Approach

The Indigenous chapter aims to illuminate Country and people as interconnected and inseparable, and to explore this relationship as foundational to all aspects of Indigenous health and wellbeing.

Throughout the Indigenous chapter, we give voice to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture and knowledge systems, privileging their ways of knowing and interacting with all aspects of Country. The chapter is underpinned by a review of relevant literature, privileging papers with Indigenous authors and co-authors (Murawin 2021a, Murawin 2021c, Murawin 2021b) (see the Supplementary material).

For information about the terminology used to refer to Indigenous people in this report, see the Glossary.

Consultations and workshops

As part of the work undertaken within all chapters of the state of the environment (SoE) report, Indigenous consulting group Murawin was engaged to work with Indigenous people across Australia to gather and present data directly sourced from individuals and communities. Six seminars, each including workshop discussions, were held in Melbourne, Geelong, Canberra, Dubbo, Darwin and Alice Springs. A workshop on climate change, led by Damian Morgan-Bulled and Sonia Cooper, was held in Cairns on 23–26 March 2021 as part of the National First Peoples Gathering on Climate Change.

Participants in the Murawin consultation included Indigenous organisations, native title prescribed bodies and Traditional Owner corporations, land councils, Indigenous organisations and individuals involved in environmental programs, Elders, and individual community members, as well as non-Indigenous organisations working to support Indigenous people’s aspirations and programs. While extensive efforts have been made to ensure Indigenous perspectives are included, the chapter may not be inclusive of all Traditional Owners’ views. It intends to best present views available in the literature and through the consultation and assessment process.

Assessment outcomes

The assessment outcomes were developed collaboratively among the co-author team and other experts working to support the SoE report. This SoE report applies a modified version of the DPSIR (Drivers, Pressure, State, Impact, Response) framework that allows us to understand Indigenous people’s caring for Country through assessing outcomes in 4 groups across the 3 sections of the chapter:

• Environment
  • Wellbeing of Indigenous people
  • State of Country and connections
• Pressures – on Country, connections and Indigenous people
• Management – to respond to these pressures.

Starting with the DPSIR framework, the Indigenous outcomes were developed iteratively through consideration of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) (EPBC Act), the national Closing the Gap Agreement, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (see Supplementary Table S1 in Murawin 2021a). The outcomes development was guided by a significant Indigenous face-to-face consultation process with seminars and workshop discussions, by reading of the literature in ways that privileged the Indigenous voice, and under the guidance of the co-chairs and the Indigenous authors team. Indigenous people’s deep holistic relationship with Country generates enormous complexity in its intersection with the largely non-Indigenous guiding conceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, the Indigenous outcomes broadly encapsulate all the Sustainable Development Goals, Closing the Gap outcomes, and many provisions of the EPBC Act and UNDRIP (see Supplementary Table S1 in Murawin 2021a).

The Indigenous outcomes assessment occurred through an Expert Elicitation Roundtable (EER) conducted together with all the Indigenous authors of the report. Structured expert elicitation is widely recognised as an appropriate means of arriving at robust conclusions about conservation and natural resource management where data are incomplete (Drescher et al. 2013). Expert elicitation involves a structured process that enables experts to provide their judgement, based on their professional knowledge and experience, and respond to key questions. The extent of variation in experts’ responses is recorded, together with their responses, to provide a measure of the confidence in conclusions that are drawn from the workshop.

The Indigenous methodologies underpinning this chapter require us to show respect and reciprocity, and to follow cultural protocols to make ‘expert elicitation’ work. We did this by:

• bringing together the best information to help us with the assessment
• bringing together respected and recognised Indigenous experts
• using Indigenous yarning methods for discussions at the assessment workshop
• being open and transparent about our disagreements and agreements.

The EER was provided with a copy of the draft chapter before the roundtable. The Indigenous experts were the Indigenous authors for this SoE report brought together by co-chairs Terri Janke, Emma Johnston and Ian Cresswell. Our co-chairs sought out a wide range of people with traditional connections to different parts of Australia, and with a track record of working on caring for Country projects and issues, while respecting family and cultural traditions and connections.

The EER – led by Terri Janke – emphasised both scoring according to a set of categories and Indigenous yarning as a process, with human relationships, with kin and Country, at the centre. Experts were asked to first discuss and then rank each outcome according to the following categories for status and trend:

• Status
  • Very good
  • Good
  • Poor
  • Very poor
• Trend
  • Improving
  • Stable
  • Deteriorating
  • Unclear

Rankings were completed by individuals through an online form.

Yarning is about talking and listening, and sharing information. It is about being respectful of different opinions and voices, and of different cultural authorities and protocols (Barlo et al. 2021). We recorded all the discussions. The online tool used for experts to record their assessment also provided some graphic images based on word frequencies (Figure 24).

We summed the scores into a table showing the different scores given to the outcomes (Table 12); percentages in this table reflect the number of experts who assigned that category to each outcome. The discussions were summarised to help people understand the reasons behind the decisions we made (see assessment outcomes across the chapter).

From a western scientific perspective, the inherent biases and uncertainty in expert elicitation can be better managed through use of clear protocols, such as our culturally grounded approach (Hemming et al. 2018). Augmentation with visualisation techniques, such as the online tool Slido to show word clouds based on the frequency of words used in the discussion, has been demonstrated to deliver more robust elicitation (van Gelder et al. 2016). Aggregation was both quantitative and qualitative, showing an overall assessment. The different scores were aggregated to show the level of confidence in that assessment, and the amount of variation across Australia revealed in the discussion (Table 13). Confidence limits are based on the widely accepted approach of considering both the quality of the evidence and the extent of agreement (Figure 25).