The intergenerational transmission of traditional language and culture is at the core of Yolŋu Indigenous knowledge practices. The homeland of Gäwa in remote Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, was established by Warramiri clan kinship networks to provide an appropriate place for this crucial role to continue. Technologies have long played a part in this transmission process, but can databases, websites and other digital storage mediums harmonise with existing Yolŋu epistemological and ontological frameworks? In considering an alternative approach to digital development, we rely on the Yolŋu elements of performative epistemology, multiple perspectives and a fundamental, narrative base. We then apply this approach to the construction of the 'Warramiri website ' (2011-2015) which houses and structures various resources, outlining its applicability to the current educational practices at Gäwa.
This article focuses on leadership by women in Indigenous research in the higher education sector of Australia. The research that provided the context for this exploration of Indigenous women’s leadership involved archiving ceremonial cultural knowledge from the Daly and Wagait regions of the Northern Territory. The article introduces the concept of Aboriginal corporeality and the struggle within colonial Australia and through to the present to prevent its erasure from Australia’s history. This struggle is referenced in the paradigm shifts underway in Indigenist research. The article acknowledges the past commitments of powerful Aboriginal women to the advancement of their clans’ people under the new circumstances that they had to confront from the 1880s. It is argued that the cultural agenda of these women prepared the ground for the advances in Indigenist research reported in this article. The article concludes with an example of the close, culturally significant partnership that was forged by the research project across two Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory.
This chapter explores the extraordinary growth in political leadership over the past 30 years among Indigenous women from a remote community. It is representative of a wider Australian phenomenon: the intense participation in democratic affairs by Indigenous women. These are two women from among many more: there are others who are participating at a similar level in this and other communities in the Northern Territory and elsewhere within Australia. Guthadjaka and Garŋgulkpuy are two Yolngu women leaders from Elcho Island in the Northern Territory, a small island 500 km northeast of Darwin. Geographically isolated, they occupy a difficult space in leadership and democratic action due to their position between two worlds: the Yolngu world and the mainstream Australian world. They have to remain true to their connections to clan and country while working with the wider political and intellectual worlds within Australia and overseas. Jackie Huggins explains that for an Indigenous leader, '[l]eadership means that you need to respect differences of views and start from where people are atnot where you would want them to be. The trick is to listen, listen, listen, and then act.' 4 Both Guthadjaka and Garŋgulkpuy refer frequently with their elders, raising each individual issue before a consensus is reached. They speak for the community, not themselves. Their leadership is different in the ways that Amanda Sinclair identifies as less ego-driven, more spiritual, with different sources of power and responsibility. 5 Ego is often set aside to respect others and their relationships. The work of Guthadjaka and Garŋgulkpuy as community leaders involves extraordinary intellectual and spiritual demands.
Abstract‘Bothways’ was an expression first utilised by Yolŋu educators in the late 1980s to convey the profound intercultural epistemological foundations of Yolŋu society that should also apply to modern Balanda (white) schooling systems. Despite the pressures from national, standardised curriculum and assessment regimes, ‘Bothways’ has not been abandoned by remote Yolŋu communities in the 21st century. In this paper we briefly revisit the first iterations of the ‘Bothways’ philosophy to demonstrate its symmetry with the Yolŋu transculturation heritage (of the Warramiri in particular), developed through many centuries of contact with sea-faring visitors. Lastly, we present data from community research at Gäwa, a Warramiri homeland on Elcho Island, which demonstrates that through a series of ‘multiple balances’, negotiation around issues of bilingual pedagogy, cultural knowledge transmission, parental engagement and student–teacher dynamic continues to renew the ‘Bothways’ approach.
BowerBird is an open platform biodiversity website (http://www.BowerBird.org.au) and a nationally funded project under management of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and Museum Victoria. Members post sightings and information about local species of plants and animals, and record other features of ecosystems. Charles Darwin University's Northern Institute Elder on Country researcher, Kathy Guthadjaka, has shared pictures and information about the biodiversity of her homelands in the Yolŋu community of Gäwa, on Elcho Island in north east Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. The extent to which this knowledge can be exposed in the same way as other open resources, can pose dilemmas about the level of 'openness' that is appropriate. Open sharing of educational materials can be promoted as a basic human right. This paper will explore the extent to which traditional knowledge can be made openly available. What are the implications for sharing this knowledge in a westernised context that compartmentalises it, and how can a western academic perspective learn from this knowledge and engage functionally with it for the purposes of learning? The existence of this project on the interface between traditional knowledge and western technocratic information management also has implications for how information is presented and valued.
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