JOHN MULVANEY BOOK AWARD
The John Mulvaney Book Award was established in 2004 to honour John Mulvaney and his contribution and commitment to Australian archaeology over a lifetime of professional service. It was created to acknowledge the significant contribution of individual or co-authored publications to Australian archaeology, either as general knowledge or as specialist publications. Nominations are considered annually for books that cover both academic pursuits and public interest reflecting the philosophy of John Mulvaney's life work.
This year’s John Mulvaney Book Award goes to Annie Ross, of The University of Queensland, and her colleagues Richard Sherman, Jeffrey Snodgrass, Henry Delcore and Kathleen Pickering Sherman for their book Indigenous Peoples and the Collaborative Stewardship of Nature: Knowledge Binds and Institutional Conflicts, published in 2011.
This book is written by five scholars from very different educational backgrounds and from different countries. Together, they address a central issue in archaeological practice today: how to work collaboratively with Indigenous peoples in managing natural resources. Working across disciplines and global regions, the authors took the courageous and creative step of co-writing, rather than simply producing an edited volume of their analyses.
The genesis of the book was a session at American Anthropological Association meeting in 2003, and the final form was hammered out over the following years.
This book shows that Australian cultural heritage management has achieved significant advances over the last decade – for example, by going beyond the discipline of archaeology to include far more anthropological connections, in particular, with respect to people's connections to place and to the resources in their environment.
The authors argue persuasively that it is vital that cultural heritage managers recognise the role of Indigenous people in all aspects of their heritage, not just in their ancient sites. The Indigenous author - Richard Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe – presents an innovative way to achieve such integrated management in his Indigenous Stewardship Model, with its connotations of a personal investment and a reciprocal relationship that ‘management’ may lack.
Indigenous Peoples and the Collaborative Stewardship of Nature makes important contributions to the discipline at conceptual, policy and substantive levels. It reveals the uniqueness as well as commonalities in the situations of each of the indigenous peoples discussed. The authors conclude that access to resources and the related exercise of power remain basic to collaboration. In so doing, they provide a remarkable demonstration of the narration of place in the Indigenous present.
Congratulations Annie and her colleagues!