The theme for National Reconciliation Week 2021 is ‘More than a word: reconciliation takes action’. Engaging with Aboriginal knowledges is a way to pursue reconciliation as more than a buzzword.
‘As I learn more about First Peoples’ plant knowledge, I’m also better understanding the broader Australian community’s failure to recognise the depth and breadth of our expertise.’
Nawarddeken Academy’s self-built school is an example of reinvesting funds from payment for ecosystem services to meet critical community needs in innovative ways.
Image: Bjorn Everts/Nawarddeken Academy
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Nina Maile Gordon, The Conversation
Mukurtu: an online dilly bag for keeping Indigenous digital archives safe.
The Conversation71.5 MB(download)
Mukurtu - Warumungu word meaning 'dilly bag' or a safe keeping place for sacred materials - is an online system helping Indigenous people conserve photos, songs and other digital archives.
If we are to close the gap in health outcomes for Aboriginal people, we need to develop and staff culturally competent health-care services.
from shutterstock.com
The local Aboriginal people told stories and painted images of a massacre of their ancestors in the early 20th century, but there was no other evidence that the incident took place. Until now.
A billabong on SBS website My Grandmother’s Lingo, which takes viewers on an interactive journey through the Marra language.
My Grandmother's Lingo
There is plenty of evidence to show Australia’s Indigenous people had ways of counting big numbers, yet the myth persists they couldn’t count more than a handful of things. Why?
A traditional rainmaker in Kenya. How can indigenous knowledge become part of university curricula?
Department For International Development/International Development Research Centre/Thomas Omondi/Flickr
Decolonisation of the curriculum doesn’t have to mean the destruction of Western knowledge, but it’s decentring. Such knowledge should become one way of knowing rather than the only way.
Somewhere up there is the road you’re on.
R. Scott Hinks/Wikimedia
Aboriginal people have been using the stars to help remember routes between distant locations, and these routes are still alive in our highway networks today.
Detail of Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Warlpiri, 2003, Yanjirlpiri Jukurrpa (Star Dreaming at Yarripirlangu).
Image courtesy of the artist's estate, licensed by Warlukurlangu Artists, Yuendumu.
Who owns a Dreamtime story? The Warlpiri, like all Indigenous groups, use a complex system of kinship that regulates which people can depict, sing, dance or talk about which Dreamings.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is calling for innovation to improve the lives of Indigenous people, but must beware of causing instability with new policies that dismiss everything before them.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Across Indigenous Australia, innovation is occurring locally, under the radar of government policies and support. We can look to this innovation and stop fixating on finding the elusive policy solution.
The legacy of dispossession continues to this day.
How to communicate across centuries of misunderstanding and dispossession.
Aboriginal stories dating back many thousands of years talk of a fire from the sky in an area now home to the Henbury meteorite craters, in the Northern Territory.
Flickr/Boobook
Just one generation ago Australian schoolkids were taught that Aboriginal people couldn’t count beyond five, wandered the desert scavenging for food, had no civilisation, couldn’t navigate and peacefully…