Indigenous Knowledges: Privileging Our Voices

How should new knowledge systems for the academy be reflective of a 60,000-year-old Aboriginal histories? Indigenous Knowledges: Privileging Our Voices offers an answer to this question with generative and sometimes challenging narratives and addresses a unique higher education situation in Australia. At NIKERI Institute, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous academics engage in collaborative discipline-specific learning and teaching. In this collection of writings, these joint and sole authors find ways to present their world views to scholars, Indigenous communities and researchers alike. Knowledge systems and ways of knowing are made accessible in 10 chapters building on occasions of reflection as communities of practice positioned around Australia’s unique indigeneity as known at NIKERI. The notion of respectful encounter is at the heart of these chapters. Depth ecology, personal and collective narratives along with other ways to deliver research design and teacher education are considered through the lens of Indigenous Knowing in this unique community of academics at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.

Tarquam McKenna is an academic and an art psychotherapist. For thirty-five years he has explored Indigeneity, arts, gender and education in higher education. His praxis continues to examine social justice and how colonisation has impacted on disenfranchised people around the world.

Donna Moodie is a lecturer who has explored engagement processes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and organisations. She is currently a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New England (UNE), Armidale, New South Wales.

Pat Onesta is a research assistant and administrator in the community-based economic development field as a Community Planner at the NIKERI Institute at Deakin University. He has worked largely with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations in USA and Australia. He has a passion around equity.