Genetic Limits On Culture?

In my first year of teaching Indigenous students on Cape York Australia, a veteran educator told me, "You're fooling yourself if you think you understand them. I've been teaching them for over ten years, and I still know nothing. We can never hope to understand." This idea of Indigenous culture as some exotic, unfathomable mystery seems to be endemic to non-Indigenous Australia. This myth mitigates teachers from having to learn about and understand where their Indigenous students are coming from.

Indigenous cultures and languages are no more or less complex than any others, and there is no reason teachers cannot achieve social balance by becoming bilingual or bicultural in Indigenous contexts, the same way they as if they were working in, say, France or Japan. 19th century myths about the existence of separate "races" should not limit the social activities of a species whose polymorphism has absolutely no genetic bearing on cultural abilities and attributes.

The teacher who said, "We can never hope to understand," obviously regarded the ability to comprehend Indigenous culture as dependant on belonging to a genetically seperate Aboriginal "race". She obviously also believed that I did not have enough of this "blood" to develop intercultural understandings either, and thus included me in the homogeneous mainstream "we" of her statement. This is the sort of thing that can keep a man from sleep at night. How about you?