Lowering Indigenous incarceration rates is a key aim of the Closing The Gap targets, but there are more First Nations people behind bars than ever. How did this happen and what can fix it?
Blue Lagoon at Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group) where the first pieces of pottery were found.
Sean Ulm
Pottery made more than 1800 years ago by Aboriginal communities on Jiigurru in the Lizard Island group in the Great Barrier Reef is the oldest ever found in Australia.
Indigenous artifacts from the northwest coast of North America on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
U.S. laws on the repatriation of Indigenous artifacts and remains still uphold inequities in the relationships between Indigenous people and the agencies holding their materials.
Students become more emotionally engaged with history when it’s presented in an interactive way, research shows.
SDI Productions via Getty Images
Rather than have students memorize names and dates, this history curriculum invites students to grapple with real-life issues faced by people from the past.
1856 map, township of Ballarat.
A.W. Strange Collection
The river wasn’t merely a physical entity – it was a symbol of spiritual and cultural significance, serving as the life force which flows through Country.
Whalers and Old Tom on the hunt
Charles Eden Wellings/WIkimedia Commons
For over 100 years, the Victorian school curriculum has failed to give generations of students the chance to learn about Indigenous political movements.
Drawing by an Aboriginal boy, Oscar, of a Native Police operation c.1897 near Camooweal.
National Library of Australia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Killing for Country does brilliantly for one group of families what a robust, locally grounded truth-telling process might do for the whole nation.
Joseph Lycett, Aboriginal Australians Spearing Fish and Diving for Shellfish, New South Wales, c. 1817.
National Library of Australia, nla.obj138500727.
Across the continent, diverse, adaptable fishing practices, recipes and rituals were a cornerstone of Indigenous life at the time of first contact – and many remain so to this day.
Stan Grant’s new book, The Queen is Dead, is revealing in terms of his decision to step down from public life. ‘I have been reminded what it is to come from the other side of history,’ he writes.
Portrait of De Lacy Evans and his wife (1870)
State Library Victoria
In the 19th century there was no formal or medical process for gender transition. When people crossed gender categories, they did so socially, sometimes for their entire lifetimes.
Across Australia, there are memorials to white people ‘killed by Natives’. But there is a silence about what led to these attacks, or the reprisal massacres that typically followed.
The sad reality is that if the demands of these early activists had been met nearly a century ago, we would not be suffering the severe disadvantage that hovers over Aboriginal lives still today.
Clockwise from left: Curramulka Community Club, St Francis House, book cover (ABC Books), Flinders University, State Library of New South Wales.
Vince Copley lived a long, impressive life, helping to make a better world for Aboriginal people. Born on a mission in 1936, he died aged 85, just after finishing his memoir, on 10 January 2022.
Neighbours from Tla’amin, K’omoks, Qualicum and Tsimshian Nations gather around the newly.
erected plaque on Xwe’etay honoring the ancestral Indigenous people of the island.
(Kathy Schulz)
One project on a small island in B.C. is demonstrating how archaeology can bring communities together and serve as a basis for reconciliation.
Tracker Nat, holding his hat on the far left, with Paul Hasluck standing next to him, holding Nat’s shield in this picture from 1958.
National Archives of Australia. NAA: A1200, L28199.
The Kakadu region has gone through immense transformation throughout history. How can archaeological food scraps tell us about how the First Australians adapted?
Breastplate, of metal, engraved ‘McIntyre King of Mannilla’, c.1860–1874. ‘King’ McIntyre (c.1814–74) . Donated by A.W. Wilkins to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 1930.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
The Ancestral Remains of Aboriginal people still lie in British museums or in graves, marked and unmarked.
Afrofuturist’s work is rooted in the desire to transform the present for Black people. Here actor Mouna Traoré in ‘Brown Girl Begins’ (2017) directed by Sharon Lewis set in a post-apocalyptic version of Toronto.
Urbansoul Inc
Afrofuturist’s work is rooted in the desire to transform the present for Black people. To do so, they imagine a reality in which Black people are the agents of their own story, countering histories that discount and dismiss them.
Wybalenna, Flinders Island: the Aboriginal settlement 1847.
Courtesy of Libraries Tasmania