintenance of traditions and freedom ‘out on the land’. This situation is similar to some areas of Australia, particularly in the north. However, unlike Canada, wildlife has been virtually invisible in indigenous claims and native title negotiations in Australia. Here the focus has instead been on rights and custodial responsibilities for culturally significant places. Although wildlife is implicitly part of this, it has received little overt attention.
In most of Australia, indigenous peoples have virtually no involvement in the way wildlife is managed by governments. Nor is there any significant data for government wildlife managers to draw on to help them understand indigenous wildlife use, the way it impacts on wildlife populations, and the way that other uses of land and sea impact on it.[2] It is therefore hardly surprising that relationships between government and indigenous people over wildlife are often characterised by suspicion and mistrust. Nor is it surprising that these feelings are compounded when indigenous people are forced to defend their rights to hunt wildlife in the courts, as in the Yanner crocodile case.[3]
Indigenous uses of wildlife, both subsistence and commercial, have been accorded greater legitimacy in Canada than Australia for a number of political, historical, economic, ecological and geographic reasons.[4] These same factors have influenced the approach taken in Canada to researching indigenous land claims. Indigenous land use studies[5]- including detailed spatial data on wildlife harvests, particularly for subsistence-have underpinned the objections of Canadian indigenous groups to energy and minerals development on their country, have informed the settlement of comprehensive claims, and have been used as the basis of First Nations' regional economic planning.
Given the focus on wildlife in claims research, it is not surprising that agreements with indigenous peoples have informed Canadian government approaches to wildlife management. As in Australia, Canadian indigenous peoples have secured access to wildlife on land where the Crown has recognised their claims to title. In contrast to Australia, they are also now recognised by governments as partners in wildlife management in many other areas. Co-management is now the dominant management regime for wildlife in Canada's northern territories. In the more southerly parts of Canada, co-management is applied less consistently and the amount of decision-making power shared between governments and indigenous groups varies widely. Nevertheless four (out of ten) provinces are using co-management in their relationships with indigenous peoples regarding hunting, trapping and fishing.[6] These include instances where single species comanagement arrangements have been established, typically in response to a perceived crisis in wildlife populations.[7] In addition, some provinces and territories have shared decision-making arrangements for environmental and resource management. Such mechanisms provide additional opportunities for indigenous groups to influence management of wildlife habitats on land where they do not have statutory title.[8]
Wildlife co-management regimes in northern areas of Canada regulate commercial, subsistence and recreational harvesting by both indigenous and non-indigenous people. Typically, they involve committees or boards with equal numbers of government and indigenous representatives which oversee wildlife population monitoring, set quotas and otherwise regulate harvests. These boards are nominally advisory to the relevant government Minister, who retains a veto power in the interests of conservation or public safety. However, in practice, it is board decisions which determine the management regime for wildlife.[9]
Although Australia is a world leader in co-management arrangements for national parks,[10] such power sharing arrangements are yet to extend to management of wildlife species and habitats outside protected areas.11 Wildlife features implicitly in negotiations for Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUAs) and analogous agreements in Australia where these concern Aboriginal access to land for hunting. But hunting access is meaningless if there are no animals to hunt. The 1997 dugong protection strategy negotiated between the Northern Land Council and the Northern Territory Fishing Industry Council broke new ground in addressing the impact that other people's activities have on the availability of wildlife to indigenous hunters. What was at issue was not traditional owners' right to go hunting, which is sanctioned by statute law, but the impact that fishing has on dugong populations. The Fishing Industry Council agreed to the closure of some important dugong habitat to commercial fishing and to changes in the design of fishing nets.[12] If hunters' rights to hunt are to have practical meaning, there is a need for more agreements of this nature.
In some other cases, Aboriginal people could benefit from negotiated agreements which provide government support for indigenous management of wildlife on Aboriginal-owned freehold lands. For example, a very few remnant colonies of the black footed rock wallaby continue to survive on Aboriginal lands in the border regions of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Ngaanyatjarra Council and Anangu Pitjantjatjara land management services are carrying out management programmes to protect these animals on their lands, in both cases with advice and assistance from State government conservation agencies.[13] Yet each group has few resources for this long term work and little opportunity to learn what is happening across the State/Territory borders. A multiparty agreement here might provide a secure flow of resources to landowners to encourage them to continue their 'on the ground' management activities and, importantly, to enable them to meet periodically to share their experiences of management techniques. Without such support mechanisms for Aboriginal landowners, these animals may well join the long list of others that have become extinct in this region. In this example, government and Aboriginal goals are the same, and a wildlife management agreement ought to be relatively easy to negotiate.
However, most agreements will involve many more stakeholders and progress in negotiations will inevitably be more difficult. This is largely because effective ecological management requires regionalscale processes to be addressed. In some cases, such as dugong management in Queensland, communication channels between relevant government agencies and indigenous groups have already been established through many years of interaction over indigenous wildlife use. This will facilitate negotiation of wildlife management agreements. In many other cases, however, this historical basis does not exist.
One example which presents key opportunities for promoting sustainable futures for indigenous people is the kangaroo industry, Australia's biggest commercial wildlife harvest. Commercial kangaroo harvesting is undergoing a shift in management philosophy away from being an activity tolerated by governments because it is necessary to contain kangaroo populations and reduce economic impacts on livestock grazing, to being promoted as a sustainable industry, particularly in the sheep rangelands. Most commercial kangaroo harvesting occurs on pastoral leases. Yet management of the harvest has so far not become part of negotiations for recognition of native title and the formulation of ILUAs.
Kangaroos, which have been favoured by provision of stock watering points, are abundant in the commercial harvest zones. Nevertheless, commercial harvesting could have a potential impact on the local availability of kangaroos for subsistence hunting. It could also produce a less direct effect at the regional level, by altering the relative abundance of different kangaroo species and their population demography. If use and management of wildlife were included as an element in ILUA and regional agreement negotiations, Aboriginal people would be empowered, and the question of how Aboriginal people might derive economic benefit through equity in the commercial kangaroo industry could also be addressed.
While indigenous people currently have almost no involvement in the commercial kangaroo harvest, they are significant players in some aspects of Australia's commercial wildlife industries, such as crocodile egg harvest.[14] Despite this, indigenous people still have no clear or agreed role in government decisions about how wildlife industries are promoted and regulated.[15] Addressing this situation is critical, because these industries are in a phase of growth and institutional reform. Negotiated agreements offer the most promising way forward.
In their recent review of the status of indigenous community-based wildlife management in Canada, Treseder et a1 [16] comment that the Canadian co-management systems have been successful:
- in overcoming conflicts between state and indigenous systems of wildlife management;
- in enhancing greatly the collection and exchange of information on wildlife resources;
- in addressing mutual distrust between the parties involved in wildlife management and increasing mutual respect and understanding; and
- in contributing to social, cultural and economic development in remote communities.
A recently published parallel review, Indigenous Community Based Wildlife Management in Australia: Sustaining Eden, [17] argues that these same outcomes could be achieved in Australia if wildlife management were reformed to promote indigenous involvement, including through negotiated co-management regimes.
This report, and companion reports from a number of regions of the world, have been prepared as contributions to the International Institute for Environment and Development's Evaluating Eden project. Evaluating Eden is exploring the impacts of wildlife use and management and is concerned with promoting management approaches that maximise benefits from wildlife for indigenous and rural peoples. Early indications are that Australia's indigenous peoples are by no means alone in their concern to ensure that wildlife is conserved through equitable, sustainable and culturally-appropriate uses in which they have a strong managing role.
Jocelyn Davies is a geographer based in the Faculty of Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, at the Roseworthy Campus of the University of Adelaide, where she works on indigenous environmental management issues.
| Wildlife is taken here to mean vertebrate animals other than fish. However, this distinction, influenced by the framework of Australian statute law, is artificial. The issues and opportunities outlined here also have relevance to management of fisheries and, to some extent, plants. |
| J Altman, H Bek, and L Roach, 'Use of Wildlife by Indigenous Australians: Economic and Policy Perspectives', in M Bomford and J Caughley (eds) Sustainable Use of Wildlife byAboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, (1996). |
| See G Atkinson, 'Manner v Eaton: Walden v Hensler reversed?' (1997) 4(1) Indigenous Law Bulletin 27. |
| For a summary of how these factors have operated in Canada, see P J Usher, F J Tough, and R M Galois, 'Reclaiming the Land: Aboriginal Title, Treaty Rights and Land Claims in Canada' (1992) 12 Applied Geography 109-132. |
For an overview of several
such studies see ibid 124. For an example see F Berkes, P J George, R J Preston,
A Hughes, J Turner, and
B D Cummins, 'Wildlife Harvesting and Sustainable
Regional Native Economy in the Hudson and James Bay Lowland, Ontario' (1994) 47
(4) Arctic 350-360. It is important to recognise that these land use studies do
not only return economic and ecological data on wildlife
use. Their prime
importance to First Nations groups is that 'subsistence embodies cultural
perspectives of relationships to places,
people and animals' (ibid 358). Thus,
in mapping wildlife use, such studies are also mapping cultural relationships
with country.
Questions of how the data generated are subsequently used can be
no less problematic than those encountered in Australia in relation
to
information about 'sacred sites'. See M S Weinstein, 'Getting to 'Use' in
Traditional Use Studies' (Paper presented at the Society
of Applied Anthropology
Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington 1997); and M S Weinstein. 'Sharing
Information or Captured Heritage:
Access to Community Geographic Knowledge and
the State's Responsibility to Protect Aboriginal Rights in British Columbia
(Paper presented
at Crossing Boundaries, the Seventh Conference of the
International Association for the Study of Common Property Resources, Vancouver,
British Columbia 1998), both at
<http://www. nativemaps.org/Methods/tus_tek/tus.html>
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