Indigenous Sustainability: Rights, Obligations, and a Collective Commitment to Country

Abstract

Recent movements within sustainability have sought to integrate Indigenous relationships to natural resources as part of the sustainability paradigm. Australian Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous movements internationally, have also utilized the language of sustainability when promoting inherent Indigenous rights to land, aspirations of self-determination and obligations to ‘country’. However, in utilising sustainability as a field of negotiation, Indigenous participants generally speak of another dimension within this debate, an Indigenous approach to ‘country’ that is bound within Indigenous relationships to natural-cultural resources that cannot be divorced from cultural-spiritual relationships with our natural world