Maboo Liyan Boorroo – Good Spirit Country: using participatory research frameworks to manage Indigenous cultural landscapes in a time of environmental and political uncertainty

Management of cultural landscapes has struggled to understand and adapt to Indigenous ways of managing heritage through a reciprocal duty of care. We argue that barriers to Indigenous cultural landscapes are threefold. First, conceptual barriers exist due to the prevalence of inappropriate heritage concepts and frameworks from the Global North. Second are relational barriers in the form of asymmetrical relationships of power between non-Indigenous heritage 'experts' and Indigenous individuals and communities. Third, political barriers present in neo-colonial politics are at odds with the goals of Indigenous movements. After introducing Martuwarra RiverOfLife and her co-authors, we review these barriers within a cultural landscape framework. We then turn to the heritage politics of Western Australia to further analyse the barriers Indigenous cultural landscapes face in attaining full recognition of their significance as heritage, and as living ancestral beings with a 'right to be known'. Finally, we describe and analyse the multi-modal, multi-year collaboration between Martuwarra RiverOfLife, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, Nyikina Indigenous custodians, and non-Indigenous researchers to establish protocols and processes that address the conceptual, relational and political barriers to the effective management of a multi-faceted Indigenous cultural landscape in Western Australia. We report on our methods and outcomes to date.