Negotiating Worldviews: Indigenous Place in Academic Space

Abstract

This chapter describes and critiques, from the perspective of an Indigenous global scholar, the development and delivery of a series of degree courses of study designed to respond to the historical, social and cultural trauma consequent to colonial worldviews interfacing with Aboriginal Australian Peoples and the expressed need for healing – not a word commonly used in the academy. Indigenous pedagogical approaches have confronted the power and privilege of the academy, in a creative tension that has demanded negotiated space under principles of cultural safety and security. While that space was being negotiated (and continues to be), invitations to take our work to Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea, have provided opportunity to consider the international movement of Indigenous Peoples to negotiate place in the international academic domain, and for Indigenous Pedagogy to show its relevancy and transportability across cultures, with our near neighbours and others, who, while having diverse histories, often have similar worldviews.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Introduction

This is both an inner story and an outer journey. My work over the last 25 years, at the community level, into higher degree studies, and as Head of College and Professor of Indigenous Australian Studies at an Australian university, has had a primary focus on violence and its relational historical, social and cultural trauma. The word healing entered my vocabulary after on-going discussions with Aboriginal¹ Australian peoples, my countrymen and women, who used the word with a sense of longing, and a felt and expressed distressed necessity, in their lives; and at the international level with other Indigenous scholars and peoples.

So when I am asked what my scholarly discipline is, my answer is ‘violence – trauma – healing’. And therein is the problem. By its very nature this work is inter and multi-disciplinary. I do not fit into any particular disciplinary box within universities.

This story will explore the journey that took me into and out of the academy, as I struggled to negotiate a place for Indigenous worldviews and pedagogical practice, within a space that was, and continues to be controlled by a dominance that, too often, believes in its own superiority. In an attempt to create safe places of learning and healing, within academic space – I often found a continuation of colonial systems of power, perpetrated by the very institution(s) in which I was working.

Underpinning all of this has been the deep struggle within myself, the choices I had to make each day – the path – or trail – I choose to follow, aware that finding my knowing depended on walking that path with clear intent.

This then, is a story of a personal struggle between two worlds, while attempting to maintain the professional integrity of applied scholarship.

2 The Journey: A Beginning

When you see a new trail, or a footprint you do not know, follow it to the point of knowing. Uncheedah²

The journey began in September 1987, when an Elder Aboriginal woman took me aside to ask for my help after a small child had been raped.³ She and other Elders had been told by authorities that ‘it was cultural’, hence there was nothing they could do.

Our Elder was outraged and distressed. As I understood, no child, under Aboriginal Law would be treated in such a way. In seeking to find why no charges had been laid, as I talked to law enforcement officers, I found at worst, explicit, overt prejudice and racism; and at the least, ill-informed, uneducated, and ignorant attitudes and opinions by those who should have made investigations and laid charges.

As I continued my search, I found troubling statistics around violence against Aboriginal women and children that far outweighed the number of deaths in custody over which a royal commission had been established. I talked to senior Aboriginal males in the Aboriginal Coordinating Council for whom I worked and was encouraged and supported to follow this request by Elder women and men to ‘do something’. I met with some resistance from a few of our male leaders, for they felt I could be ‘tainting all Aboriginal men with the same brush’, if I followed this path. There was also much resistance within government circles, for as one senior official said to me: ‘don’t talk about things like that. People will think self-management is not working’.

I choose to walk the path the Elder women asked of me. I began with an expectation that the legal system should have the answers, once it became aware of ‘the problem’; to hope the health system might provide some solutions; to finally, coming to a belief and commitment to education as the most promising way forward.

Hence I followed the pathway of scholarship, not a scholarship that had me locked in a room in a university, but one where I could sit on the ground, listening to and learning from stories of the people who had lived their lives under government policies and controls over an Australian colonial history; who knew their communities, knew the problems and wanted something to happen; and were willing to work to make it happen. In listening, I also learnt to reflect and think before coming to a deeper understanding, enabling me to choose to advocate and act. The work of my PhD resulted in a thesis.⁴ However it was the communal activities within the fieldwork of my PhD studies which resulted in the richness that kept me on my path. A series of educational packages embodied within an organisation we called We Al-li, two words from the language of the Woppaburra people of central Queensland. We – fire, and Al-li – water, essential elements for all life, used often in healing ceremonies by Indigenous people; also symbolic of two deep emotions I found present in all with whom I was working – anger and grief. I found under anger with all its attendant sub-emotions and actions, was grief, an anguish that was layered, unresolved, often depressed or suppressed, and increasingly acted out on self and others. I named what I found, generational trauma, deep hurt that needed healing.

The activities of We Al-li was what we called storywork, sitting together, sharing stories, teaching each other, not just of pain and disorder, but of resilience and creativity, using deep cultural processes in what worked when people made the choice to do something about their lives and change their own circumstances. These were stories that some might call trauma stories, that were held in the mind body spirit, and told in art, dance, song and storytelling.

3 My Experience as a Global (Indigenous) Scholar

These studies provided me entry into a university at a level where I could progress study programs, at the under- and postgraduate level, designed, developed and delivered by our own peoples, to respond to these expressed violence- trauma- healing needs. I became linked to other Indigenous scholars at the international level. Between 2003 and 2008, using We Al-li modules⁵ as templates, we crafted documents for academic board, that provided an accredited pathway of study and research scholarship for a Diploma of Community Recovery; an undergraduate degree in Trauma and Healing; a Master of Indigenous Studies (wellbeing); and working with scholars from Canada, the USA, and New Zealand, a Professional Doctorate in Indigenous Philosophies.

Apart from our work within Aboriginal Australia, we were invited to deliver the Diploma of Community Recovery in Timor Leste, which we taught bilingually, in Tetum and in English.

In September 2009, the people of Kaugere, a settlement on the edge of Port Moresby, the government centre of Papua New Guinea, invited us to run a 5 day workshop with a focus on human rights in relationship to family and community violence. Because there is no school in Kaugere for the children, Peter and Lydia Kailap had established the Children’s University of Music and Arts (CUMA), with volunteer workers using music and art to teach children who are eager to learn. Often the only meal the children received for the day was at the school. For the 5 days we were there, the school became an adult learning centre – a ‘university’. Each day 75 men and women, the parents of the children who attended the school, sat together to consider the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1956); the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) in relationship to the violence they live with on a daily basis. Starting with what happens to children when they witness and hence experience violence, the men, and the women, at first in separate gender groups, and then together, worked to develop a community development approach to their needs, which could enable healing change to occur within Kaugere, and elsewhere.

As I think back to those 5 days I witnessed the deepening movement of education to ‘educaring’. In the first round people began to feel safe, so that they could listen and learn together. Once they felt comfortable, not threatened by what they were learning, they went deeper, inwards, looking at themselves. And in the circular process of listening and learning together, as their voices grew strong and powerful, the sound rose up, and in the process talking became music, shared between them, and with us, the visitors, a social healing. They were talking to each other about issues of violence they had never previously discussed. On the last day, in what they called a celebration of change, they sang us a farewell song. A young man, Emmanuel Mailau sang his song, ‘Children’. Ceremonies can often be rituals of grieving, and the song ‘Children’ is a lament for the lives of children, crying and dying on the hills around Moresby.

These are human experiences and they validate our humanness. The song, ‘Children’, located us in a place where children see much violence, where children are hungry because their parents have no money to buy food, and where children die early from diseases that are preventable. As Emmanuel says: “I live in a settlement. The song is about all the children that I see every day living such hard lives of poverty, the orphans that roam the streets in the settlement – it is an emotional song”. Yet every morning in Kaugere we also heard the voices of children who attend CUMA, singing their joyful morning songs, showing that while violence in its varied shape-shifting forms is remarkably resilient, so are children, as they reach beyond themselves engaging in celebration – ceremonies of healing, each morning in this small classroom without walls. They taught me what it is to be human.

As I flew out of Papua New Guinea I reflected on the relevancy of education in the lives of children, in the way parents can ‘educare’, teachers can educate, and the responsibility of the academy, institutions of higher learning, to learn how to ‘get it right’ as they graduate the elite of our societies.

I left Papua New Guinea to travel to Timor Leste, to deliver the last unit in the Diploma of Community Recovery. Each day in class we would explore the need for men and women to heal from the multiple human rights violations that have been part of the historical, social and cultural trauma of Timor Leste. There is, within this small island, the world’s youngest democracy, the human will to find a better way to live together, a resonance that rises from working in conflict transformation and peace building, in healing from generational trauma.

‘In Timor’, the students said to me, ‘we must all be responsible for re-building our country. No one person created our violence. We now must find a way to heal, men and women, separately, and together, always placing in the centre of our circle, our children’. They painted as they talked together in the classroom without walls, a circle dance on canvas, with children surrounded by their families and communities. As I sat back listening and watching them talk and work together, the canvas moved and danced and sang to me. They discussed culture as a changing moving entity, and yet under the intellectual discussions, at their core, they drew on the strength of their resilience and resonance, both separate yet interdependent qualities in the work of community peace building. They taught me, again, what it is to be human.

In Timor Leste, where the film Balibo had just been released, these students were all members of families who have, in various ways, survived the genocide of multiple colonisations and invasions. The students all work with people who have suffered torture trauma. These students inspired me with their capacity to laugh, sing, cry and be heartbreakingly real as we went about our studies. In Timor, with each visit, there is always a celebration – a birth – a marriage – the commemoration of the Santa Cruz massacre this last time. They gather to dance and sing in celebration of their survival, of the great genocide that is their history. Here students asked me, what is the difference between political trauma, historical trauma, social trauma, and cultural trauma? Can you explain the differences between loss and grief, victimization, and traumatisation? Their challenge to me, is my challenge to myself, to get it right, to walk a good path from the community into the academy and back into community, that allows us all to answer those questions well, in the languages we all understand.

Violence displaces people at multiple levels, fracturing our sense of safety in the world. The key to health and being well is both immediate and trans-generational, essentially at the same time, places of learning and spaces for healing. It is also about healing, in education, or ‘educaring’. Education is healing, yet our academy does not yet understand this. The space between continues to be negotiated by our two worlds.

In Aboriginal Australia, in Timor Leste and in Papua New Guinea, as we worked together, we found deeply embedded layered generational trauma, often specific to place and the stories of that place. We found between our peoples and our countries, essential diversity yet important commonalities. The common threads connected us, and the diversity taught us more deeply about our human condition. We found all of the people who invited us in, responsive to the protocols of dadirri ⁶ or other language words with similar meanings: listening to one another in reciprocal relationships; really deep listening and wanting to listen; hearing, listening, learning, feeling, thinking, understanding, knowing, from the heart.⁷ We worked to create safe places for people to be with each other, to find and tell their trauma stories. Sometimes the feelings were intense and people stayed connected to hear and witness, and to bear witness, to reflect and learn. It was from this we built our educational practice. At that time we did not understand that we were working within a trauma informed educational care and practice, for all our students. We just called it ‘educaring’.

For too many, their stories had become senseless and they felt hopeless to change their lives. The pain felt too great. However in the sharing, as the stories came, helplessness and hopelessness turned to courage and hope as people started to grieve and grow together. These were stories that were not in text books. They were lived experiences.

Often we worked on the ground, on floors, sitting sometimes on cushions, watching as people drew their story maps, their loss history graphs, their trauma grams, and then began to talk, to themselves, and with each other about what they were finding. We provided the researched text that validated what they already knew but were making more explicit in their reflective discussions. People in the university questioned why we did not want lecture theatres. Our students did not need to be lectured at. They provided lessons from life experiences that were not yet written.

We used cultural tools for healing – story, art, music, theatre, dance, always placing the trauma stories of people and place, as the centre-piece of our work. The storytellers were our teachers and we learnt as we listened. These stories were not just about individuals but linked social groups across history and country. The Stories were about the storyteller(s) culture and identity.⁸

New cultural tools were being developed to meet deepening knowledge about their own lived experiences and needs. We watched people transform their lives, making sense of what had previously been senseless to them. All our work was encompassed within an educational approach that provided personal support while developing strong theory-to-practice professional skills, for healing from trauma.

In the beginning, as our small group in the university worked together to develop our educational packages, we had understood our teaching-learning practice was an Indigenous pedagogy, influenced by the work of Paulo Freire and derived from Indigenous worldviews. One of our colleagues defined the basis of Indigenous philosophies and educational strategies as:

the underlying principles of relationships and balance…the individual is required to develop to the full, those personal attributes that can enhance the life of the group. Learning is very much a process of experiencing, of watching patiently and quietly, and of absorbing. Learning is a life-long process, which takes place formally and informally. As people become increasingly knowledgeable, and assert their knowledge, they also become increasingly responsible for teaching the new generation who will take over from them. In an Indigenous educational environment this ‘sharing of knowing’ is made possible through the literature of Orality, Iconography and Ritual: of narrative, song, symbol, dance and drama.⁹

Ours was a person centred approach, and we began to formally refer to our work as Edu-caring, an integrated education/healing model asserting that those who came together had much to teach each other … exemplifying the true meaning of the Latin term ‘educare’: to lead out from, to show the way, under principles of teaching and learning reciprocity.¹⁰ This ‘educaring’ approach honours an Indigenous Pedagogy and concentrates on the notion that healing is educational, and education can be healing.

We believe that personal and professional development is interrelated and interdependent and the nexus between the personal and professional is crucial. For example, Indigenous approaches to education place a strong emphasis on enhancing self and community learning, in much reflective practice and critical discussion. It is the process of becoming aware of self and others, which underpins purposeful personal development and healing as a cornerstone to education, training and skill enhancement. Just as we now understood trauma to be generational in many Aboriginal lives, we articulated learning as a transgenerational process of experiencing, absorbing and sharing of knowing – a generational healing.

In Indigenous education, the process of identifying ‘who am’ and ‘how I relate to the world’ is of paramount importance and considered the starting point for learning. The emphasis in the first instance is on what is happening for me ‘in here’ rather than on an objective analysis of what is happening in the world ‘out there’.¹¹

4 A Worldview That Informed My Teaching and Research Practice

The way of knowledge is like our old way of hunting. You begin with a mere trail - a footprint. If you follow that faithfully, it may lead you to a clearer trail - a track - a road. Later on there will be many tracks, crossing and diverging one from the other. Then you must be careful, for success lies in the choice of the right road.¹²

All cultures and peoples define their worldview, providing conceptual order which allows them to understand how the world functions and how it is structured.¹³ In the beginning I felt lost, because the view of the world that I knew had been shattered. As a woman coming to middle age I had never previously known of the levels of violence I was then witnessing and documenting, as I worked to develop an educational approach to our needs.

World is the totality of all that exists around us, including the physical universe, the earth, life, mind, society and culture. Because it is we who make sense of our worlds, our worldview should also answer the basic questions “Who am I - Who are we?” These were the first questions we started to explore as we developed We Al-li and its off-spring- the Diploma and Masters. Worldview explains “Why is the world the way it is? Where do we come from?” This is where we also find answers to important questions “where are we going?”, proving a list of possibilities, choices, values and rules for living – a sense of purpose, or meaning of life, providing a theory to our action (praxis). These are deeply embedded in Aboriginal philosophies and spiritual teachings, in song and dance and ceremony. Worldviews influence pedagogy.

Torres Strait Island man, Martin Nakata says Indigenous scholars are often engaged in studying texts that have been written ‘about them’ which is not simply an intellectual activity but also, “an emotional journey that often involves outrage, pain, humiliation, guilt, anxiety and depression”.¹⁴ Here we were creating our own ‘texts’. We found the Stories that came in our first work, were full of pain and shame, and yet we saw the pain transformed into healing action, as we listened, learned and took action together. We witnessed people stop and catch their breath as they completed their generational story-map or trauma gram – many times, looking up with tears, saying ‘then it is not my fault’ – or – ‘now I understand’, as they saw that across each generation, government interventions into the lives of their families potentially imposed another layer of trauma.

Or, as I witnessed in Timor Leste during the loss and grief unit as a student stood in front of the grief cycle chart: “first we had the Portuguese; then world war two; then the Indonesians – and the Santa Cruz massacre” … and so on and so on, each student having lost members of their families in those recent massacres.

Marie Battiste, Cree scholar, draws out distinctive features of Indigenous knowledge, and pedagogy, which resonates across all the Indigenous cultures in which I have lived and learnt, to various degrees. “Learning is by observation and doing”. Authentic, shared experiences are our teachers, “embracing … both the circumstances people find themselves in and their beliefs about those circumstances”. Such a system, Battiste points out, ‘constantly adapts to the dynamic interplay of changing empirical knowledge as well as changing social values’. She cautions against “petrifying, oversimplifying, or mystifying Indigenous knowledge systems by stressing their normative content or ‘sacredness’.”¹⁵

Karen Martin, of the Quandamoopah Noonuccal, challenged me to give value to the Storywork as an academic pursuit. In her seminal work on relatedness theory, she writes on Meta-story work in its essential place in Quandamoopah worldviews: “These are stories about what is known, what is being known and what is yet to be known and thus they are grounding, defining, comforting and embracing. They vary in purpose and content and so they can be political and yet equally healing. Their meanings and messages teach, admonish, tease, celebrate, entertain, provoke and still the spirit, and so cannot be fully understood in the didactic way of reading the written words”.¹⁶ She shows us Stories can: engage, challenge, confirm and enlighten, as she names “Storywork as a meta-process that enables many smaller Stories to be woven together”¹⁷ into a larger whole.

Martin would argue as I do, that Indigenous worldviews and their informed pedagogy, are both old, and at the same time, emerging and evolving as they are being defined and re-defined, named and renamed, lived and relived.

While the work of such Indigenous scholars sustained me, I revisited the work of Paulo Freire, for I felt clear connections between what we were doing, and his first book, Education as the practice of freedom, followed by his Critical Pedagogy.¹⁸

Friere’s¹⁹ contribution to the pedagogy that informed my teaching practice is the requirement that learning should help the student perceive and challenge social, political, and economic contradictions, providing in essence, a voice to the voiceless. Hence they are able to develop a critical awareness and could take action, both as individuals and in social groups, becoming responsible for what they are doing with their expanding worldviews.

For me, an Indigenous critical pedagogy builds bridges between old and new knowledge, in both cross and interdisciplinary approaches to education. Indigenous teaching learning research practice is old, yet it is also evolving as we respond to changing worldviews emanating from changed, and changing circumstances, that I now call the violence trauma vortex. I needed to be engaged in healing work, within the academy, if the academy was to have any meaning in our lives.

5 My Contribution as a Global Scholar: The Trail Takes Me Back to the Future

Walking between two worlds is such a delicate dance²⁰

Newman’s 1852 series of lectures titled The Idea of a University, ²¹ promoted the concept that universities should be places to protect the life of the mind, and to preserve the accumulated wisdom of the past. Universities were constructed in their original medieval form, as extensions of monasteries, retreats, where people went to find places, and spaces of tranquility and harmony so, in communion with themselves and others of like mind, they could cultivate their understanding of their life worlds.

Indigenous scholarship, throughout antiquity, also was conducted in places and spaces where people sat, sang and danced together in communion, defining and negotiating worldviews through ceremonial practice and day to day living – activities that honoured life as physical and spiritual, sacred and profane. Indigenous pedagogy was human interaction with our life worlds, deepening our worldviews, allowing us to create and maintain nurturing, resonating relationships of mutual respect, recognition of rights, responsibility and reciprocity. Colonisations brought a legacy of layered traumatisation into these worlds.

In more recent years in his work with refugees and displaced peoples, Richard Mollica, in his book: Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World,²² wrote that his approach was an intentional focus on culture and history, as revealed in the words that his patients used to describe their trauma stories. He heard, as I did, that traumatised people voice the same request for help in self-healing. And he found, as I did, that the healer has to place him/herself as close as possible to the pain and suffering of the traumatized person in order to take in the revealed truth. This process becomes the foundation of all healing actions. I have located this process, not in a mental health paradigm, but within the pedagogical framework of multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural education. I have called it ‘Educaring’.

‘Educaring’ recognises healing as an educational process, providing care for people to do their own healing work while studying to acquire skills, qualifications and accreditation. In the educational model it invites participants ‘to understand the social, political, psychological, environmental, family and community functions that have made them who they are, and how they relate to the world in which they live’ and take charge of their own lives, and that of their families and communities.²³

An Indigenous Critical Pedagogy recognises trauma, both across lifespan and generations, and understands trauma focused ‘Educaring’ as a foundation that allows individuals, families and communities to find the power they have within themselves for self healing.²⁴ This model provides the means by which people can choose to heal, while developing healing skills to work with others.²⁵ The educational approach enables people to come to know themselves, name what influences have shaped who they have become, their humanness, informing an awareness and knowledge of other peoples, their histories and stories, and what has shaped them, our collective environments, and what influences and shapes community and a knowledge and understanding of our place and responsibility to community.²⁶ Healing through ‘Educaring’ has the capacity for true reconciliation between social groups.

Indigenous spaces in academic places however, involves a delicate disciplined dance, drawing on the strength and resiliency of Indigenous scholars who hold courage and hope as their negotiating tools.