Embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives Dr Yin Paradies BSc MMedStats MPH PhD

1. Embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives Dr Yin Paradies BSc MMedStats MPH PhD Indigenous Knowledges and Cultures Coordinator Professor of Race Relations Faculty of Arts and Education

2. About me • I am a Anglo-Asian-Aboriginal Australian, identified or identifying as Aboriginal since birth • My Aboriginality is via my maternal line, my grandmother was a member of the Stolen Generations • I am a descendant of the Wakaya people of the Gulf of Carpentaria near the NT/Qld border • I was born in Townsville, raised in Darwin from age 9 and have lived in Melbourne since 2007

3. Indigenous Knowledges and Culture Coordinator • A new university-wide role for 2018-19 at 0.4 FTE • Advance, evaluate and review university wide strategies with relevance to Indigenous Knowledges and Culture • Lead and inform practice, teaching, research and curriculum in Indigenous Knowledges and Culture across Deakin

7. Key policy goals • Increase employment, retention, promotion and representation of Indigenous staff and students • Provide a culturally safe environment, including campuses that are inclusive of Indigenous culture • Where relevant, courses include Indigenous references and perspectives and Deakin supports high-quality Indigenous research and research ethics • Robust and respectful engagement with Indigenous communities surrounding Deakin campuses

8. Why Indigenous knowledges? • Indigenous people have been excluded from higher education and continue to experience significant barriers to participation that we can help address • Indigenous people have sophisticated systems of knowledge and learning that have made vast contributions to the Australian nation with far more potential that we can engage with and benefit from • More generally, diversity in perspectives enhances creativity, problem-solving, and innovation in teaching, learning and research at Deakin

9. Indigenous knowledges • Sowed, irrigated and tilled the land • Permanent dwellings (i.e. stone houses) • Altered the course of rivers with dams and weirs • Understood plants, animals, weather & environments • Had a peaceful and prosperous pan-continental government and a flourishing trade economy

11. “Only 17 of nearly 500 recorded stone house sites in Gunditjmara country have been excavated” (McNiven et al. 2017)

12. “The Australian Museum holds in its collections, pieces of grindstones that have traces of plant and animal material that have been dated at 32,000 years. Such evidence suggests that Aboriginal Australians were in line with or even the first in the world to make damper or bread.”

13. Knowledge as a Western construct • “We need to accept that the dominant regime of knowledge is culturally and racially biased, socially situated and partial” (Moreton-Robinson 2004:88) • From the Old English cnāwan, meaning ‘see learn’ • Fundamentally based on privileging sight as the pre-eminent sense (i.e., ocularcentrism)

14. (Adapted from Helms 1992 p. 13)

15. Indigenous perspectives • Circularity and continuity of time and space • And/both instead of either/or binary thinking • Wisdom, consent, respect, generosity and autonomy • Knowing, being and doing (stories, art, song & dance) • Combines reason with feeling, intuition & imagination • Caring and embodied relationship with (non-)humans, including the land and sea within a living cosmos

16. Indigenous perspectives • Vague, elusive, partial and fluid within an rich ‘ontic/epistemic imaginary’ (Verran 1998) • Combines both the literal and metaphorical into an immanent “enacted reality” (Law 2004) • “Knowing and coming into knowing is not about getting knowledge, holding knowledge or treating it as an acquisition. Rather, knowledge is a process of continual integration” (Smith et al. in press, p. 15).

17. Eight ways of knowing (Yunkaporta & Kirby 2011)

18. (Morcom & Freeman 2018)

19. (Graham 2014)

20. Yolŋu ontology/epistemology • Garma (face-to-face here-and-now in truth-making) and galtha (all honourable futures must involve a careful ‘remembering of the future’) • Understanding as a practice of collection action, not knowledge as an ‘object’ out there in the world • Truth expressed via stories; with ‘facts’ as badly told stories without context • Theory is a story about ‘then and there’ while practice is story about ‘here and now’ (Christie 2015)

21. Bawaka Country et al. in press ‘Stories go in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. It helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories. . .’ It is precisely this circular and spiral weaving and wending of stories that prompts learning, and opening to alternative ways of asking, knowing, understanding, and doing

22. (Yunkaporta & McGinty 2009)

25. Current activities • Revision of GLO 8 to include an Indigenous focus and build capacity among teaching teams etc. • Developing Indigenous content on the Inclusive Curriculum and Capacity Building website • Increasing visibility of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research project • Audit of curriculum for appropriate and enhanced Indigenous content

26. Current activities • Adopting IND101(Introduction to Aboriginal Studies) and IND201 (Aboriginal Knowledges and Experiences) into existing courses (e.g. social work, nursing etc.) • Developing an new medical ethics unit based on Indigenous ethical frameworks and approaches • Delivery of ad-hoc cultural competency sessions to faculty boards, executives, school meetings, networks, library staff, DUSA, new staff inductions, PhD students, ECRs etc.

27. Cultural competency training • Historical and contemporary overview • Cultural difference and Indigenous perspectives • Racism, advantage and bias • Fostering culturally appropriate environments

28. Business & Law Indigenous strategy • Cultural competency training for staff & students • Board rep and data /policy/funding development • Build Indigenous staff and student networks • Enhance Indigenous perspectives in courses / WIL • Increase Indigenous staff employment / retention • Community events, engagement and outreach

29. Barriers to Indigenous knowledges • Ignorance of Indigenous knowledges alongside fear of getting it ‘wrong’ and cultural appropriation • Inflexible thinking within the academy about what constitutes valid knowledge (production) • De-valuing of unique, alternative or different ways of understanding and comprehending the world • Resistance to expanding our repertoire of academic approaches to understanding, wisdom and creativity

30. Engaging with Indigenous knowledges • An ongoing journey of understanding, not a time-delimited process of mastery, prediction and control • Messy (open and inter-mingled) but not muddled (i.e., a process which is wrong and damaging) (Bawaka Country et al. 2018) • Approach with openness to uncertainty, modesty / humility and by listening and engaging respectfully

31. Questions yin.paradies@deakin.edu.au