Aboriginal Education Resistance
Indigenous Students Resist Assimilatory Colonial Curriculum
Anglo-centred curricula and school texts provoke resistance in Indigenous learners, resulting in widespread education failure in Aboriginal communities.
Schools are supposed to have inclusive curricula these days, which means including Indigenous perspectives in the classroom. However, schools have failed to deliver true inclusivity, almost without exception. Apart from a few token cultural items examining simplistic aspects of foods and cultural artifacts, we remain outside of the curriculum, with the cultural capital of the Anglo middle class dictating our children's learning. Naturally the students resist, voicing their concern in aggressive statements about a fear of "turning white".
As with all things, this comes down to language. Australian English words, structures and genres carry a colonial subtext that is implicitly assimilatory. This colonial discourse, despite the best of intentions, positions both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators as complicit in assimilation. For example, it can lead a progressive Aboriginal community school (to all appearances at the cutting edge of inclusivity) to compose the following text for its school website.
"Because they were nomadic people, the art which they produced was often temporary, and part of a ritual. Things like bark paintings, small totem sticks and the like were produced at certain times as an important part of the tribal culture. Due to the temporary nature of such things, and the sudden end of traditional Aboriginal life, we do not have many examples of such things left in existence. The art which Aboriginals are remembered for can be generally divided into two categories: Rock Art and Object Art. … Object Art could be defined as the artistic decoration of otherwise everyday images. Things like didgeridoos, boomerangs, clothing or jewellery, and simple instruments and tools like knives, or clap sticks."
While on one level the text seems to celebrate and include Aboriginal culture, the subtext reveals colonial attitudes and myths about our peoples as stoneage, simple, obsolete, extinguished, transient, extinct. This is present not only in explicit phrases such as "temporary nature", "remembered for" and "sudden end", but also in the use of the past tense, which infers that we have somehow ceased to exist in the present, and therefore have no claim to the future. The third person plural "they" excludes Indigenous voices, making "Aboriginals" passive objects of study. Even the archaic use of "Aboriginal" as a noun reveals colonial baggage from the days when government policy was designed supposedly to "smooth the pillow of a dying race."
As Aboriginal people we internalise these seemingly harmless discourses,in school and beyond. Take for example our everyday use of the word "artifact" to describe our tools, weapons and crafts. Rather than recognising our cultures as living, evolving entities, this word relegates us to the past, a static stoneage relic to be unearthed and examined from a colonial viewpoint, through the knowledge filters of the dominant culture. When we use this kind of language uncritically, we internalise these filters and recreate ourselves according to an exoticised, anglicised ideal of primitivism. Schools not only fail to challenge these discourses, but they perpetuate them as well, promoting a primitive notion of Aboriginality and silencing genuine Indigenous viewpoints in the curriculum.
When we leave this hidden curriculum unchallenged, we become complicit in our own colonisation and ongoing ethnocide, as our sophisticated traditional ways of knowing are replaced by childish simplicity and westernised logic. The problem is, it is hard for us to put our finger on exactly how this is occurring. After all, most Anglo educators are genuinely committed to our advancement, and generally have no personal assimilatory agendas.
So although we can't pinpoint exactly what disturbs us about the curriculum, we still feel the threat to our identity and so we resist education implicitly.
