Indigenous peoples’ cultural burning within a government fire agency? The state craft and agenda stakes in public sector land management

Indigenous peoples’ political-legal resurgence along with shifting societal values about racial discrimination are profoundly changing settler-colonial public sector land management. Public servants find themselves navigating and making decisions about a) Indigenous peoples’ political-legal jurisdictional presence and conceptual-regulatory difference, vis-à-vis b) the public sector’s assumed monopoly on naming and regulating land management. This research centres on a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous public servants in the Australian Capital Territory. They worked to support Indigenous peoples’ landscape burns, or cultural burns, on nature reserves and the national park by adding a new prescribed burning category to their agency’s regulatory framework. Important landscape burns were lit and highly valued by those directly involved. The work also revealed where discrimination could be partially addressed and where it persisted, helping to prioritise change. Overall, the public sector context constrained Indigenous peoples’ authority and autonomy, including core obligations. This affirms self-determination priorities of returning land and resources. Relatedly, Indigenous interviewees reported they were not understood. The public sector and its expert knowledge communities needed to undertake a deep reflexivity about their worldview-expertise assumptions to join the conversation. Work for change includes broadening policy to encompass Indigenous priorities and values, and, thus, requiring Indigenous expertise as a regulatory authority. This can support collaborative potential to combine the strengths of the two different fire traditions. The results have value globally for those motivated to identify and diminish colonial and imperial violence, especially in land management, biodiversity and natural hazard risk mitigation public sector contexts.