Green gatekeeping: colonial conservation and the Jemez Principles

Indigenous connections to place are not happenstance. They are determined by complex knowledge systems, governed by relational accountability (Graham, 2008), and supported by sophisticated technologies that have sustained existence for tens of thousands of years (McLoin, 2019). Contemporary climate crisis and population increase are creating rising demands on Elohi (Earth) and Ama (Water), resulting in further disenfranchisement of Indigenous First Nations from their connections to Country (Ridgeway and Jacques, 2014). Within the context of Mill’s racial contract (Mills, 1997), Green Gatekeeping is a term coined to describe public land management policies and narratives that displace Indigenous peoples from fully accessing their ancestral landscapes and criminalise their cultural practices. Green Gatekeeping locks the gates to Country. When Indigenous people attempt to access conserved land for cultural practices like fishing, harvesting or fire management, they can be criminalised (Uncle, 2019, Brother of Mungo, 2019). In Australia, as part of conservation policies, First Nations risk fines or imprisonment for hunting customary food sources even though they were not responsible for the decline in these resources (Nakata, 2010). First Nations’ activists have called upon conservation organisations to adopt a series of six untested protocols to address Green Gatekeeping - The Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing (1996).

This study aimed to theorise the historic underpinnings and contemporary manifestations of Green Gatekeeping, and to provide Case Stories shared by First Nations Knowledge Holders for contextualisation. It employed an interpretivist research design to code the effectiveness of each Jemez Principle quantitatively with word cloud interview transcription software, and qualitatively with constructivist transcriptions of Case Stories shared by First Nations peoples of New South Wales Australia Case Stories. Utilising Case Story methodology, the researcher is humbled as a tool, like a pen, to transition the Knowledge Holders’ spoken word to written text. The First Nations participants included five Australian Aboriginal land management professionals sourced through pre-fieldwork relationships and the snowball method, who responded to semi-structured open-ended interviews. Auto-ethnography and Performance Scholarship were woven throughout the thesis in art, song, story, and language as part of Reciprocal Research (Swan, 2017) and Research as Ceremony Methodologies (Wilson, 2008).

The research findings concluded that The Jemez Principles are useful in “Building Just Relationships” when Second Nations’ “Commitment to Self-Transformation” are prioritised.