Indigenous Arts Leaders Disrupt the Lexicon of Leadership

Through investigating the term ‘leadership’ as it makes sense to Indigenous arts leaders in Australia, this paper attempts to destabilize and reproduce new meanings and sense making about thisterm ‘leadership’. I will explore the intersections of cultural citizenship, cultural capital and cultural production as they shape the available space Indigenous arts leaders inhabit. Rather than identifying individual characteristics of Indigenous arts leadership, this study describes the territories or terrains through which individuals construct and adapt their leadership. These fluid territories find themselves shaded by tensions of identity politics, lateral violence and hemmed in by discourses of managerialism, yet beyond the challenges and difficulty of working in this space Indigenous arts leaders enact what it means to belong. This study aims to disrupt implicit leadership theories (Sinclair, 2007) and listen for new meanings, culturally contextualized meanings of leadership for Indigenous arts leaders. Seeing and hearing Indigenous arts leaders through not only a critical lens, but a lens that is both appreciative and relational (Bolden & Kirk,2009), this study seeks to illuminate the words and discourses that Indigenous arts leaders work within.