Aboriginal Way Research Articles

Sharing our account of journeying through Jindaola: an Aboriginal way towards decolonising educators

PurposeThis paper illuminates our journey as accounting educators by exploring accounting as a technical, social and moral practice towards decolonising ourselves. It lays the foundations for decolonising the higher education curriculum and the consequences for addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).Design/methodology/approachThis paper focuses on the potential to foster a space for praxis by adopting dialogism-in-action to understand our transformative learning through Jindaola [pronounced Jinda-o-la], a university-based Aboriginal knowledge program. A dialogic pedagogy provided the opportunity to create a meaningful space between us as academics, the Aboriginal Knowledge holder and mentor, the other groups in Jindaola and, ultimately, our accounting students. Since Jindaola privileged ‘our way’ as the pedagogical learning process, we adopt autoethnography to share and reflect on our experiences. Making creative artefacts formed the basis for building relationships, reciprocity and respect and represents our shared journey and collective account.FindingsWe reveal our journey of “holding to account” by analysing five aspects of our lives as critical accounting academics – the overarching conceptual framework, teaching, research, governance and our physical landscape. In doing so, we found that Aboriginal perspectives provide a radical positioning to the colonial legacies of accounting practice.Originality/valueOur journey through Jindaola contemplates how connecting with Country and engaging with Aboriginal ways of knowing can assist educators in meaningfully addressing the SDGs. While not providing a panacea or prescription for what to do, we use ‘our way’ as a story of our commitment to transformative change.

The search for truth: Filming the battle of Meewah

The Battle of Meewah (One Tree Hill) was fought just outside the city of Toowoomba in September 1843. The battle constituted the first major setback to European settlement in Queensland, though it slowed rather than halted the dispossession of First Nations’ people. It offers an invaluable insight into the ‘Aboriginal way of war’ and challenges the widespread perception that First Nation’s peoples were the passive victims of colonial expansion. The battle is the subject of a currently in-production documentary film with the working title The Battle of Meewah. For this documentary the filmmakers have developed a new approach to documentary film authorship that aligns more deeply with Indigenous story telling culture rather than the Western sole-authorship model.

Holding space for an Aboriginal approach towards Curriculum Reconciliation in an Australian university

ABSTRACT Since Universities Australia’s Indigenous Strategy recommended a sector-wide approach to ‘closing the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, universities have grappled with how to do this. Resisting mainstream approaches to curriculum development that eschew any kind of relational accountability (Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing) requires entering difficult relations of power and occupying space to transform the act of curriculum development itself. This paper is the second in a series understanding Jindaola, a programme led by a Local Aboriginal Knowledge Holder within one Australian university. It ‘hacks’ the curriculum development space with staff through Aboriginal way towards Curriculum Reconciliation, building knowledge-based relationships between disciplinary and relevant Aboriginal Knowledge. We deliberately and controversially enact this type of relationship, by temporarily bringing the Foucauldian lens of ‘heterotopia’, and interview data from 30 participants, to describe how Jindaola usurps the neocolonial remit to embed Indigenous Knowledge, and creates and holds a counter-hegemonic space to decolonise curriculum development.

Being on Country as Protest: Designing a Virtual Geography Fieldtrip Guided by Jindaola

The fieldtrip has long been a key component of the geography curriculum, described as a ‘touchstone’ for learning in, on and about place. Learning on Country provides an opportunity to embody Indigenous knowledges and experience places and people in field classes. However, such opportunities are increasingly under threat as the costs and risks of running field trips have risen, and more recently, faced challenges such as those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe the transformation of a third-year undergraduate geography field trip into a virtual field trip using online resources. We reflect on the processes and challenges of doing so in ways that privilege and respect Aboriginal pedagogies and practices in educational design. Drawing on the philosophies and frameworks of Jindaola, an Aboriginal way of embedding Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum, we show how the virtual field trip, as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning, can embed place-based experiential learning into online learning contexts. This paper outlines how the design, articulation and practice of that process is grounded in Country, culture and customs.

Professional development for teachers meeting cross-cultural challenges

Purpose When providing professional development for teachers, certain factors should be considered and included to ensure it is effective and enhances teacher practice and outcomes for children in their classes. While this is achieved in many curriculum areas, there has been little written about effective professional development for teachers in relation to Aboriginal education in Australia, enhancing teacher confidence in meeting the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This paper aims to describe a study concerned with the ongoing development of a professional learning framework empowering primary school teachers to infuse Aboriginal ways of seeing and being into their classroom practice. Design/methodology/approach Design-based methodology, using semi-structured interviews with teachers, allowed for iterative amendment and improvement of the professional learning experiences. A description is provided linking the elements of successful professional development for teachers to the implementation of this study’s professional learning. Findings Key findings are that if the elements noted in the literature pertaining to successful professional learning for teachers are included, change in practice does take place and is sustained, to the benefit of the children they teach. This study demonstrates the vital importance of ongoing collaboration and support for teachers undertaking professional development if they are going to change practice in the longer term. Originality/value The pedagogy described in this paper goes beyond content to an Aboriginal way of teaching children through modelling and how this can be infused into teaching practice.

An Aboriginal way towards curriculum reconciliation

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the context and design of an institutional educational development grants program, Jindaola, which reflects an Aboriginal way towards reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian higher education curriculum. The program is unique in two ways: it foregrounds the voice of Aboriginal local Knowledge Holders in the design and implementation of the program; and, rather than focussing on embedding predefined ‘packages’ of Indigenous Knowledges and pedagogies into curricula, the approach adheres to Aboriginal methods for conducting business and maintaining knowledge integrity, by taking interdisciplinary teams of academics on a journey towards what we are calling ‘curriculum reconciliation’.

Learning in Place, Cultural Mapping and Sustainable Values on the Millawa Billa (Murray River)

This paper presents an Indigenous perspective on the significance of land, culture and Indigenous rights. The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples promote the importance of traditional Indigenous societies, such as Aboriginal Australians. Participating in caring for country methods and having a close on-going relationship to the land is also supported in this Declaration. As well as this, these principles support the notion of Indigenous education for community, and youth in particular, in places of cultural significance and places of longstanding occupation. All of this lends itself to an Aboriginal way of being in terms of cultural teaching and learning. These principles are incorporated into a performative perspective of traditional pedagogy and the incorporation of cultural practices in a best practice model that can incorporate cultural mapping as an exercise that expounds environmental and ecological perspectives within learning places on the land. Through connection to land and community relationships to cultural knowledge and cultural values, this paper will provide an Indigenous standpoint on Indigenous experiences and senses of place and the importance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in advancing significant principles and initiatives that value Indigenous ways of being and doing.

Growing Up the Future: Children's Stories and Aboriginal Ecology

Growing Up the Future: Children's Stories and Aboriginal Ecology

Sharing stories: a place for aboriginal elders to tell their story, so their journey continues …

Aboriginal organisations throughout Victoria are funded to deliver quality services to Aboriginal people through HACC, Aged Care, and Disability programs. Services are delivered in a culturally appropriate way taking into...

Re-thinking Nature, Fact and Fiction

In the halcyon days of publishing in Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Queensland Press (UQP) established an innovative series on the Australian Environment edited by Alan Gilpin. The series emerged from the flourishing scientific, environmental and conservation discourses. This was not the only way, or even then the central way, UQP addressed environmental issues. On the one hand, the Press actively supported the emergence of an Australian postcolonial canon in fiction and poetry through (re)publishing the works of Steele Rudd, Vance Palmer and Peter Carey. In the need to develop an international market for their books, however, fiction editors could easily and did edit out descriptions of the Australian environments. On the other hand, the Press published technical studies such as a series on Australian Ecology. With the rupture in the management of the Press in 1983, the Australian Environment series was stopped. By the 1990s with the increasing recognition of the Australian Aboriginal way of thinking about country (and the delineation of Australasian territorial copyright) UQP pulled back from developing a global market in order to establish a successful Black Australian Writers series for, primarily, a national readership. The genre of 'bush realism' and other new writing by non-Indigenous Australians that drew on environmental differences of the 'new world' in contrast to the old, as a result, shifted away from central stage in narratives of the nation.

Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley (review)

Reviewed by: Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley J. David Wood (bio) Neil S. Forkey. Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley University of Calgary Press. xvi, 164. $34.95 The author claims the Trent Valley experience to be a microcosm of the pioneer settling throughout North America, and this study to be a model for analysing it. A critical review of the book in an Ontario journal, by an academic named in the acknowledgments as 'very helpful,' challenged the present reviewer first to look for virtues. Part 1 argues for bioregional/environmental history as an appropriate methodology, especially in light of the Aboriginal way of life and the ubiquitous struggle of the pioneers with the natural conditions. 'Ecological locale' (area as natural environment) and 'home place' are introduced as analytical tools. The Mississauga's resistance to giving up their traditional access to the land might be seen as attachment to a home place. The three case study chapters in part 2, dealing with the hubris of Purdy's mill dam on the Scugog River, the activities of lumbermen and settlers on the Bobcaygeon colonization road, and the story of the matriarch Catharine Parr Traill, are readable, informative, and copiously referenced (the first two from primary sources). The overall impression is that the case studies were separate, thoroughly researched essays that were then yoked to a theoretical context provided by part 1. The first chapter justifies the environmental history methodology and avers, 'the study of human interaction with nature ... should deal intimately with these two variables and demonstrate an understanding of both.' The breadth of knowledge required is a unique challenge for environmental historians, and part 1 falls short of demonstrating intimacy with the natural components. There seems to be a lack of understanding of the two fundamental aspects of the environment, the geomorphology (land surface) and the climate. It is not reassuring to read of glacier-cut 'deep ridges,' 'foothills' (of?) or waste lands 'straddling' (rather than characterizing) the Canadian Shield after the extraction of the big timber. The climate is described in very general terms that fail to distinguish between the Rice Lake and Haliburton extremes of the watershed. The boundaries of the Trent Valley bioregion are not clarified, though its northward reach 150 kilometres north of Lake Ontario is mentioned. References to 'the upper Trent Valley' are puzzling. The reader is not told why the parts of the valley highlighted are significant or why other parts can be ignored. This ecological context is less helpful than it might be in the explanation of the early settlement. The prime importance of land in human settlement presents the greatest theoretical hazard to the writing of environmental history, namely the temptation to attribute purpose to nature. The book refers to the environment as an actor, a player, an agent, and not 'a passive object.' Historical [End Page 476] geographers and Canada's Laurentian historians wrestled with this problem in the early decades of the twentieth century, and were cautious in describing the role of nature. A related issue is the imputing to people of intentions and beliefs without providing supporting evidence or framing the debates over, for example, claims that settlers copied the Native occupants and also aimed to replicate the landscapes of their overseas homes. To demonstrate cultural transfer from the old country by the pioneer Irish requires a full case study based on specific local evidence, in addition to citing the standard sources. If the land is of vital importance to a bioregional historian, why not show what the Irish did to domesticate the terrain of actual townships in which they settled? It would be helpful if the two-page conclusion could be expanded to clarify the ways in which the Trent Valley was a microcosm of the North American frontier. Typographical errors (starting with two in the table of contents), incorrect words ('proscribe' for 'prescribe' or wheat called 'import' rather than 'export'), and awkward expressions in part 1 suggest editorial deficiency, as does the division of the book into two parts only in the table of contents. To conclude positively, there is a wide...

The White Indian: Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Grey Owl and the Spectre of Authenticity

Almost from the moment he died, and it was revealed that he was not an Apache half-breed but an Englishman, Grey Owl has been depicted largely as a fake or fraud, an impostor. He is one of the numerous members of the Wannabe Tribe who claim to have special insight into the Aboriginal way of life. However, in his 1996 poetic biography Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, Armand Garnet Ruffo suggests that Grey Owl may not have been guilty of deception, at least as far as the First Nations are concerned. After all, Ruffo writes, not only were most Aboriginal people Grey Owl knew aware of his identity, but they were instrumental in his metamorphosis.

Natives on the Electronic Frontier

Natives on the Electronic Frontier

Mapping the mythological landscape: An aboriginal way of being‐in‐the‐ world

Mapping the mythological landscape: An aboriginal way of being‐in‐the‐ world

Mapping the Mythological Landscape: an Aboriginal Way of Being-in-the-World

Warlpiri Aborigines utilize graphic and cognitive systems to represent their connections to landscape. The Dreaming is the primary mechanism through which Warlpiri organize and understand the significance of places. Each Dreaming myth has an accompanying graphic map, which references incidents and places associated with Ancestors. The maps recount sites along Dreaming tracks, and provide assessments of resources. Warlpiri create these coded images to coordinate physiographic and mythical components of the landscape. They structure knowledge about the world and facilitate the recollection of activities in space. Dreaming maps signify, among other things, aspects of cultural ecology around which society is organized.

Iodine nutrition in two Tasmanian cultures.

When Europeans occupied Tasmania, the Aboriginal way of avoiding goitre was lost.

Education for Christian Leadership: Responding to the Aboriginal Way

Education for Christian Leadership: Responding to the Aboriginal Way

An aboriginal way of being Australian

An aboriginal way of being Australian

Learning to Read the Aboriginal Way

This article briefly describes recent approaches to Aboriginal reading education, and assesses their possible usefulness on the basis of the extent to which they are consistent with present-day cognitive and cross-cultural psychological views on reading. Competence approaches are seen as having least likelihood of success, while other approaches based on indigenous learning styles, explicit metacomprehension skills, and functional literacy provide a suitable base for Aboriginal learning.

Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

... Jenness quickly found his curiosity about anthropology blossoming into a vocation. In 1911 he was appointed Oxford Scholar to Papua, New Guinea, where he spent twelve months studying Northern Entrecasteaux. Upon his return to New Zealand, he was asked to join Canadian Arctic Expedition, an ambitious government-funded scientific enterprise under direction of well-known arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and R.M. Anderson. In June, 1913, Jenness found himself aboard refitted whaling vessel Karluk steaming northward to Bering Strait and beyond to Beaufort Sea. ... In autumn of 1913, small vessel became locked in sea ice off northern coast of Alaska. Unable to free itself, ship drifted helplessly westward towards Siberian Sea, where it was finally crushed in ice off Wrangel Island. Eight men perished in their bid to reach mainland. By a stroke of fortune, Jenness was not aboard Karluk when she drifted off; he, Stefansson, and several others had left ship earlier on a routine hunting trip. Abandoning hopeless task of searching for Karluk, which was lost to sight when they returned, hunting party headed for Barrow, Alaska to rendezvous with remaining two vessels of expedition, Alaska and Mary Sachs. Jenness spent his first winter at Harrison Bay, Alaska, where he learned to speak Inuktitut, gathered information about Western Eskimo customs and folklore, and experienced at first-hand precarious existence of northern hunter. In spring of 1914, he set out along coast to expedition's base camp at Bernard Harbour in Coronation Gulf region. Here he engaged in one of most important goals of Canadian Arctic Expedition-the study of Copper Eskimos of Victoria Island, a people first brought to attention of civilized world by Stefansson only four years earlier. When Jenness arrived in Coronation Gulf region, only a handful of Europeans had visited land of Copper Eskimo. Merchants had only just begun to ply their trade in area, and missionaries and Northwest Mounted Police were yet to arrive. As a consequence, Copper Eskimo remained largely unaffected by contact with outside world. Jenness, therefore, was charged with recording a virtually pristine aboriginal way of life that would change radically within a generation. Jenness spent two years with these Central Eskimo people, living for one year as adopted son of hunter Ikpukhuak and his shaman wife Higalik. During that time he hunted and traveled with his family, sharing both their festivities and their famine. The monographs and publications that resulted from this field work have been recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive description of a single Eskimo tribe ever written. ... During his tenure with National Museum, Jenness published two seminal articles on northern archaeology. The first paper identified a new prehistoric culture in eastern Arctic - Dorset Culture - which Jenness believed to have preceded Thule Culture (the ancestors of contemporary Inuit) by a millenium or more. The second paper hypothesized Old Bering Sea Culture of Bering Strait area, a complex which Jenness believed not only preceded Thule Culture in western Arctic but which was ancestral to it. Considered radical at time of their publication, these theories are now widely accepted, having been vindicated by carbon-14 dating and subsequent field research. Jeness's interest in Arctic never waned. As late as 1968 he was still articulating his concern for Inuit struggle to survive. Among his last works was a series of five volumes published by The Arctic Institute of North America that reviewed government policies toward Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. ...