Jacqueline Lo

This chapter focuses on Marrugeku's Indigenous-governed intercultural practice that is grounded in and guided by Country and its custodians. Yawuru leader Mick Dodson describes “Country” as “a word for the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area and its features. It describes the entirety of our ancestral domains”. Writing from their different positions as Indigenous and settler Australians, the authors address the aftermath of the historic referendum for The Voice in Parliament, which proposed to provide permanent representation and recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution. If the Uluru Statement from the Heart is an invitation to meet across the divide of Indigenous and settler Australia, can Indigenous-governed interculturalism serve as a model for working across the different histories, subjectivities and socialities that make up multicultural Australia towards treaty and truth-telling? Marrugeku's production, Jurrungu Ngan-ga, which confronts Australia's shameful fixation with incarceration by connecting outrageous levels of Indigenous imprisonment to the indefinite detaining of asylum seekers, will be used as a case study to exemplify the company's innovative Indigenous-governed aesthetics and politics as a form of staging Makarrata.