Nothing new in Indigenous reform agenda

Indigenous leader Pat Dodson – who revealed he has met Prime Minister Tony Abbott only once, and then in passing – said last week that removal of frontline services from Indigenous organisations working towards Closing the Gap in Indigenous health “would seem counter intuitive to any fair-minded Australian”. But that, he said in this Age OpEd, has been the result of the Federal Government’s much-awaited Indigenous Advancement Strategy...

Indigenous as ’not-Indigenous' as ’Us'?: A dissident insider's views on pushing the bounds for what constitutes 'our mob'

In australia, 'Aboriginality' is often defined by people in constrictive ways that are heavily influenced by the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. An essential component of this is a 'racial' categorisation of peoples that marks sameness and difference, thereby influencing insider and outsider status. In one sense, this categorisation of people acts to exclude non-aboriginal 'others' from participation in preinvasion indigenous ontologies, ways of living that may not have contained such restrictive identity categories and were thereby highly inclusive of outsiders. One of the effects of this is that aboriginal peoples' efforts for 'advancement' - either out of 'disadvantage' and/or towards political independence (ie, sovereignty) - become confined and restricted by what is deemed possible within the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. This is so much so that aboriginal people are at risk of only reinforcing and upholding the very systems that resulted in their original and continuing dispossession.

A Home at School: Building Stronger Indigenous People through Cultural Resurgence in an Urban Ontario Public School Context.

In this thesis, I work through the educational narratives of young Aboriginal women and men as I explore the relationship between cultural programming and student engagement. My analysis is structured through a collaborative Indigenous research project. My overarching task is to explore how a cultural support program, the Native Youth Advancement with Education Hamilton (NYA WEH) Program, offered at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School, located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, attempts to re-imagine Aboriginal education in ways that directly challenge the residential school legacy. In particular, I work to illuminate how particular forms of Aboriginal education are connected to the graduation rates of Aboriginal youth. I argue that the ways in which the NYA WEH Program navigates Native Studies curriculum, relationships, and notions of culture and tradition are significant to the engagement of Aboriginal youth. This research develops theoretical connections between the contemporary experience of Aboriginal social inequality and educational initiatives which attempt to reverse that legacy. By placing the NYA WEH Program narratives side-by-side with literature supporting Aboriginal education for Self-determination, I work to learn how to best support and encourage Aboriginal student engagement in secondary schools across Ontario.

Capturing Australian indigenous perception of virtual landscape

This short paper presents a means of capturing non spatial information (specifically understanding of places) for use in a Virtual Heritage application. This research is part of the Digital Songlines Project which is developing protocols, methodologies and a toolkit to facilitate the collection and sharing of Indigenous cultural heritage knowledge, using virtual reality. Within the context of this project most of the cultural activities relate to celebrating life and to the Australian Aboriginal people, land is the heart of life. Australian Indigenous art, stories, dances, songs and rituals celebrate country as its focus or basis. To the Aboriginal people the term “Country” means a lot more than a place or a nation, rather “Country” is a living entity with a past a present and a future; they talk about it in the same way as they talk about their mother. The landscape is seen to have a spiritual connection in a view seldom understood by non-indigenous persons; this paper introduces an attempt to understand such empathy and relationship and to reproduce it in a virtual environment.

Systemic racism: the hidden barrier to educational success for Indigenous school students

Explanations for poor educational experiences and results for Australian Indigenous school students have, to a great extent, focused on intended or conscious acts or omissions. This paper adopts an analysis based on the legislation prohibiting indirect racial discrimination. Using the elements of the legislation and case law it argues that apparently benign and race-neutral policies and practices may unwittingly be having an adverse impact on Indigenous students' education. These practices or policies include the building blocks of learning, a Eurocentric school culture. Standard English as the language of assessment, legislation to limit schools' legal liability, and teachers' promotions.

Australian Indigenous students: addressing equity issues in assessment

This article provides the background and context to the important issue of assessment and equity in relation to Indigenous students in Australia. Questions about the validity and fairness of assessment are raised and ways forward are suggested by attending to assessment questions in relation to equity and culture-fair assessment. Patterns of under-achievement by Indigenous students are reflected in national benchmark data and international testing programmes like the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Sstudy and the Program for International Student Assessment. The argument developed views equity, in relation to assessment, as more of a sociocultural issue than a technical matter. It highlights how teachers need to distinguish the "funds of knowledge" that Indigenous students draw on and how teachers need to adopt culturally responsive pedagogy to open up the curriculum and assessment practice to allow for different ways of knowing and being.

Doing cultural heritage using the torque game engine: supporting indigenous storytelling in a 3D virtual environment

Digital Songlines (DSL) is an Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) project that is developing protocols, methodologies and toolkits to facilitate the collection, education and sharing of indigenous cultural heritage knowledge. This paper outlines the goals achieved over the last three years in the development of the Digital Songlines game engine (DSE) toolkit that is used for Australian Indigenous storytelling. The project explores the sharing of indigenous Australian Aboriginal storytelling in a sensitive manner using a game engine. The use of the game engine in the field of Cultural Heritage is expanding. They are an important tool for the recording and re-presentation of historically, culturally, and sociologically significant places, infrastructure, and artefacts, as well as the stories that are associated with them. The DSL implementation of a game engine to share storytelling provides an educational interface. Where the DSL implementation of a game engine in a CH application differs from others is in the nature of the game environment itself. It is modelled on the 'country' (the 'place' of their heritage which is so important to the clients' collective identity) and authentic fauna and flora that provides a highly contextualised setting for the stories to be told. This paper provides an overview on the development of the DSL game engine.

The epistemology that maintains white race privilege, power and control of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous peoples' participation in universities

This paper represents my attempt to turn the gaze and demonstrate how Indigenous Studies is controlled in some Australian universities in ways that witness Indigenous peoples being further marginalised, denigrated and exploited. I have endeavoured to do this through sharing an experience as a case study. I have opted to write about it as a way of exposing the problematic nature of racism, systemic marginalisation, white race privilege and radicalised subjectivity played out within an Australian higher education institution and because I am dissatisfied with the on-going status quo. In bringing forth analysis to this case study, I reveal the relationships between oppression, white race privilege and institutional privilege and the epistemology that maintains them. In moving from the position of being silent on this experience to speaking about it, I am able to move from the position of object to subject and to gain a form of liberated voice (hooks 1989:9). Furthermore, I am hopeful that it will encourage others to examine their own practices within universities and to challenge the domination that continues to subjugate Indigenous peoples.