Indigenous leaders form new national body

A two-day summit of first nation leaders and elders from across Australia has formed a new body to represent Indigenous people and reclaim Indigenous rights and representation, organisers have said. 

The First Nations Summit for Freedom sought to take back the conversation from a small number of high-profile Aboriginal people, including the head of the prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, Warren Mundine, and the chairman of the Cape York Group, Noel Pearson, who have been the targets of protest and criticism from corners of Indigenous advocacy and activism.

About 115 people gathered at the Old Telegraph Station in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, the birthplace of the Aboriginal social activist Charlie Perkins, on Thursday and Friday last week.

At the summit, Indigenous lawyer and activist, Michael Mansell, called for the creation of a funded national body, similar to the long-gone Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commission. “There’s a need for a revived national body with guaranteed funding, but it should have legislated powers,” Mansell said.

Delegates discussed the national response to local Indigenous issues and concluded with the establishment of a 20-person representative committee through a nomination process “Unfortunately we had to do this because we found there are no peak bodies really standing up and saying what we want said,” summit organiser and Narrunga elder, Tauto Sansbury told Guardian Australia.

Ahead of the summit, Sansbury had said he would like to see “fair representation from each state or territory representing their communities, and I’d like to see them elected by their own community”. On Monday evening he said that while it was impossible to get through everything on the agenda, the summit was “a good start” and covered a lot of issues of great concern for Indigenous Australia.

“The high incarceration and increasing incarceration of Aboriginal women, the high suicide rates that are off the planet, the removing of Aboriginal people off their land in Western Australia and now South Australia, and just the lack of government understanding of Aboriginal issues, culture and our connection to country,” he listed.

“It’s like a tsunami running right through Australia and wiping people away.”

He said the issues have been around for a long time but “we need to tackle them now”. “We want surety that this is going to be a long-serving committee and there’s not going to be anybody for just a short time, and we’re going to deal with issues,” said Sansbury.

The summit concluded with a declaration of sovereignty by the nominated members and a pledge to take it through communities for consultation and to march in Canberra on 26 January and hopefully meet with members of government.

The federal minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, phoned Sansbury over the weekend to offer congratulations on the summit and indicated they would meet in January, Sansbury said.

“We the original sovereign people and heads of the nations being assembled ... declare the independence of our people, which is hereby constituted and declared to be an independent sovereign nation under the designation united tribes of the land,” read the declaration.

“All sovereign power and authority within the territories and the united tribes of this land is hereby declared to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary elders and heads of the tribes in their collective capacity. We also declare that they will not permit any legislative authority separate from themselves in their collective capacity to exist, nor any functions of government to be exercised.” 

Jenny Munro, a Wiradjuri elder and co-founder of the Redfern Aboriginal tent embassy, told the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Organisation (Caama): “We will continue to fight and we will continue this struggle to have our rights to country recognised, our rights to rear our children, our rights to speak our language on our country and our right to determine our future for ourselves.”