Colin Scott
Colin Scott researches respect, reciprocity and communication among hunting, fishing and gathering peoples.
Through this he seeks to understand the ways indigenous cosmologies shape their livelihoods and practices, and are reciprocally shaped by this lived experience. Colin has sought to understand how their land and sea tenure and resource management arrangements are both the context for, and the product of, ecological knowledge.
Working with the coastal James Bay Cree of northern Quebec since 1976, and Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland since 1996, he tracks the evolution of indigenous land and sea rights, as state governments, metropolitan developers and indigenous peoples come into conflict through different ownership claims and different ways of understanding rights, differences that - in part - result from conflicting notions of cultural identity, tradition, continuity and change.