The Cultural Interface

Abstract

For a while now I have been researching and writing
about Australian Indigenous education issues. Like you all,
I have seen much good work and learnt much from what is
going on across the country and internationally to improve
outcomes for Indigenous learners in formal education
processes. And still we go on with the struggle and with
the limitations that Western sciences and practices place
on us in the process. This paper draws together theoretical
propositions from the work we have been progressing for the
higher education sector over the past decade and to point
to some foundational principles that can help establish
some early beginnings with Indigenous education as a
discipline in the higher education sector.

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Volume 36, Supplement, 2007 *•
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL
"/INDIGENOUS EDUCATION
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CULTURAL INTERFACE
MARTIN NAKATA
Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University
of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, New
South Wales, 2007, Australia
SI Abstract
For a while now I have been researching and writing
about Australian Indigenous education issues. Like you
all,
I have seen much good work and learnt much from
what is going on across the country and internationally
to improve outcomes for Indigenous learners in
formal education processes. And still we go on with
the struggle and with the limitations that Western
sciences and practices place on us in the process. This
paper draws together theoretical propositions from
the work we have been progressing for the higher
education sector over the past decade and to point to
some foundational principles that can help establish
some early beginnings with Indigenous education as
a discipline in the higher education sector.
Indigenous knowledge
Renewed interest in Indigenous knowledge, systems,
and practices is widespread and global (Nakata,
2002).
This interest has emerged in times of "new
configurations in global relations ... [where] the
centrality of knowledge ... [is] the emerging currency
in that relationship" (Hoppers, 2000, p. 283). The
global discourse on Indigenous knowledge thus runs
into and across a range of interests such as sustainable
development, biodiversity and conservation interests,
commercial and corporate interests, and Indigenous
interests. It circulates at international, national,
state,
regional, and local levels in government, non-
government, and Indigenous community sectors, and
across a range of intellectual, public, private, and
Indigenous agendas. It is dispersed across various
clusters of Western intellectual activity such as scientific
research, documentation and knowledge management,
intellectual property protection, education, and health.
It is politically, economically, and socially implicated in
the lives of millions of people around the globe. To
gain a sense of the global reach, do a Google search
on the term "Indigenous knowledge", and see what
turns up.
Much of this emerges from the basis of practical
concerns in development contexts and practical
engagement with peoples' local knowledges on
the ground and for varying purposes. The focus on
ecological, environmental, resource management and
agricultural practice reflects this, as does the concerns
for knowledge maintenance, knowledge management
in digital environments, and legal protection.
Through an even more complex set of intersections,
this emerging trend is mingling with, building on,
responding to, contesting, and shaping in turn, a much
longer, institutionalised set of discourses with their
own socio-historical and discursive practices, including
objectified knowledge about Indigenous societies
and cultures, and other knowledge production that
explains our historical and contemporary positions.
Included in this discursive realm is what some
call "the archive", but which I prefer to broaden and
call the corpus; viz., that body of knowledge, both
historical and ongoing, that is produced by others
"about us" across a range of intellectual, government,
and other historical texts. In the academy, this corpus
was once primarily the domain of the discipline of
anthropology, but now extends across a range of
disciplines where Indigenous concerns, or concerns
7

"-CULTURAL INTERFACE
about Indigenous peoples and issues, intersect
with the established disciplines. Slowly, this corpus
is incorporating a discernable "Indigenous voice"
as Indigenous people insert their own narratives,
critique, research, and knowledge production into
the corpus. The emergence of revalued and revised
"Indigenous knowledge" for inclusion into programme
and course content excites some people who see it as
a source of "unmediated" knowledge. But we need
to be very careful here. Things aren't just white or
black, and things cannot be fixed by simply adding
in Indigenous components to the mix. This is a very
complicated and contested space.
• Contested knowledge spaces
In their differences, Indigenous knowledge systems
and Western scientific ones are considered so
disparate as to be "incommensurable" (Verran, 2005)
or "irreconcilable" (Russell, 2005) on cosmological,
epistemological and ontological grounds. Although
these philosophical concepts are not elaborated
here,
it is critical that those who have an interest in
drawing in Indigenous knowledge into curriculum
areas understand these concepts and have some
understanding of how differences at these levels frame
possible understanding and misunderstanding at the
surface levels of aspects of Indigenous knowledge.
The literature in this regard is growing internationally
and is a worthy area for analysis and assessment. It
is emerging out of a range of interests, sectors, and
projects across the globe. It criss-crosses from critique,
to caution, to advocacy, to theory, to innovation, and
to examples in practice (e.g., Agrawal, 1995a, 1995b,
1996;
Battiste & Youngblood Henderson, 2000;
Christie, 2005; Ellen & Harris, 1996; Gegeo & Watson-
Gegeo, 2001; Langton & Ma Rhea, 2005; Russell, 2005;
Smith, 1999; Verran, 2005). It is important to read it
critically enough to situate the arguments of various
positions taken in this literature.
Differences at these levels mean diat in the academy
it is not possible to bring in Indigenous knowledge
and plonk it in the curriculum unproblematically
as if it is another data set for Western knowledge to
discipline and test. Indigenous knowledge systems
and Western knowledge systems work off different
dieories of knowledge that frame who can be a knower,
what can be known, what constitutes knowledge,
sources of evidence for constructing knowledge, what
constitutes truth, how truth is to be verified, how
evidence becomes truth, how valid inferences are to
be drawn, the role of belief in evidence, and related
issues (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001, p. 57).
One knowledge system cannot legitimately verify
die "claims to trudi" of die odier via its own standards
and justifications (Verran, 2005). So incommensurable
are die ways diese systems "do" knowledge, diat even
widi understanding of epistemological and ontological
8
Martin Nakata
differences and endless descriptions of diem in various
sites of knowledge production, we cannot just "do"
Indigenous knowledge in die curriculum. In universities,
we subscribe to die institutional arrangements and
practices of the Western and scientific knowledge
traditions. Learning and "doing" knowledge in this
context is mediated by the disciplinary organisation
of knowledge and its discursive and textual practices.
In this context, we deal with representations of
Indigenous knowledge already circumscribed by the
English language and the discursive positioning of
various disciplinary practices, including scientific
paradigms, historical understandings, particular sets of
interests, various dieoretical positions, technologies of
textual production, and so on. These representations
may carefully and usefully describe die application of
different approaches of each knowledge system to a
common point of focus to generate understanding. But
die way we come to know and understand, discuss,
critique and analyse in university programmes is not die
way Indigenous people come to know in local contexts.
However, in the academy and on the ground, the
talk of Indigenous knowledge systems, rather than
of cultures, does bring Indigenous knowledge, its
systems, its expressions, and traditions of practice
into a different relation with Western science than
was possible through the discipline of anthropology.
Initially, anthropological studies of Indigenous
societies and cultures were used to provide the
evidence for disciplinary theories of human evolution
and development. Knowledge production in this area
served to rationalise an array of practices and activities
of liberal capitalism as it expanded across the globe.
But, despite a shifting basis of enquiry over the last
century, all knowledge production about Indigenous
people still works within a wider set of social relations
that rationalise, justify, and work to operationalise a
complicated apparatus of bureaucratic, managerial,
and disciplinary actions that continue to confine the
lives of Indigenous people.
We can argue that interest in Indigenous knowledge
systems begins in a different place but we have to
concede that Indigenous knowledge is similarly
positioned within discursive fields as any other
knowledge production "about us". Still, this does
not deny the argument that the current interest in
Indigenous knowledge is emerging at a different
historical moment where Indigenous peoples are
much better positioned within the legal political order
where issues of rights, sovereignty, self-determination,
and historical redress provide a better base for the
assertion of Indigenous interests.
So,
even though it is still predominately non-
Indigenous or Western parameters that give shape
to the Indigenous knowledge discourse, it does ask
questions that relate to its usefulness and value in
a variety of contexts, including Indigenous contexts.
This brings a focus in some (but by no means all)

Volume 36, Supplement, 2007
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contexts to more collaborative and locally-generated
practice on the ground (Christie, 2005; Gumbula,
2005),
more opportunities to preserve and maintain
Indigenous knowledge within communities (Langton
& Ma Rhea, 2005) both through documentation
processes and through reinvigorated interest in
its future utility (Anderson, 2005, Hunter, 2004),
and especially for strengthening Indigenous social,
economic and political institutions (Ma Rhea, 2004). It
also brings a focus to sharing and transferring aspects
of Indigenous knowledge across contexts for much
wider human benefit. In best practice circumstances,
the transferring and/or integration of Indigenous
knowledge (IK) across knowledge domains provides
due recognition and legal protection to those aspects
and innovations of knowledge that are Indigenous
in origin. In worst practice, of course, global interest
in Indigenous knowledge threatens its integrity and
exploits it on an even greater scale.
In the academy, and in Australia-whether Indigenous
or non-Indigenous, lecturer or student - most of us
develop our general and/or detailed understandings
of Indigenous knowledge, traditions and practices via
the interpretations and representations of it in the
English language by Western knowledge specialists or
scientists. This is not to deny that some Indigenous
students and lecturers develop knowledge in situ
in Indigenous contexts. But it is to suggest that the
larger conceptualisation and characteristics that
describe and situate Indigenous knowledge vis-a-vis
Western knowledge, comes to us through the filter of
its discourse. What aspect of Indigenous knowledge
gets representation, and how it is represented in
this space reflects a complex set of intersections of
interests and contestations: from what aspects of
knowledge are recognised or valued; what can be
envisioned in terms of representation or utility; what
sorts of collaborations are practical or possible; the
capacity of current technologies to represent aspects
of IK without destroying its integrity; to what research
projects are funded; to the quality of experts in both
knowledge traditions; to the particular interests of
scientists or disciplinary sectors; to what is finally
included in databases, or published and circulated
in the public or scholarly domain. And importantly,
the negative of all of those: what is not of interest,
or value; what is not able to attract funding; what
is not investigated, documented or published; what
is misinterpreted during the process of abstracting
Indigenous knowledge; and what remains marginalised
at the peripheries and at risk of being written out, not
recognised as valid knowledge, or forgotten.
The
cultural interface
In this contested space between the two knowledge
systems, the cultural interface (Nakata, 1998), 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, how we come to know and
understand our changing realties in the everyday, and
how and what knowledge we operationalise in our
daily lives. 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. On
the ground, in practical contexts where Indigenous
knowledge experts are in direct contact with scientific
experts, this is the space of difficult translation between
different ways of understanding reality (Verran, 2005).
But, in the intellectual discourse, translation has already
occurred. Indigenous knowledge is re-presented and
re-configured as part of the corpus "about" us and is
already discursively bounded, ordered and organised
by others and their sets of interests.
In the academy, then, we come to learn "about"
Indigenous knowledge in similar ways to how we
came to learn "about" Indigenous cultures and issues
via the established disciplines. It is important for those
wanting to bring Indigenous knowledge into teaching
and learning contexts to understand what happens
when Indigenous knowledge is conceptualised
simplistically and oppositionally from the standpoint of
scientific paradigms as everything that is "not science".
It is also important to understand what happens when
Indigenous knowledge is documented in ways that
disembodies it from the people who are its agents,
when the "knowers" of that knowledge are separated
out from what comes to be "the known", in ways that
dislocates it from its locale, and separates it from the
social institutions that uphold and reinforce its efficacy,
and cleaves it from the practices that constantly
renew its meanings in the here and now. And it is
also important to consider what disintegrations and
transformations occur when it is redistributed across
Western categories of classification, when it is managed
in databases via technologies that have been developed
in ways that suit the hierarchies, linearity, abstraction
and objectification of Western knowledge - all of which
are the antithesis of Indigenous knowledge traditions
and technologies.
In the rush to document and database Indigenous
knowledge, it is also important to understand the
effects of documentation both positive and negative.
There is a growing literature around these issues that
should inform how we draw in Indigenous knowledge
for teaching and learning purposes, particularly in
undergraduate teaching (Agrawal, 1995b; Christie,
2005;
Langton & Ma Rhea, 2005; Verran, 2005). So, in
incorporating understandings of Indigenous knowledge
into curriculum areas, in asking our students to read
accounts of it, or to discuss its potential applications
in a range of professional contexts, or use it in
applied ways, it must be acknowledged that we are
screening it through a filter that positions it to serve
9

.*» CULTURAL INTERFACE
our educational objectives, and which draws on our
own prior theoretical investments in knowledge and
knowledge practice. But apart from understanding
these issues, there are other considerations of the
contested space, which need some reflection before
we discuss any content and methods of Indigenous
studies, or teaching and learning in higher education.
These revolve around the location of Indigenous
learners in this space.
• The locale of the learner
For many Indigenous students and lecturers, regardless
of their distance from what we understand as "the
traditional context", the Indigenous epistemological
basis of knowledge construction and the 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, of relating to kin, of
socialising children; in ways of thinking, of transmitting
knowledge, even in creolised languages; and in that
all encompassing popular, though loosely used term,
"worldview", 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. This
is also familiar and recognisable, and we may accept
it, refuse it, assimilate it, domesticate it, use it, subvert
it, but nevertheless are constantly engaged with it, as
we move forward in a constant process of endless and
often unconscious negotiations between these frames
- or reference points - for viewing, understanding, and
knowing the world.
Negotiating between these is a transforming
process of endless instances of learning and forgetting,
of melding and keeping separate, of discarding
and taking up, of continuity and discontinuity. We
participate in these ways of viewing, being, and acting
in the world, often in quite contradictory, ambiguous,
or ambivalent ways. We subscribe with varying degrees
of commitment, both in time and space, to various
positions depending on the moment, depending on
what experiences, capacities, resources, and discourses
we have to draw on, according to what is at stake
for us, or our family, or our community, and so on,
and according to past experiences, current realities,
aspirations, and imagined futures.
Indigenous people have a long experience of
being located in this space of contested positions
at the cultural interface. In this locale, Indigenous
Martin Nakata
students are discursively constituted as subjects
vis-a-vis that "matrix of abstracted discourses that
constructs a consciousness of ourselves which
is outside of the local, outside of how life is
experienced" (following D. Smith 1987, 1990, 1999).
And it is via understanding what constitutes and is
constitutive of Indigenous experience in this locale
that lecturers need to retheorise Indigenous students
as prospective learners.
Let's now try and bed down the position of
Indigenous learners in this locale. Whatever the
particularities of their prior experiences, learners
come into university programmes already variously
constituted and positioned discursively to take up the
knowledge, which has inscribed their position. The
socio-historical discourses which have constituted
their position are, in this learning context, organised
and given their order through the disciplines and the
corpus, through a Western order of things. Some of
the theoretical framings within this order have come
to form a commonsense and consensus position about
the Indigenous community. Contestation of knowledge
is easier for students at content and ideological levels
within these accepted positions. Contestation is also
easier if sites of interrogation are considered in terms
of simple intersections.
But, Indigenous students often feel the
contradictions and tensions within having to align to
one or the other, especially when they see weaknesses
in examples and arguments on both sides of the divide.
It is more difficult to problematise the major theoretical
concepts and pursue intersubjective mapping of our
many relationships at the cultural interface because
these demand explication of broader sets of discursive
relations beyond the literal interpretation of the text or
the theoretical framings within a particular approach
to a topic. For example, when we deploy the concept
of sovereignty or of self-determination, how are those
situated within wider sets of discursive relations of
colonial discourse, legal discourse, rights discourse
and so on? How has it provided a priori conditions to
our thinking? How does it frame thinking in a range of
implicated areas of practice? How does our subscription
to it allow or not allow certain sorts of discussion
about it? And when is it possible that we can talk of
something else to achieve our goals? For instance,
when legal-political concepts work through and are
constituted in complex relations with anthropological
discourse and on into health or education, and are
then further complicated by the apparatuses of policy
and managerial and bureaucratic discourse, how
are these all to be brought to the surface? How are
students to suspend accepted thinking in one area
without suspending allegiance to Indigenous interests?
Can they take up other positions without being tagged
essentialist or assimilationist? If so, what are they?
Not opening up theoretical positions for more
complicated discussion means that the dynamics of die

Volume 36, Supplement, 2007
cultural interface is sutured over in favour of the Western
order of things and its constitution of what an Indigenous
opposition should be. Indigenous learners also often
do not have a fully articulated experiential basis for
contesting knowledge. In that much cultural practice is
implicitly understood it is often difficult for Indigenous
students to contest the interpretations of the corpus on
the basis of what they know of their own culture. For
example, the inner workings of customary adoption are
not always revealed to young students. They may know
enough to be uneasy with a textual interpretation but
not certain enough of their own knowledge to make
some sort of counterclaim. This uneasiness has to be
suspended to make sense of legal discourse. The choice
becomes one between silence or laying themselves open
to challenge from the more authoritative elements of the
corpus. How are Indigenous learners to be supported
to explore their experiential knowledge beyond the
classroom and to bring it in to inform how particular
Indigenous positions are contested via engagement with
the corpus?
The learner, in reaching a position under these
conditions must suspend one or the other. They cannot
easily forge understanding without being called into
alignment with one position or the other. The learner
does not have opportunities for developing ways of
reading, ways of critically engaging within accepted
Indigenous discourse, as this is itself constituted
within wider sets of social relations, without betraying
accepted positions within the Indigenous body politic.
Thus it is difficult to work through the inherent
tensions of the everyday world. Currently professional
preparation is inadequate in terms of equipping
graduates to work two knowledge systems together in
the interest of better practice. So how can we navigate
the complexities of this contested space?
i* An Indigenous standpoint theory
Since the early 1990s, I have investigated possibilities
with standpoint theory and, in particular, an
Indigenous standpoint as a theoretical position that
might be useful - something from the everyday and
not from some grand narrative. However this has not
been easy. The term "standpoint" is often substituted
for perspective or viewpoint, but these do not
adequately represent the use of the term in theory,
which is quite complex and contested as a theoretical
approach. Feminist standpoint theory emerged in
the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to deal with the
problem of articulating women's experience of their
world as organised through practices of knowledge
production, and which theorised women's positions
as rational, logical outcomes of the natural order of
things, when in fact they were socially constructed
positions that were outcomes of particular forms of
social organisation, that supported the position and
authority of men over women (Smith, 1987).
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AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL "/INDIGENOUS EDUCATION
As a method of enquiry, standpoint theory was
utilised by a diversity of marginalised groups whose
accounts of experience were excluded or subjugated
within intellectual knowledge production. However,
analysis from the standpoint of people's everyday
experience is not the aggregation of stories from
lived experience. It is not the endless production of
subjective narrative to disrupt objectified accounts.
According to Polhaus, it works off the premise that
first the social position of the knower is
epistemically significant; where the knower is
socially positioned will both make possible and
delimit knowledge. Second, more objective
knowledge is not a product of mere observation
or a disinterested perspective on the world, but
is achieved by struggling to understand one's
experience through a critical stance on the social
order within which knowledge is produced
(Pohlhaus, 2002, p. 285).
Standpoint accounts, then, depend on reflexivity
and the distinction between experience and standpoint
(Pohlhaus, 2002). Bringing the situation of ourselves as
"knowers" into the frame does not make ourselves the
focus of study but will "involve investigating the social
relations within which we as 'knowers' know" (Pohlhaus,
2002,
p. 287). This will also involve knowing where to
look, and which social relations might be informing
our knowledge. Importandy, and to borrow again from
Polhaus, "being ... [an Indigenous knower] does not
yield a ready-made critical stance on the world, but rather
the situation of ... [Indigenous knowers] provides the
questions from which one must start in order to produce
more objective knowledge"(Pohlhaus, 2002, p. 287).
Standpoint, then, does not refer "to a particular social
position, but rather is an engagement with the kinds of
questions found there" (Pohlhaus, 2002, p. 287), and
this engagement moves us along "to forge", following
Harding, a critical Indigenous standpoint.
An Indigenous standpoint, therefore, has to be
produced. It is not a simple reflection of experience
and it does not pre-exist in the everyday waiting to be
brought to light. It is not any sort of hidden wisdom
that Indigenous people possess. It is a distinct form
of analysis, and is itself both a discursive construction
and an intellectual device to persuade others and
elevate what might not have been a focus of attention
by others. It is not deterministic of any truth, but it lays
open a basis from which to launch a range of possible
arguments for a range of possible purposes. These
arguments still need to be rational and reasoned; they
need to answer to the logic and assumptions on which
they are built. Arguments from this position cannot
assert a claim to truth that is beyond the scrutiny of
others on the basis that as a member of the Indigenous
community, what I say counts. It is more the case, that
what is said must be able to be accounted for.

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This,
then, is not an Indigenous way of doing
knowledge. Rather, it argues for what Harding
calls "strong objectivity" (Pohlhaus, 2002, p. 285)
by bringing in accounts of relations that "knowers"
located in more privileged social positions are not
attentive to. It is a particular form of investigation.
It is the explication and analysis of how the social
organisation and practices of knowledge through its
various apparatuses and technologies of the textual
production organise and express themselves in that
everyday, as seen from within that experience. People's
lived experience at the interface is the point of entry
for investigation, not the case under investigation. It is
to find a way to explore the actualities of the everyday
and discover how to express them conceptually from
within that experience, rather than depend on or
deploy predetermined concepts and categories for
explaining experience.
Standpoint theory has not developed as a
singular theory but has congealed around different
interpretations of other theories associated
with Marxist approaches, poststructuralism, and
postmodernism. It has come under a lot of criticism
and has fallen somewhat out of favour (see Moore
& Muller, 1999; Walby, 2000). Criticisms have been
levelled at its weaknesses: the defeatism of what
some call the tendency to "epistemic relativism"; the
endless fragmentation across categories of difference;
an unfortunate emphasis on "who can know" rather
than "what can be known"; the preoccupation with
politics of identity and location that reify boundaries
between groups who also have common concerns;
and the containment of politics and action to
recognition and location rather than redistribution and
transformation. These weaknesses need to be engaged
with so that accounts can be produced that articulate
forms of agency created in local sites through the
social organisation of knowledge and its technologies,
and which give content to how people engage and
participate in and through them.
Standpoint theory in my mind is a method of enquiry,
a process for making more intelligible "the corpus of
objectified knowledge about us" as it emerges and
organises our lived realities. I see this as theorising
knowledge from a particular and interested position,
not to produce the "truth" of the Indigenous position
or the awful "truth" of the "dominant" colonial groups,
but to better reveal die workings of knowledge and how
understanding of Indigenous people is caught up and
is implicated in its work. This to me is a useful starting
point for a first principle of an Indigenous standpoint
theory; viz., that Indigenous people are entangled in
a much contested knowledge space at the cultural
interface. It would therefore begin from the premise
that my social position is discursively constituted within
and constitutive of complex sets of social relations
as expressed through the social organisation of my
everyday. As an interested "knower", I am asking to
Martin Nakata
understand how I come to understand - to know within
the complexities at die interface where our experience
is constituted in and constitutive of die corpus.
A second useful principle for an Indigenous
standpoint theory would recognise Indigenous agency
as framed within the limits and the possibilities of
what I can know from this constituted position - to
recognise that at the interface we are constantly being
asked to be both continuous with one position at
the same time as being discontinuous with another
(Foucault, 1972). This is experienced as push-pull
between Indigenous and not-Indigenous positions.
That is, the familiar confusion with constandy being
asked at any one moment to both agree and disagree
with any proposition on the basis of a constrained
choice between whitefella or blackfella perspective.
For me, this provides a means to see my position in
a particular relation with others, to maintain myself
with knowledge of how I am being positioned, and to
defend a position if I have to.
A third and connected principle that may usefully
be incorporated is the idea that the constant "tensions"
that this tug-of-war creates are physically real, and both
informs as well as limits what can be said and what is
to be left unsaid in the everyday. To factor this tension
in helps us to get beyond notions of structuralist
power and the resultant causal analyses. This will
allow us a more sophisticated view of the tensions
created between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
dualities, not as the literal translation of what is said
or written in propositions, but the physical experience
and memory of such encounters ih the everyday, and
to include them as part of the constellation of a priori
elements that inform and limit not just the range but
the diversity of responses from us.
These three principles allow that, although I have
knowledge of my experience at the interface and can
forge a critical standpoint, I am not out singularly to
overturn the so-called dominant position through
simplistic arguments of omission, exclusion or
misrepresentation, but rather out there to make better
arguments in relation to my position within knowledge,
and in relation to other communities of "knowers".
We see and act on things in these ways all the time.
If you think of something like Indigenous humour, it
emerges from this locale where we form a community
around some shared inter subjective understanding of
our experience, where we can understand the jokes.
Witness Mary G's poor guests, they are the outsiders
in this world of experience and they must fathom
our accounts of it and feel what it is like not to be a
"knower" of this world.
Humour and satire are particular forms of social
analysis and comment. Comedians like Mary G are
right in there "doing" social analyses that illuminate
our way of looking at our experience, which drag into
the analysis our experience of dealing across a space
where our shared subjectivities have been constituted.
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Volume 36, Supplement, 2007
Indigenous humour is a way of making sense from
within this experience. It recognises the tensions and
complexities of everyday life and reflects this back into
this space and the fact that we all "get the
joke"
provides
evidence of our knowledge of how complexities in
this space emerge in our everyday experience. The
joke doesn't resolve anything but it does articulate
something known but unsaid. We laugh because it
expresses something we recognise, something we
already know. In that we often send up ourselves,
humour reveals our incomplete understandings of
how the world beyond us works and the mystery of
its ways. But in that, it also captures an important
dimension of our experience in this locale.
Indigenous humour also reveals the ignorance
of outsiders of how we operate in and understand
our world, and many a merry laugh we have all had
at whitefellas' expense in this regard. In humour,
there is scrutiny of ourselves as actors in our world
and acknowledgement of that world beyond that is
omnipresent and often not coherently logical from
our point of view. This is why we need a standpoint
theory that can generate accounts of communities of
Indigenous people in contested knowledge spaces as
its first principle, that affords agency to people as its
second principle, and that acknowledges the everyday
tensions as the very conditions to what is possible
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous positions,
as its third principle. In these ways we can deploy an
Indigenous standpoint to help unravel and untangle
ourselves from the conditions that delimit who, what
or how we can or can't be, to help see ourselves with
some charge of the everyday, and to help understand
our varied responses to the colonial world. So what
will this mean for Indigenous education?
H
Indigenous education
First, in the higher education sector we must maintain
focus on a flexible approach to gaining the best fit
between students, learning, teaching, and future
professions, and allow ourselves liberties to use
everything at our disposal to achieve the best result
for our students. It is radically dumb to discard or not
explore things that we know to work but not use them
because they come from white traditions. Second, we
need to recognise that our students live in a very
difficult and complex space, and ensure that we do not
conflate our understanding of this here and now wfth
an imagined distant past that can be brought forward
to reconfigure a simpler traditional future bounded off
and separated from the global. Third, we need to keep
in focus that future graduates into professions must
be able to work in complex and changing terrains.
And let's start with the fact that Indigenous learners
are already familiar with complexities of the cultural
interface. Fourth, we need curriculum designs to
build on these capacities and to create opportunities
*» AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL "/INDIGENOUS EDUCATION
for learners to achieve a balance of knowledge, skills
and processes for exploring disciplinary boundaries,
and not deceive ourselves that the right content will
produce better outcomes of
itself.
And fifth, and very
importantly, educators need themselves to develop
their scholarship in contested knowledge spaces of
the cultural interface and achieve for themselves some
facility with how to engage and move students through
the learning process.
If we hold on to some of these basics as we move
forward with our work, come together annually to
discuss what works and what doesn't, we would have
begun the first steps towards establishing Indigenous
education as a discipline, with its own practices for
engaging with and testing knowledge.
•
Acknowledgements
This paper was delivered as a keynote address at
the (Re) Contesting Indigenous Knowledges and
Indigenous Studies Conference, 28-30 June, 2006,
Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia.
•
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• About the author
Professor Martin Nakata is Chair of Australian
Indigenous Education, Director of Jumbunna
Indigenous House of Learning at University of
Technology Sydney and Honorary Research Fellow
at the Mitchell Library. He is the first Torres Strait
Islander to receive a PhD from an Australian university
and his current research work is in the curriculum
development areas with a particular focus on
Indigenous learners.
14