Planning for Coexistence?

Recognizing Indigenous rights through land-use planning in Canada and Australia

Libby Porter, Janice Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317080169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Planning is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for Indigenous people to negotiate meaningful articulation of their sovereign territorial and political rights, reigniting the essential tension that lies at the heart of Indigenous-settler relations. But what actually happens in the planning contact zone - when Indigenous demands for recognition of coexisting political authority over territory intersect with environmental and urban land-use planning systems in settler-colonial states? This book answers that question through a critical examination of planning contact zones in two settler-colonial states: Victoria, Australia and British Columbia, Canada. Comparing the experiences of four Indigenous communities who are challenging and renegotiating land-use planning in these places, the book breaks new ground in our understanding of contemporary Indigenous land justice politics. It is the first study to grapple with what it means for planning to engage with Indigenous peoples in major cities, and the first of its kind to compare the underlying conditions that produce very different outcomes in urban and non-urban planning contexts. In doing so, the book exposes the costs and limits of the liberal mode of recognition as it comes to be articulated through planning, challenging the received wisdom that participation and consultation can solve conflicts of sovereignty. This book lays the theoretical, methodological and practical groundwork for imagining what planning for coexistence might look like: a relational, decolonizing planning praxis where self-determining Indigenous peoples invite settler-colonial states to their planning table on their terms.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Challenge of Indigenous Coexistence for Planning

Dispossession, Planning and the Politics of Recognition

Indigenous peoples have been dispossessed – dispossessed of their lands, but also of the political, cultural and socio-economic responsibility to govern those lands according to customary ancestral law. These conditions of dispossession are particularly prevalent in settler-colonial contexts, where generations of colonial agents and migrants not only came to stay, but also worked to destroy and then replace Indigenous ways of being with a new political-economic order (Wolfe 2006; Cavanagh and Veracini 2013). As scholars working in the growing field of settler-colonialism studies note, these conditions are not confined to a discrete historic event (Wolfe 2006), but rather form a ‘relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority’ (Coulthard 2014, 7, emphasis in original). In other words, the fact of Indigenous dispossession in settler-colonial states is a contemporary phenomenon, and the conditions that enable it are persistently reproduced.

An extraordinary struggle has been underway for decades in the face of these conditions of dispossession, waged by Indigenous peoples in countless places across the globe to reconstitute themselves as self-determining peoples with a secure land base. This struggle has involved an encounter with settler-colonial states, an encounter that demands recognition from those states as a fundamental component of any effort to redress dispossession. The last 40 years has witnessed the emergence of an array of regimes of Indigenous recognition around the world, encompassing land settlements, treaties, reconciliation plans, compensation packages, partnerships and agreements. Although not legally binding, the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides some indication of the nature of these claims and of the models developed in response. It underscores the right of all peoples to self-determination in the pursuit of economic, social and cultural development, as well as Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain and strengthen their relationships to their traditional territories.

These efforts to respond to Indigenous claims are particularly pronounced in former British settler states (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, to a lesser degree, the United States), countries that share a similar colonial history and similar systems of law. Many of these settler states have developed new legal and political mechanisms for responding to these claims: treaty negotiations in Canada, Australia’s native title regime, and the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa-New Zealand are good examples. The language of rights and of rights-based recognition dominates much of the international, national and sub-national discourse on how settler states are responding to the claims Indigenous peoples are making. Planning has been one of the important public policy arenas where these new mechanisms have come to ground, and where other responses to Indigenous demands have been developed.

These responses, both in planning and in the wider body politic of settler states have attempted to settle the profoundly unsettling impact of Indigenous claims on settler-colonial authority. Yet they have also reignited an essential tension that lies at the heart of Indigenous-colonial relations between the sovereignty of Indigenous law and its associated responsibilities toward unceded Indigenous territories now enmeshed within settler-colonial jurisdictions, and the desire of settler-colonial states to reconcile these unique place-based relationships within existing colonial institutional and legal arrangements. As many Indigenous scholars, activists and leaders have shown (Taiaike Alfred, Glen Coulthard, Irene Watson, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michael Dodson, Patrick Dodson, Leanne Simpson), Indigenous demands inherently challenge the underlying authority of those very institutional and legal arrangements. Defining redress for dispossession through the very instruments that constitute that dispossession in the first place throws into sharp relief how the operations of colonial power are never transcended, but simply change register and shape. Dene scholar, Glen Coulthard argues that ‘instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the ideal of reciprocity or mutual recognition, the politics of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’ (2014, 3, emphasis in original).

Given political and spatial characteristics, Indigenous demands place a specific onus upon planning systems. Planning, as an arena where issues about the use, management and future of place are contested, negotiated and settled makes an obviously important site where the finer institutional, legal and land-use arrangements of recognition are hammered out. It is not surprising then that planning has come to be a key forum where the politics of recognition comes to ground. Yet despite some fairly significant shifts, particularly in the field of natural resource management planning, how the politics of recognition plays out in different planning contexts and the factors that shape planning’s responses to Indigenous demands are not widely discussed in planning research and practice (Hibbard, Lane and Rasmussen 2008). Perhaps more importantly, planning as a field of inquiry and practice has not yet sufficiently come to grips with its own complicity in the ongoing fact of dispossession in settler-colonial states.

This book is about what happens when Indigenous demands for recognition of coexisting political authority over territory intersect with environmental and urban land-use planning systems in settler states. Taking the complicity of planning in ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession as a point of departure, this book looks closely at where and how Indigenous demands have become part of land-use planning systems and how those demands have been settled and managed. In doing so, the book is also about how planning processes themselves become sites for Indigenous resistance and resurgence, and the complex politics of recognition that unfolds.

Contribution, Purpose and Framing of the Book

Recognition of cultural difference has been a debate within planning for a long time; showing how this recognition unsettles the universalizing tendencies of planning (Sandercock 2003, 1998a) creates space for a critical reflection on the invisibility of certain cultural identities (Sandercock 1998b) and enables analysis of the socio-economic and political impacts of exclusionary practices (Hooper 1992; Sandercock and Forsyth 1992; Yiftachel 1998, 2009; Beebeejaun 2004; Harwood 2005). Cultural recognition often demands a more radical line of questioning about how planners should understand and then act in contexts of ‘deep difference’ (V. Watson 2006; see also Yiftachel 1998; Fenster 2003; Burayidi 2003; Beebeejaun 2004; Thomas 2000; Harwood 2005; Jackson 1997; Umemoto 2001; Porter 2006b). The onus Indigenous demands place upon planning significantly overlaps with, but is also distinctly different from, the recognition of other forms of cultural difference. For in contexts of Indigenous-settler encounters, planning is confronted with substantively different ontological and epistemological philosophies of human-environment relations, which give rise to unique systems of governance and a deep sense of responsibility and connection to places and the non-human entities that live in those places (see Alfred 1999; Langton 2002; I. Watson 2002). Tom Trevorrow, a Ngarindjerri Elder, states it in beautifully simple terms: ‘Our traditional management plan was: don’t be greedy, don’t take more than you need and respect everything around you. That’s the management plan – it’s such a simple management plan but so hard for people to carry out’ (Murrundi Ruwe Pangari Ringbalin 2010).

Indigenous scholars of planning have sought to express these differences and their implication for how planning is theorized and practised (see Jojola 2008; Matunga 2013). These expressions position planning as an essential element of the colonial project, directly implicated in the processes of Indigenous dispossession and colonial conquest. A small body of work attends to this important point (Porter 2010; Ugarte 2014; Dorries 2012; Stanger-Ross 2008), and has aimed to expose how planning continues, in its contemporary practice and theory today, to reproduce spatial relations in the interests of settler-colonial power (Lane and Cowell 2001; Howitt and Lunkapis 2010; Yiftachel 2009; Porter 2010). This often occurs in ways that erode Indigenous efforts to claim and reclaim their political, cultural and economic sovereignties (Dorries 2012).

Acknowledging this erosion to be a real possibility in every planning situation, a growing number of authors are exploring the ‘split personality’ (Hibbard, Lane and Rasmussen 2008) of planning in Indigenous contexts, highlighting the ways planning might also be used to create space for the exercise of Indigenous self-determination (Lane and Hibbard 2005; Zaferatos 2004) and the reclamation of Indigenous modes of socio-spatial organization (Jojola 1998, 2003; Matunga 2013). Taking seriously that all outcomes and politics are contingent (they might always have been different) points to the importance of conceiving planning as a potentially transformative space. There are numerous compelling examples of planning processes that have been able to catalyze deep, cross-cultural learning about the legacies of colonialism and take significant steps toward the improvement of community relations (see, for example, Dale 1999; Sandercock and Attili 2010), if not the development of planning tools and practices that are more responsive to Indigenous customary law. A substantial body of literature and practice guides now exists, tracking how recognition of Indigenous rights and title has led to increased engagement with Indigenous stakeholders (Berke et al. 2002), and providing guidance on new modes of planning governance including the now well-established models of joint or co-management (Stevens 1997; Borrini-Feyeraband, Kothari and Oviedo 2004; Howitt, Connell and Hirsch 1996; Jaireth and Smyth 2003; Jentoft, Minde and Nilsen 2003; Lane and Williams 2008; Maclean, Robinson and Natcher 2014), or protection of cultural heritage (Jones 2007). More recent work is showing how a more advanced and scaled-up set of planning processes is now being conducted on a government-to-government basis, where settler states and Indigenous peoples mutually recognize their separate coexisting authority and create agreements to manage land-use planning responsibilities (Barry 2011).

The vast majority of these examples relate to environmental planning and natural resource management situations. The field has been much less responsive to the questions posed by Indigenous claims and Indigenous customary law for planning in urban contexts (for recent exceptions to this silence, see Porter 2013; Porter and Barry 2015; Dorries 2012). This is curious, as there are a variety of fields contributing to a rich set of debates that all speak very directly to planning on these questions. For example, there is significant work on the specific needs and socio-economic position of Indigenous people living in cities (Cardinal 2006; Peters 2005, 2006; Walker 2003). There is also important work on questions of urban governance, particularly about Indigenous self-government (Peters 1992; Walker and Barcham 2010; Walker 2006) and what that means for municipalities (Mountjoy 1999) and on urban citizenship debates (Wood 2003). Finally there is a robust and long-standing debate about the cultural politics and political economy of expressions of Indigenous identity and agency in the city as well as analyses that position urbanization as a key colonial process (Jacobs 1996; Edmonds 2010; Pieris 2012; Porter and Barry 2015; King 1990; Shaw 2007; Yiftachel and Fenster 1997), exposing how Indigenous people are often only engaged in urban governance processes when their protest movements present significant risks to the viability of major development projects (MacCallum Fraser and Viswanathan 2013).

This book seeks to address these gaps, especially the paucity of planning research on Indigenous recognition in urban contexts. To that end, the book speaks directly to the practice and theorization of planning, drawing on debates, concepts and theoretical lenses from a wide range of other fields. Our aim in this book is to examine what actually happens when planning systems meet the claims and struggles of Indigenous peoples, as well as when they interact with now well-established settler-state mechanisms that purportedly seek to redress those claims.

We do this from three points of departure: First, that planning as it is conceived and performed today in settler states is an innate part of the process that makes and remakes colonial spatial and political authority normal and coherent. Planning was intrinsically involved in historical processes of subjectification and dispossession, and remains one of the key policy arenas in which states seek to resettle the surety of their spatial jurisdictions. Second, that the variant of Indigenous recognition that liberal states have widely adopted in response to Indigenous claims reconfigures colonial domination and reproduces the conditions of dispossession. Third, that neither of the first two points should be conceived as monolithic or inevitable. The intersection of planning with Indigenous demands for recognition of sovereign political and spatial jurisdictions has enormous transformative potential. Understanding where that potential exists, how and when it can become foreclosed, and how the demands of Indigenous people might more effectively be used in planning for these ends requires a critical yet hopeful conceptual framing, and a close empirical attention to actually existing interactions between planning systems and Indigenous peoples.

This book adopts the struggle for coexistence as that critical yet hopeful conceptual framing. As the title of the book suggests, when the actions and agency of Indigenous demands can articulate planning as a practice and ethic of coexistence, we contend that a more transformative politics of recognition becomes possible. We use coexistence in this book as a normative, political and conceptual position. It is especially ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Challenge of Indigenous Coexistence for Planning
• Part I Concepts and Contexts
• Part II Stories of Planning In (Post)Colonial Victoria and British Columbia
• Part III Conceptualizing Coexistence In Planning Theory and Practice
• References
• Index