Navigating the territories of Indigenous leadership: Exploring the experiences and practices of Australian Indigenous arts leaders

Abstract

This article explores the leadership of Australian Indigenous artists and arts leaders. We advance the idea of ‘territories’ to convey the overlapping contexts in which Indigenous artistic leaders work, and through this framework seek to highlight the embodied ways individuals enact leadership across country and community. Thematic, narrative and discursive analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with diverse Indigenous artists identify four territories and multiple practices of leadership in which our participants engage. The four territories are: authorisation in a bi-cultural world (cultural authorisation and self-authorising); identity and belonging (both fearless and connected); artistic practice (innovative and custodian of cultural values); and history, colonisation and trauma (expressing and containing trauma, empowering and generating hope). The article builds on emerging research on Indigenous leadership to argue that the experiences of Indigenous artists and a framework designed to reflect their embodied and spatially anchored practices, has broader applicability – revealing new insights about leadership.