This paper presents an Indigenous perspective on the significance of land, culture and Indigenous rights. The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples promote the importance of traditional Indigenous societies, such as Aboriginal Australians. Participating in caring for country methods and having a close on-going relationship to the land is also supported in this Declaration. As well as this, these principles support the notion of Indigenous education for community, and youth in particular, in places of cultural significance and places of longstanding occupation. All of this lends itself to an Aboriginal way of being in terms of cultural teaching and learning. These principles are incorporated into a performative perspective of traditional pedagogy and the incorporation of cultural practices in a best practice model that can incorporate cultural mapping as an exercise that expounds environmental and ecological perspectives within learning places on the land. Through connection to land and community relationships to cultural knowledge and cultural values, this paper will provide an Indigenous standpoint on Indigenous experiences and senses of place and the importance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in advancing significant principles and initiatives that value Indigenous ways of being and doing.
Sometimes data invites more of us. To be physically held and touched, through hands creating and crafting with matter, cultivating a closer connection to the fibres, threads, textures and sinews of data. Through touching and shaping the materiality of data, other beings, places and times are aroused. Here, we share the story of data that invited more of us and how this has spurred the creation of an exhibition titled Stories of Belonging with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artist/scholars for an arts festival in Queensland, Australia. This work by the collective, SISTAS Holding Space, deeply interrogates our ontological positionality as researchers, in particular what this means in the Australian context – a colonised nation populated through waves of migration. The scars of colonization, migration and shame are held and heard through Black and White Australian women creating and interrogating belonging alongside each other – listening and holding space for each other. We air the pains of ontological destruction, silencing, disconnection and emptiness. Through experimental making research methodology, we argue the primacy of storying and making, and for provoking resonant and entangled understandings of belonging and displacement.
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