Kind Regards: fire-making as ethical resistance and anticolonial praxis with River

Kind Regards Collective, W. Somerville, B. Turner, C. Arnold, R. Isaacs-Guthridge, V. McKenzie, A. van den Heuvel, N. J. Godden & L. Fuller (2025). Kind Regards: fire-making as ethical resistance and anticolonial praxis with River. Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2025.2595091

Winner of 2025 CPPP Director’s Citational Justice Award.

We are eight Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars collaborating across Country who examine how relational, place-based storying functions as an ethical site of resistance and anti-colonial practice. Grounded in our relationships with three rivers, we demonstrate how being in relation with place and each other challenges colonial overwriting of history and enables the reimagining of anti-colonial futures. We introduce ‘fire-making’ as an ethical and anti-colonial methodology grounded in relationality. Like tending a fire, we collect material to enable ignition, feed and stoke the flames, and maintain burn through yarning, moving and storying together. This practice guides our engagement with uncomfortable truths about the ecological impacts of colonial behaviour. We examine how fences, signs and weeds materially mark ongoing colonial violence, while also exploring the ethical negotiations required to sustain respectful relationships with Country and one another. We position storytelling as a deliberate act of resistance, an intentional modelling of how Aboriginal peoples have always made futures. Through iterative cycles of sharing, responding, and re-telling, we show how collaborative, place-based storying can inform Indigenist futures and offer a cultural studies praxis grounded in ethical accountability to place.