Songspirals bring Country into existence. In Aboriginal English usage, Country is much more than ‘the environment’. Country encompasses the seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds and all the beings that exist in and make up a place, including people. Songspirals (commonly known as songlines) are rich and multi-layered articulations, passed down through the generations and sung by Aboriginal people to wake Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place – people co-becoming as place (Bawaka Country et al 2016, Rose 1996, 2007). This paper draws on our close collaborative relationship with Yolŋu co-researchers as Bawaka Country to nourish and, where appropriate, share Indigenous and Country-led understandings of women’s keening of songspirals. Our spiral-based framework extends ideas of songlines to generate new knowledge which centres Yolŋu women’s conceptions of place and time. In a time of disruptive environmental change, supporting such deep place-based engagements, that are not only Indigenous-led, but are led by Country, are crucially necessary.

Political ontology research has asked what it means to take diverse worlds seriously. More concretely, researchers have focused on ‘the practical and political implications of enabling or silencing diverse worlds’ (Yates et al., earlyview, p. 3). This has often involved confronting the dominance of colonial ways of knowing and managing environments. In this presentation, I will describe a project in development that involves exploring exactly how the hegemony of colonial ontologies might be unsettled (Barker and Lowman 2016; Hunt and Holmes 2015). Specifically, I am interested how Māori initiated and led environmental decision making is, or is not, decolonising for tauiwi (non-Māori). I will explore opportunities these decision making processes create for tauiwi to question persistent colonial power inequalities, come to take Māori ontologies seriously (Blaser 2009) and move beyond integrative and cherry-picking approaches. Furthermore, what are the possibilities for shifting beyond listening and understanding to being allies or accomplices (Mikaere 2004)? This project also explores how tauiwi might come to develop their own languages for relational ethics with more-than-humans (Thomas 2015); or perhaps, what new ontologies flourish?

I draw on recent work at the overlap between value production, the politics of knowledge, and indigenous professionalization. I illustrate that recently introduced Indigenous professionalization programmes in Peru, which certify the knowledge and competencies of Indigenous actors, serve to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and ecologies-in-practice into capitalist value production networks. Knowledge is not fully commodifiable – it circulates as a “fictitious commodity” (Jessop, 2007; Polanyi, 2001) or a “pseudo-commodity” (Andreucci, García-Lamarca, Wedekind, & Swyngedouw, 2017; Felli, 2014). Fictitious commodities require a host of institutions, techniques, legal frameworks, discourses, and infrastructures to make them perform in commodity-like ways (Goldstein & Yates, 2017). Among these techniques are “inscription devices” (Li, 2014), used to inscribe particular value framings onto pseudo-commodities. I illustrate that state-initiated programmes of translating Indigenous knowledge into relatively fixed indicators for the purpose of professional certification/accreditation act as a kind of inscription device. The politics of translation involves fixing dynamic Quechua knowledge and ecologies-in-practice as static indicators written into certification guidelines in Spanish. In the process, local Indigenous knowledges are translated and inscribed into extra-local capitalist psudeo-commodities. I illustrate these arguments by drawing on the case of professionalizing “agricultural extensionists” and “rural promoters” in Peru’s Southern Andes.