Keywords

Research is not innocent, Linda Tuhiwai Smith tells us (2021). As a critical form of knowledge production about Indigenous peoples, western derived academic research has been forged in the body of imperialism and is instrumental to the structured practice of colonialism. It has mis-represented, obscured and subjugated Indigenous diversity and experience. The cosmology of Indigenous knowledges has been devalued and relegated to a primitive past as European knowledges were reified as superior and universal. Indeed, she asserts, the very being and lived realities of Indigenous people inside and far beyond the academy have been objectified and dehumanised by research (Smith, 2021, p. 44).

Linda Tuhiwai Smith does not, however, directly address what were contemporaneous and now still persistent issues of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, although these are clearly a primary object of her agenda. Rather she deals in revealing the mechanics of systems of imperial and colonial power as antithetical to that agenda. This has instigated Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s activist intellectual quest in resistance: to challenge the orthodoxies of ‘truth’ by dismantling the means of knowledge production in the academy. There is a need, she asserts, ‘to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity’ (Smith, 2021, p. 26). Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, in effect, beyond the violence of armed invasion and frontier wars (or indeed the police state) to articulate the cultural and psychic violence that research perpetuates—‘the reach of imperialism into our heads’ (Smith, 2021, p. 25).

My response to Gulwanyang and Amani’s reviews and directly to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work pivots on this intersection of the institution, structure and process with lived experience, mind and body. As Gulwanyang and Amani draw on their own experience to engage with this work, it helps me bring into view that systemic partner of research, formal ‘education’. There is less emphasis on this in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work although she does make clear that this institution is critical as a conduit of the products of research. Both Gulwanyang and Amani reveal some of the complex ways in which learning functions in this institutional site through the interplay between socio-political contexts, orthodox ‘truths’ and the embodied life experience of its participants, often with unintended consequences. It highlights for me too that Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work is obviously informed by the interplay of her Indigenous experience within the colony, both inside and outside the academy. However, the radical action being taken in the broader world for land rights, sovereignty and self-determination are not explicitly detailed. Nonetheless, these are implicitly present in the intellectual challenges she makes and indeed those of the oppositional academic works she cites, which will also circulate between thought, text and practice.

It is this complex learning experience that informs Gulwanyang and Amani’s focus on ‘power positioning, place and space’ in their response to this work. This focus is central for me also but very importantly, it highlights that our starting points are quite different. The work itself demands, as they have done, that we reflect on our subject positioning, our place within this colonial space. Unlike Gulwanyang, I am not an Indigenous researcher. Like Amani, I am a non-Indigenous academic. However, unlike Amani, I was born in the imperial centre (although perhaps not wholly of it) that developed its discourse of ‘truth’ in the process of colonisation, and I migrated to the colony as a ‘British’ child. I didn’t really know then what being ‘British’ was, but whether I like it or not, my relationship to the imperial ‘truth’—not least of all the ‘History’ that Linda Tuhiwai Smith so trenchantly dismantles—differs from Gulwanyang and Amani because of it. Being brought into this place now called Australia was facilitated (I would later learn) by an immigration scheme that cultivated and favoured British migrants. It was built on invasion, conquest and coloniality, not least of all the bizarre premises of racial ideology, and the privileges that this endowed and justified for the non-Indigenous. I became the ‘settler Australian’; unseeing, unknown to myself in this context of Indigenous worlds.

In consequence, my journey of intellectual development and moral response demanded by this work must differ to theirs in principle. Although I am in this place, now called Australia, I am not of it in the way that Gulwanyang is. She illustrates this in her narrative of lived experience that speaks of the centrality and indivisibility of Country and First Nations Peoples. She is a part of the collective intellectual development and reflexive cycling of deep knowledge arising from being in place through generations of kinship and culture. Quite clearly this is not a static perspective of ‘tradition’ but one of intellectual, moral and emotional engagement and reflection.

For Amani, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work not only provides reflection on the canon of western research but incites reflection as decolonial practice. This is a highly personal endeavour for Amani, as for Gulwanyang, but from a different place. As a woman of colour, Amani has points of empathy with Indigenous experience, but she does not betray these by assuming sameness or the right to speak. She responds to the work’s decolonial imperative in reviewing ‘Indigenous research’ as a ‘humbling activity’, an opportunity that has been afforded to her. This resonates with me.

But what I cannot deny is that this is not at all from the book alone, nor of many other useful academic works. It is from engagement with First Nations Peoples that in a sense knocked me at least a little sideways out of the state of the non-acknowledgement of the colony and my place in upholding it. The appearance of a young Pat O’Shane, a Kuku Yalandji woman, at my secondary school in the 1970s was stunning. This was a person who would achieve a series of ‘firsts’ (female Aboriginal teacher in Queensland; Aboriginal Magistrate in Australia; woman and Aboriginal person to be the head of a government department) (NNS, 2021). It would be a first for me, to hear an Aboriginal person speak with articulate rage on the violence of the colony. I may not have understood all but I wanted to know more.

Fifteen years or more ago now, late in the piece, I first encountered Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s major work in an earlier edition. I was teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trainee secondary teachers, specialising in Aboriginal Studies, at the Koori Centre. This centre, (named for the regional identity of Aboriginal Peoples) at a major university, grew out of federal policy in the very late 1980s to develop enclaves of support for Aboriginal students (Cleverley & Mooney, 2010). The problem the centre posed was both symbolic and one material version of the power struggle over ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ that Linda Tuhiwai Smith elucidated.

This struggle and the significance it held for Indigenous knowledges and identities was played out in the lives of the students. There was little in the university system and its mainstream curriculum at the time that indicated an awareness or openness to alternative bodies of knowledge, moral systems or ways of being. Gulwanyang attests to the persistence of this in contemporary educational institutions when she questions the structures that continue to privilege non-Indigenous voices to speak over her.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Chap. 1—‘Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory’ (2021)—set as a required reading for these trainee teachers by my predecessor, was a potentially fundamental intellectual challenge to the system. The intent was more than a gesture, it seemed to me to have a practical aim: to both equip these students with the skills to critically evaluate the academic research and writing done to and about them and to challenge the right of others to arbitrarily conceptualise and tell their stories. They were being prepared to be active agents who would tell their own stories. Telling their stories inevitably would mean telling different stories, ones that countered the myths and silences of an ‘Australian’ history and society. This was critical to preparing for their roles as teachers and their everyday engagement with the secondary school system. In effect as teachers, as Aboriginal teachers, they were forced into contestation with a system that had barely begun to meaningfully acknowledge the concept or fact of Aboriginal histories or contemporaneous Aboriginal life. Given the coloniality of the institution that continued to ignore or denigrate, and to extirpate their Aboriginality, this reading was about the right to define themselves, their families and communities.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work articulated some of the emergent thinking on the ground, inside and out of the academy. It provided a clear basis on which to premise the further opening up of the formal educational space for Aboriginal voices and perhaps pierce the self-assurance of white curriculum and school communities, including the teachers. It would in principle nurture an awareness and valuing of their Aboriginal selves, communities and knowledges in the colonial context as a basis for unity, to speak back. In doing this it might almost provide protection against the ravages of colonial psychic harms, permitting a regrouping to gain control of the means of historical production and so of the narrative of their lives, even of the nation. It was palpable that identity and history were intimately related; these were ‘students’, but this was their life; the academic was personal and political. In this respect, the text still seems like a manifesto, a call to intellectual arms.

But, for me, the book itself gained meaning and value from the pre-existing momentum of grassroots Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism that was bringing changes to the school and university systems that I experienced from 1989, working in a university-based Aboriginal Teachers’ Aide Training Program (Cleverley & Mooney, 2010). The Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, formed in 1977, had made a tremendous impact, challenging the legacies of twentieth-century segregated schooling (Fletcher, 1989) and working for the enactment of the 1982 Aboriginal Education policy in NSW (the first state policy of its kind in Australia) (NSWAECG, n.d.). It also advocated for inclusion of aspects of Aboriginal cultures and perspectives—‘knowledges’ was a word less likely to be used—in schooling to create an environment that it was hoped would prove more inclusive for Aboriginal students and improve the woeful outcomes of formal state-mandated education.

Essentially, challenges were being made to the assimilatory trajectory of the schooling that posited Aboriginality as antithetical to success in education. These built on the momentum of challenge made to the Australian state and society by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands Peoples on various fronts—notably land rights, sovereignty and socio-political inequities—and was fuelled by their alienating experience of mainstream education. Formal schooling was an utterly fundamental issue underlying ongoing educational and social marginalisation, entrenching material disadvantage and poverty.

In the tertiary sector the challenge at the time was being made most decisively to the discipline of anthropology, particularly on the grounds of its historical relationship to government and the control of Indigenous people from colonial to times (masquerading as) postcolonial. Confrontation of the discipline of history, on which Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes so acutely, had remained stoically silent for much of the twentieth century; it was now commencing but had failed to effect systemic change. The vehemence of the subsequent battles in the ‘history wars’ (Macintyre & Clark, 2013) in the mid-1990s as academic revisionist histories began to cut through to the quick of broader colonial sensibilities revealed the resistance of white society to ‘knowing’. But the challenge in the polite spaces of the university to the discipline of anthropology at this time seemed visceral, precipitated perhaps by its self-proclaimed disciplinary remit to understand the totality and the intimacies of Indigenous life. As a novice in the academy, I recall less the reading of Linda Tuhiwai Smith than the blunt truths of Indigenous students and communities and the challenge of new radical leadership, political and academic, still marginalised, but making their assault on the academy, its exclusivity and privilege.

There was even some slight disappointment I confess in my reading of the work at the time—it whetted my appetite to know the truths that Smith’s injunctions on methodology would reveal in practice; that is, I wished to hear Indigenous stories. Taken alone, the work seemed to homogenise, to universalise Indigenous experience. I craved a sense of the specific, the lives and the life-changing events, the revelatory truths of how things had been and the dynamism of the moment, the initiatives of challenge and possibilities: the struggle for power in practice. But I think too there was the arrogance of youth. I had been involved in a minor way in support of Aboriginal activism for land rights and still with a consciousness as an English migrant I saw myself as somewhat different, somehow removed from the colonial. It was only over time I began to realise my place in this context as a settler and the greater significance of the work for understanding and propelling the struggles that were emerging and had now become critical: the politics of Indigenous being and knowledge in the academy and the ‘postcolonial’ state, and the centrality of this for sovereignty.

As a worker in this field of knowledge production, initially mostly a teacher and progressively a researcher, I needed to grapple with the decolonial challenge being made ever more explicitly to my own subject position and the theories and methodologies of knowledge production. This is something I share with Amani, who elaborates in her own self-reflective engagement. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work makes us all, as non-Indigenous teachers and researchers in education, responsible. It is relentless in that it does not let us off the hook of having to account for ourselves and our practice. As teachers we rely on a body of academically produced knowledge that is complicit in relationships to power. As researchers how do we account for our rationale and complicities in the process of production? How do we engage with, reframe and challenge this power and our relationship to it in order to be a conduit for Indigenous ways of knowing and being?

Martin Nakata in his delineation of the ‘Cultural Interface’ (Nakata, 2007a, 2007b) asserted the dynamic intersections in the schooling encounter (2007a, p. 323) in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students were not passive nor ‘empty vessels’ but those possessed of an agentic consciousness of self as inheritors of sophisticated knowledges and deep connections to Country and community. This revelation has been given a particular life for me not only in my engagement with students but in the reality of the growing numbers and influence of dynamic Indigenous academics with whom I have worked throughout my career. It gives pause for thought, contra the concerns about education in the creation of an Indigenous academic elite that Linda Tuhiwai Smith raises only briefly and perhaps more in illustration of the assimilatory intent of education. Her own story, her work, and Gulwanyang’s response alone would speak otherwise to undermine education’s capacity for effacement of the Indigenous.

This changing context has continued to prompt me into a questioning of the meaning and practice of the decolonial, especially with respect to Indigenisation: where exactly do I belong? As I commence a research project centred on the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students under Indigenous leadership, I reckon with the productive reflective questioning of both Gulwanyang and Amani. The work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith is not beginning nor ending in this but weaves in and out with the fabric of our lives of other learning and experience to remain remarkably salient.