Exploring ways to evoke weaving and yarning sovereign relationships is a key contribution of this webtext. The pursuit to explore what Arturo Escobar (2018) called an inter-epistemic, inter-cultural, inter-ontological ways of narrating our personal stories of sovereignty and sovereign relationships has led us to compose multimodal and poly-vocal ways to highlight how these practices are enacted, participated in and welcomes many to further enfold and nurture sovereign relationships. Such entwining of non-textual elements demonstrates plurality of engagements and materials created by, with, through many gestures, places and movements. These materials are important and plentiful sites to story-tell intersections, coexistence and correspondences, bringing people together, creating shared experiences and providing opportunities to connect as sovereign nation members. Memorable moments during Sovereign Weaving was often just being together—sitting on the banks of the Murrumbidgee river and listening to squawks of Cockatoos at dusk, or watching the artists manifest beauty through weaving reeds and native bird feathers. These are powerful co-ontological enactments of sovereign relationships. We have aimed to make the plural human and non-human participation in sovereign relationships evident through this Inventio webtext to imbue intimate and intangible facets of being that have been just as significant in shaping the gatherings.
While the narrative is structured and argued through analytical writing, using common conventions for reporting research, we hope we evoked a sensual connection in the viewer's imagination as an encounter somewhere "in-between" (Akama, 2015) to kindle the richness of sovereign relationships. Rather than evacuating the local by assimilating it in an abstract universal, we have learnt from hermeneutic traditions to convey "a loving grasp of detail" and "thoughts intimately tied to places" (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 18). In doing so, we attempted to bring a renewed focus on the tensions that dominant epistemologies and practices can entrench without careful vigilance. This is also an important reminder that this webtext, as well as any communication materials that were, and are being designed as part of our research are not static, universal or self-contained representations of knowledge. They are dynamic, partial, relational patchwork of temporal traces that can only speak "nearby", rather than for or about, a common event (Trin Minh-ha, quoted in Chen, 1992). Plural traces woven here are done in the hope to respect the sentience of relationalities.
Weaving and yarning is evidently powerful, and can provide welcoming entry points for non-Indigenous people to consider their sovereign relationships. We hear this in a quote by a prominent non-Indigenous writer and scholar, Merrill Findlay (2015), who participated in Wiradjuri Hands-on-Weavers event: "Weavers are very powerful people, you are weaving together not only diverse plant materials, but also diverse people and in the process you are co-creating a future that will be very different from our troubled past. So you weavers are very powerful women! You are weaving together not only diverse plant materials, but also diverse people, and, in the process, you are co-creating a future that will be very different from our troubled pasts. . . Reconciliation not only between Wiradjuri and non-Wiradjuri people, but with Mother Earth too. My people's actions over the past two hundred years have damaged this land we now share dreadfully but, through your weaving, you are showing us a different way. By gently harvesting plant material, colouring it with natural dyes, and creating beautiful objects, you are showing us all how we might tread more softly upon this earth so that, in another 40,000 years, women like us will still be able to weave native grasses into beautiful baskets, bowls and bags for pleasure and for utility. Thank you for these lessons."
To premise Indigenous sovereignty and to engage in sovereign relationships is to embrace this troubled past, yet be open, curious and courageous to explore many futures that we could weave and yarn together. We leave the readers to twine their own interpretation and stories with the traces of our work to consider what sovereign relationships might mean to them.