Indigenous Pluralism

Indigenous Pluralism is a traditional way of knowing that draws down knowledge from many surrounding language groups, as opposed to dominant cultural thinking that favours a monocultural approach to education. Although the colonial construct of neo-tribalism has shattered this way of thinking, along with traditional trade routes and songlines, our peoples are not customarily insular and static in our thinking. Traditionally, we always traded with other language groups (even as far afield as Asia - consider the archaic Wik words "otamat" and "remat" borrowed from Indonesian), adopting foreign ideas and technologies (eg. the dugout canoe from Asia, Christianity from Europe, Didgeridoo from Arnhem Land) and combining knowledge to create new innovations. We have always learned multiple languages and cultures from the world around us, intermarrying and adopting across language groups. My own Dreaming is a good example of this, so I will outline aspects of it briefly here to illustrate the scope of Indigenous pluralist knowledge.

My Dreaming plays out along songlines linking my Kaurna ancestors with my adoptive Wik family across the continent. From Nguko (owl) on Kaurna country to Ngamadja and the white owl on Wangkumarra land at South-west Queensland, where both peoples once sang the Mura song when gathered together for business, stretching way up to Cape York where Boobook and White Owl once travelled from their land in South Australia, whose widows then married into Cape York tribes, to where Wik people today call that same owl Nguk (like the Kaurna Nguko) - my learning journeys draw down from many language groups and Elders interwoven with these webs of knowledge.

The evolving philosophies of thinkers from many Indigenous groups (such as Kirridth Yordtharrngba of the Yaidt'midtung) often draw upon knowledges from around the world, including but not limited to Anglo language and knowledge. Thus I am able to learn European languages and ways while retaining my Aboriginal ways of thinking and knowing. This allows me to develop a global sense of my indigeneity, learning about spiritual matters from Chaldo-Assyrian aborigines in the Middle East, about "Indigenismo" from the Zapatistas in Mexico, or about Aboriginal sovereignty from Six Nations Mohawks in Canada.