Education - a passport from poverty

In my thirst for knowledge, as I progressed through tertiary studies, I also read of great writers such as Stephen Hawking who wrote A Brief History of Time, Isaac Asimov, and his Understanding Physics and Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, but I still sought to read an advanced theoretical standpoint of an Indigenous Australian.

I know my relatives found my collection of thick hard-cover text books a bit peculiar, taking their place on the dining table along side Mills and Boon’s romantic novels, Racing Form Guides and Rugby League Weeks, but they nevertheless understood my pursuit of education was something I felt passionate about.

Last month I was finally able to whet my appetite for quality Indigenous viewpoints, listening to and having meaningful conversations with two of the nation’s leading Indigenous academics at the a conference hosted by QUT, (Re) Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies.

The inspirational and challenging papers presented by Professor Martin Nakata (UTS) and Professor Eileen Morton-Robinson (QUT), in particular their level of intellectual discourse: Nakata on cultural interface - the place I was born into, and Morton-Robinson on cultural borderland - how that space is lived, were worth the admission fee by themselves.

Professor Martin Nakata, Director of Indigenous academic programs at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney, is the first Torres Strait Islander to receive a PhD from an Australian university. His current research work is in curriculum development and online pedagogies, with a particular focus on Indigenous learners.

Professor Nakata spoke articulately and concisely on the dynamics of his discipline:

In this contested space between the two knowledge systems, the cultural interface, things are not clearly black or white, Indigenous or Western.

In this space are histories, politics, economics, multiple and interconnected discourses, social practices and knowledge technologies which condition: how we all come to look at the world ...

Much of what we bring to this is tacit and unspoken knowledge, those assumptions by which we make sense and meaning in our everyday world.

For many Indigenous students and lecturers, regardless of their distance from what we understand as ‘the traditional context’, the Indigenous ... ways of “doing” knowledge are not completely unfamiliar.

These are embedded, not in detailed knowledge of the land and place for all of us perhaps, not perhaps in environmental or ecological knowledge, but in ways of story-telling; of memory-making; in narrative, art and performance; in cultural and social practices ... and so on.

But we are all also grounded in Western epistemology, through historical experience, through Christianisation, through the English language, through interventions of and interactions with colonial and contemporary institutions, through formal education, through subscription to the law, through subscription to the world of work, to democratic values, through everyday living, through use of technology, through popular culture, and so on.