Contesting colonial digital power: Indigenous Australian sovereignty and self-determination in digital worlds

Interest in decolonizing the digital continues to grow from rhetorical gestures to transform digital spaces to specific interventions that highlight colonial power. At the same time, more questions are emerging about exactly what the concept of digital decolonization can substantively offer. Ecomedia scholarship has engaged with some of these questions, such as how the digital can facilitate decolonization of ecocriticism and provide ways to decolonize and Indigenize digital mapping. This chapter offers a critical perspective on the digital presences that misrepresent, and inappropriately share, information about Indigenous peoples in the country now known as Australia as well as new digital worlds. The impact of popular digital spaces that are not authored or controlled by Indigenous Australians is considered in order to evaluate and problematize claims to knowledge and decolonization in this setting. We challenge those that are interested in digital decolonization to think and act in ways that recognize, honor, and respect Indigenous Australian people’s sovereignty and self-determination. Drawing on Ruha Benjamin’s invitation to dismantle currently existing problematic digital worlds while simultaneously crafting new ones, we also discuss digital worlds that assert the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous Australians in this chapter.