Indigenous young people,disadvantage and the violence of settler colonial education policy and curriculum

Abstract

In this article, I argue that settler colonial violence is manifest both in the experiences of Indigenous young people in their engagement with the education system, and in the fact that despite a decade of targeted efforts to close the gap in Indigenous educational ‘disadvantage’ – it still remains. Drawing on a small qualitative study undertaken with Indigenous high school students from across New South Wales, Australia, this research reveals that the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives within the classroom is reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future. Before concluding, I bring settler colonial theory in relation to sociologist Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation of violence to put forward a complex reading of Indigenous educational disadvantage as a product of colonial dispossession.

Keywords

education educational sociology Indigenous education Indigenous studies Indigenous youth justice social justice sociological theory youth

In this article, I suggest that an engagement with Indigenous education policy and the experience of Indigenous young people learning ‘shared history’ within Australian classrooms expose the continuation of settler colonial violence. Shared history within this context can be understood as the seemingly benevolent consideration of historical encounters as figured through, and legitimised by, discourses of aspirational unity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.¹ Within an education system that continues to fail Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people, this desire for unity through an articulation of past events in the present works to depoliticise Indigenous perspectives and experiences while making central a version of shared history underpinned by an exclusionary curriculum. This is evident in interviews with Indigenous high school students in New South Wales, Australia which reveal that the knowledge, stories and perspectives students carry with them into the classroom are often dismissed or difficult to share. This dismissal, I argue, is not unique to the classroom, but rather classrooms are reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future. As Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013: 80) note:

When we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. To say that something is invested in something else’s futurity is not the same as saying it is invested in something’s future, though the replacement project is invested in both settler future and futurity.

The primary aim of coercive policies of the 20th century was to disconnect Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal children and young people from their families, communities and land, compromising the futurity of Indigenous people. I understand this policy agenda as an assertion of absence in the future. Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still remain. Despite our determined existence, the violence of these past policies can still be traced in the contemporary violence experienced by Indigenous young people in their schooling. Consequently, after a decade of targeted efforts to close the gap in Indigenous educational ‘disadvantage’ a significant gap still remains (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson, 2016; Hogarth, 2016; Morrissey, 2006; Vass, 2012).

This article begins by considering scholarship which questions whether the concerns experienced by Indigenous young people in their engagement with schooling are also reflected in state policy. I then briefly outline some methodological and ethical questions about conceptions of Indigenous youth in research with Indigenous young people, before presenting the findings from this research project. Lastly, I bring settler colonial theory in relation to conceptions of violence as theorised by peace scholar Johan Galtung (1969, 1990). This theoretical relationship is useful in accounting for the continuing disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people and the dismissal of Indigenous young people’s knowledge in their engagement with schooling.

Indigenous education policy vs Indigenous student realities

In their consideration of multicultural education policies in Australia, Knight et al. (1990: 133) assert that official state policy attempts to ‘represent the world in factual terms so that certain kinds of practices flow “naturally” from them’. This naturalisation process is informed and framed by inquiry emergent from social science and modernist principles creating a seemingly seamless, coherent and impartial reality that appeals to popular consciousness. In this way, official policies master-narrate a legitimised view of the world reinforced by available social myths. As Maggie Walter notes in reference to the government’s Closing the Gap policy, ‘Indigenous data “stories” are unlikely to deviate from well-worn themes of disadvantage and deviation from the norm’ (2010: 53). Countering these normalised realities are competing stories that can be employed as ‘resources for decoding and recoding and otherwise clashing or collaborating with official policy’ (Knight et al., 1990: 133). Within Indigenous-focused education policy in Australia, educational inequality has been normalised through the strategic severance from the ‘colonial’ process as enabled by representations which position disadvantage as an inherent part of Aboriginality. ‘Disadvantage’ is thus figured in a way to disconnect it from its historical inception, working to situate it as not only external to the social universe of non-Indigenous Australians, but also as wholly the burden and problem of Indigenous peoples.

The implications of the past for the education of Indigenous students have been acknowledged within the scholarly literature (Beresford et al., 2012; Gray and Beresford, 2008; Herbert, 2012; Hogarth, 2016; Malin and Maidment, 2003; Maxwell et al., 2018; Miller, 2017; Patrick and Moodie, 2016; Rudolph, 2016). Gray and Beresford (2008) argue that historical policies of segregation and assimilation denied a sufficient education for generations of Aboriginal people, thus contributing to an intergenerational legacy of trauma and disadvantage that inhibits educational progress for many Indigenous students in the present. They also argue that few of the educational repercussions of the forced removal of children have been considered within official discourse. Therefore, they believe that recognition of the impact of colonialism and continued racism is a precursor to the achievement of increased educational outcomes for Indigenous Australians (Gray and Beresford, 2008).

The extent to which empirical research informs public discourse is also questioned by Lea et al. (2011) who consider reforms concerning Indigenous education and whether the results from existing research are considered within policy contexts. For example ‘engagement’ is identified as one of six priorities central to the design and implementation of educational policy, programs and services in the current national Indigenous education strategy to ‘close the gap’ in Indigenous and non-Indigenous student achievement (Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs, 2010: 6). Yet in a three-year ethnographic study of schools in northern Australia, Lea et al. (2011: 332) found that ‘families resoundingly testify, their schools engage with them on a more than satisfactory basis’. This research builds on international perspectives of parent engagement (Ball, 2003b; Ball and Vincent, 2001) and situates Indigenous parents in terms of their class orientation as low to intermediate interveners, rather than as culturally deficient, as much of the policy emphasis on engagement implies (Lea et al., 2011). In demonstrating how Indigenous parents have ‘been positioned in the ebbs and flows of engagement imperatives’ (2011: 323), Lea et al. argue that an emphasis on the lack of community and parent engagement diverts attention from the social and economic barriers Indigenous students and their families face while simultaneously inferring that poor attendance and academic achievement is due to parents and communities ‘lackluster interest’ in schooling (Lea et al., 2011: 333). Overwhelmingly the ‘fuzzy logic’ of policy directives emphasising engagement glosses over aspects of Indigenous lived realities outside of school that directly impact upon students’ retention, attendance and achievement.

Over the last decade significant research into Indigenous education has emerged capitalising on recent advances in the theory and measurement of multidimensional notions of self-concept (Bodkin-Andrews et al., 2010; Craven and Marsh, 2004; Craven et al., 2005). The data informing this literature stems from a singular, yet extensive, publicly funded research project published in 2005 focusing on the aspirations and self-concepts of 517 Indigenous and 1151 non-Indigenous secondary-school students. The nascent results from the quantitative aspect of this project indicated that Indigenous students place more importance on attending school, achieving good grades and contributing to their community and society as a whole than do non-Indigenous students. The qualitative data gained from focus groups undertaken as part of the research supported these findings regarding student aspirations. Additionally, it was revealed that Indigenous students received inadequate assistance and careers advice compared to their non-Indigenous peers, while multiple social barriers, including racism, contribute to the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational attainment.

In an attempt to counter the research that overwhelmingly focuses on students who do not succeed, Craven et al. (2005) interviewed Indigenous students in their final years of high school about their educational and employment aspirations, school attitudes, peer relationships, family situations and place in community. These students described an educational environment that continually challenged them socially and culturally, where they had ‘learned to “get on with it” and accept injustices so as to get through’ (2005: 140). This is compounded by the fact that many Indigenous people aiming to continue on to higher education, due to previous policies referenced above, are first-generation students who, unlike their non-Indigenous counterparts, are the first in their social and familial universe to graduate high school let alone attend university (Behrendt et al., 2012). For those students who do continue on to finish high school, it is a battle fought ‘against a backdrop of subtle and relentless racism that affected their daily lives’, manifest in the curriculum and their relationships with teachers and peers (Craven et al., 2005: 24–5). Teachers and career advisers’ low expectations of Indigenous students often translated into inadequate advice, which Craven et al. (2005) identified as a critical social justice issue.

Increasingly, policy imperatives present ‘a diversity of interests as a homogeneity, in much the same way that anthropological notions of culture and the project of assimilationism have attempted to contain diversity and erase or shape Indigenous subjectivities in the past’ (McConaghy, 1998: 343). For example, Aboriginal children who were taken away under assimilation policies acquired Western knowledge at the expense of Indigenous ways of knowing, language and culture. Yet Indigenous children affected by segregation maintained Indigenous knowledge without attaining what is perceived as sufficient Western cultural capital to negotiate with white Australian society (see Malin and Maidment, 2003). Thus, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson highlights, ‘in effect colonisation produced multiple contexts that shaped the construction of Indigenous subjectivities, which were and are positioned within discursive formations of history relative to a particular space, country and time’ (2003: 23). Consequently, the implications of the forced removal of generations of Indigenous children are mirrored by the effects of segregation policies for those children who remained on their homelands with culture and language, but who, as a result, were often denied access to mainstream education. Despite the diversity of Aboriginal experiences of education, national policy continues to present the Indigenous community as homogeneous (Mellor and Corrigan, 2003; Yu, 2012). As Mellor and Corrigan (2003: 3) state ‘a further corollary of the homogenisation in much of the research and policy relating to Indigenous education is the loss of the differentiated Indigenous voices’. In seeking to interrogate the homogenising effect of Indigenous education policy and its consequences, it is imperative that critique also provides a framework for examining the ways in which Australian policy processes have worked to erase Indigenous subjectivities, while also reproducing inequality.

Research project

Methods

This research was undertaken on Gumbaynggirr Country on the mid-north coast of New South Wales with 1 Torres Strait Islander and 12 Aboriginal high school students from six different state schools and one private school across the state. Students were recruited to be part of the study based on their involvement in a residential high school program for Indigenous students. The young people who participated in this study were around 15 years of age. Of the 13 students who participated, 7 contributed in individual interviews, 4 in one focus group and 2 in a combined interview. Both focus groups and interviews were loosely structured, responding generally to the broader question: What is it like being an Indigenous high school student? This approach gave me the freedom to build on certain relevant points as they emerged. In engaging with the transcriptions of focus groups and interviews I employed thematic analysis to differentiate themes and their significance to this research project (Aronson, 1994; Boyatzis, 1998; Braun and Clarke, 2006). After discerning the prominent themes that emerged through the engagement with these students in interviews and focus groups, I set about interpreting the findings. Before presenting an aspect of the findings of this research project with Indigenous young people, it is important also to consider conceptions of Indigenous youth, particularly in educational research.

Conceptions of Indigenous youth in research with Indigenous young people

Indigenous young people are overwhelmingly framed within scholarly literature (Palmer and Collard, 1993; Tuck, 2009), the media (Fforde et al., 2013) and policy (Altman and Fogarty, 2010) as problems. In fact, in the present moment, the parameters framing Indigenous children and young people maintain extensive reference to risk (Schwab, 2012), gaps (Ford, 2012; Wheldall et al., 2010), disadvantage (e.g. Carson and Koster, 2012; Keddie et al., 2013), underachievement (e.g. Klenowski, 2009; Romero-Little, 2010) and disorder (Homel et al., 1999). This language is often used to describe a seemingly self-evident assumption: that Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal young people are a problem in need of fixing. While the findings presented here draw on the experiences of Indigenous young people in their engagement with schooling, they themselves are not part of the problem being attended to. This research, to be clear, is not asking questions about who these Indigenous children and young people are, or making representative claims about who they ought to be (S. Nakata, 2015; Tuck, 2009). Rather, a focus on the experiences of Indigenous young people within the classroom in parallel with the classroom as a space where ‘policy as discourse’ (Ball, 1993, 2003a) is enacted, illuminates the continued function of settler colonial education. This focus also reveals that Indigenous students are not only victims of the structural violence of an exclusionary curriculum, but actively negotiate their position in relation to it (see for example M. Nakata, 2007: 10).

Findings: schooling as contested ground

Throughout this article I have been building on the proposition that political considerations of Indigenous ‘disadvantage’ fail to contend with certain significant aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational realities. For the students who participated in this research this is evident, for example, in the disjuncture they identified in the knowledge they hold about the past as inherent through their families and communities’ stories, compared to the accepted historical narratives asserted within the classroom. What proceeded most strongly from my engagement with these students was the extent to which their experiences of school were punctuated with moments of disjuncture – between what they felt others thought Aboriginal people ‘should be’ versus their perceptions of themselves – and the disjuncture between their perspectives and legitimated perspectives of the past.

Intergenerational knowledge and experience of colonialism

School was the primary space in the lives of these students where their position and the knowledge inherent in occupying that position was most under contestation. Particularly as many of the students I interviewed talked of how past policies of assimilation had directly affected their family.

Yeah, my grandfather was part of the Stolen Generation.

My Nan’s sister was part of the Stolen Generation

Heaps of my family were taken away.

My Dad’s dad.

For some of the students, silence about the past indicated a story untold. Bec for example, talked of the silence she faced when asking about her family story, which signified to her that something painful had occurred.² In response to a question enquiring as to whether she was aware if her family had been directly affected by previous policies she stated:

I think so, but I’m not too sure because they wouldn’t talk about it. Even when I ask my Mum she’s like ‘Nup, you’d have to ask Nan but she might not want to talk about it.’ So I know something happened.

Later in the interview she commented in relation to a desire to know more about her family history and cultural background that:

I wanted to learn more about it but I couldn’t, like I wanted to speak to my Nan and that, but she’s really touchy on that subject because when she was younger stuff happened in her life that she doesn’t want to talk about.

For Bec, an association was made between her lack of knowledge about her family history and the possibility that her maternal grandmother had been forcibly disconnected from culture and ancestral lands. For those students who did not identify as having had family members directly affected, they still acknowledged a historical position of potentiality that had not turned into an actuality. Jamie, for example, felt that his father was lucky ‘because he was around the time of Stolen Generations, but he wasn’t taken away’. I emphasise these familial identifications, whether potential or actual, because they ground disciplinary discussions of historical policy occurrences in corporeal and personal narratives that are intergenerational and partly inform what these students know and who they are. This is particularly relevant as the dissonance often referenced by the students seemed most explicit in the recounting of their experiences engaging with historical issues as presented as part of the school curriculum.

Contested histories

Discussions during interviews and focus groups about history often revealed frustration, as students communicated their experience of being in a classroom where their collective measure in Australia’s history they felt, was being misrepresented or not presented at all. Bec cited history lessons as moments where she felt she was being treated differently because of her Aboriginality. The teacher, she felt, was hyperaware of her presence and as a result:

[w]as a bit more touchy about it, like in case she would say something that was going to offend me or something, and in one case she actually asked me in front of the whole class if what she was saying was offending me. But the fact that she asked me, that kind of offended me. Got me a bit angry.

Davey felt the same way as Bec. When I asked him if he was treated differently at school, he said:

Yeah, like by non-Indigenous people and teachers more. Even the teachers I have seen act a bit different. Not in a racist way. But they are trying not to be racist, like around us. They completely change when they’re one on one with us. They change the way they speak.

During a focus group, I asked four of the girls participating whether each of their respective schools acknowledged Aboriginal people as part of Australian history. Carmen, who is a strong, opinionated and articulate young woman talked about how she dreaded history lessons at school.

Usually half of the class would get into a very heated racial discussion, which we had to sit through. Because the teacher had no idea what he was going on about. Some of the stuff he had on the board, because he just copies it from the Internet, so some of the stuff he has got on the board is racist, and he is teaching us. So it’s like very … uncomfortable.

Carla, who attends the same school as Carmen, responded by describing Carmen’s reaction to these classes: ‘[she] is really quiet during that class. She never talks in that class ever. She rages, she has whisper rages.’ Carla’s account of her experience during these history lessons resonates with Carmen’s:

It is a really touchy, touchy topic. It’s hard to bring it up without something racial being said, or a racial discussion happening. If something happened in history, and you said, ‘no that’s not right’ and then explained it from an Aboriginal perspective, someone will be like, ‘nup that’s not right’. And then it would turn into a big thing.

The issue of which historical perspectives were presented as legitimate was a significant aspect of the school experience identified within interviews and focus groups.

Conflicting perspectives of the past: what is legitimate history?

Students felt they had a unique perspective not considered within the school environment. Many of the students also felt that when Indigenous-focused content was incorporated into lessons or class discussions it was still presented from a Eurocentric position. During the focus group with Carmen and Carla, who attend the same school, and Dell and Samantha, the issue of perspective arose:

Dell:

We don’t learn the Indigenous side of things.

Samantha:

They teach the non-Indigenous side.

Dell:

Like what about how our people would have felt? There are ghosts on our land!

Carmen:

Yeah, we learn a lot more of the non-Indigenous history and background.

Dell:

It helps us to see their side, but I kinda want them to see our side.

Tj, whose grandfather was removed from his family as a child, talked about how his people were forced out of the state of Queensland where his tribal ancestral lands are located, onto missions in New South Wales. He connected the past treatment of his people to his own identity in the present. When I asked him whether it was important to teach about Indigenous experiences of the past at school he stated, ‘they were my ancestors and stuff. I could have experienced all that. It’s important to me.’ Danny, one of my Gumbaynggirr countrymen, expressed the importance of including Indigenous perspectives as part of the shared history of Australia.³

They should value their own country’s history, and the owners of a lot of that history. And the land that they are on … you got to like, you can’t express your own beliefs, you can, but you always have to learn from a white perspective, especially in history. Why don’t they learn from us for once?

Jamie also responded by asserting that an Aboriginal perspective was important as part of a shared history:

Even if it doesn’t affect them or change them, I think it’s good to hear, or it’s good for them to know what we’ve been through and even if they don’t care, I mean it’s another side of Australia’s history that they should be aware of because what we mainly learn at school is from, basically, from a white perspective.

In the following excerpt, an explicit connection was explored between the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and what is included as legitimate history within the school syllabus of each respective school. This discussion occurred during the focus group with Carmen, Carla, Dell and Samantha. It was a continuation of their response to a question about the importance of acknowledging Indigenous perspectives.

Carmen:

What happened to all our ancestors and what they went through. At school you don’t really get that much of an opportunity to learn about it.

Samantha:

They gloss it over at school and make it sound all pretty.

Dell:

At school they make it sound like a free holiday.

Carmen:

You’ve got your history and geography and some of the history and like and whatnot, about Aboriginal Australians, but like it’s all rubbish.

Samantha:

And they use nice words. Like ‘colonisation’, and ‘settlement’.

Dell:

And we like ‘You stealing our land.’

Samantha:

Invasion!

Carmen:

There’s more to history than that. You can’t just touch on it. Say a few things.

Carla:

It’s all wrong.

Samantha:

But do you guys feel that you learn more about the First Fleet than you do anything else?

Group:

Yes.

The First Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788 from Britain; onboard were the initial ‘settlers’ and convicts who were to ‘settle’ the newly acquired colony. The students participating in this focus group perceived this ‘settlement’ as the moment Australia was invaded and they were dispossessed of their land. Carmen equated this dissonance between her perceptions and those being asserted as legitimate within the classroom, with powerlessness. She felt like her interpretation of these past events and what they meant to her were not acknowledged or valued. She states:

it’s hard to be able to have that conversation with like, your geography or history teacher. You get into school and you go into one of those lessons and if you see something on the board that’s a little bit iffy, you can’t really say ‘Sir that’s wrong’ because he’ll be like ‘Proof. Where’s your proof?’

When I asked Danny what was taught at his school about Australian history, he responded ‘I don’t know I, like, failed on the test because I disagreed with it all.’ Danny also questioned why perhaps a meaningful shared history was not featured as part of the curriculum. He suggested that ‘it’s probably why they teach it at such a young age. So you don’t have that big idea. So you cannot build your own perspective.’ Carmen felt silenced during history and geography classes, while Danny deployed resistance as a site of activism against what he was being taught. Danny’s decision to disengage with this aspect of schooling, and the focus group participants’ expressions of frustration and disempowerment signify a tension that circumscribed the general experience of these students.

Indigenous perspectives and ‘Australian’ history in school

As evidenced by the interviews and focus groups relating to the history presented within the schools these students attend, a significant issue and point of disjuncture emerged from the apparent misrepresentation or lack of presentation of Indigenous history and perspectives as part of the syllabus. A lacuna exists in empirical research on the educational experience of Indigenous young people. There is a particular gap in the research on the experiences of Indigenous students in their engagement with, and the impact of, historical subject matter taught within schools. In 1978, the Catholic Commission of Justice and Peace issued a statement of concern to the national government about the state of educational wellbeing of Aboriginal people. They asserted that:

History as learned by most Australians is the history of Europeans, and especially of the British, and of their descendants in Australia. It is the history of the dominant races and nations, written by them and for them. As such it does nothing to make us sensitive to the impact of the events in that history on the Aboriginal population. Nor does it lead us to an awareness or interest in the history of the Aboriginal people who have lived here for at least 30,000 years. (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, cited in Welch, 1988: 210)

Forty years later, the students in this study continue to criticise the presentation of Australian history for very similar reasons. Ten years after former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations and announced the Close the Gap policy, not much has shifted. In line with this critique, Robyn Moore suggests that while the apology allowed for the opportunity to acknowledge responsibility for past policies, ‘the ongoing repercussions of those policies are dismissed’ (2012: 9). The act of apologising establishes ‘the morality of the nation while simultaneously freeing it from the burden of responsibility’ (2012: 9).

Only since 2014, with the implementation of a national curriculum, have debates about what is to be pragmatically relayed within educational contexts for the benefit of Indigenous students entered mainstream consciousness. In answering the question, ‘what change processes are needed to close the gap in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students?’ Gray and Beresford (2008: 215) call for more acknowledgement of the past impacts of colonial policies and their implications in the present day for educational achievement. Within current policy discourse aimed at ameliorating Indigenous disadvantage, Coram (2008) asserts that non-Indigenous Australians are primarily positioned as the benevolent patrons of goodwill in the present. The implications of maintaining Indigenous disadvantage are thus concealed by denial or a silence about the past. Coram argues that, in terms of educational policy, ‘it is the erasing of history that obscures the systemic social engineering that has led to current patterns of inequality’ (2008: 2). This is also evidenced within policy discourse and, to an extent, academic literature, where manifestations of colonialism in the present are conflated with the perceived cultural particularities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Brasche and Harrington, 2012; Cheers, 1990; Cooper, 2011; Fisher, Frey, and Lapp, 2011). Morris and Cowlishaw (1997: 7) contend that:

It is the erasure of historical processes from Aboriginal identity, which precludes many Aboriginal groups from the successful prosecution of land claims, or indeed the successful prosecution of their interests in general…. The current appeal to ‘culture’ in defining Aboriginality turns out to be not so different from the explicitly racial definitions of an earlier era.

This is problematic as often those Indigenous people most disconnected from ‘culture’, as it is positioned with policy discourse, are also those whose families were most affected by previous policies of assimilation and segregation (Bretherton and Mellor, 2006; Luker, 2005; Perkins, 2004). Bec, for example, who wants to find out more about her Aboriginal culture and family history, is prohibited from doing so unless she broaches the painful past with her grandmother. The policy focus on the ‘cultural competency’ of teachers and school staff, rather than on an awareness of the shared and often traumatic past, and its legacy for all Australians, relegates students like Bec and the others who participated in this research to a liminal space where their authority as Aboriginal people remains unacknowledged. Notions of culture as the acceptable form of differentiation to define ‘otherness’ have transposed ideas of race. The employment of culture within this context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2007) asserts, is a rhetorical strategy which reduces ‘culture’ to disembodied knowledge and practice in order to render invisible racially marked bodies and the racism that underpins the logic of this strtaegy. Gray and Beresford (2008) acknowledge a necessity to recognise past policies and their impacts, in addition to contemporary assertions that racism has taken on a structural form, which perpetuates current inequality while seemingly seeking to address it. Here I make a link between the lack of historical understanding incorporated within the curriculum and classroom, and displayed by the teachers within the experience of these Indigenous students as an indication of the way settler colonial violence continues to function through education.

Settler colonial violence and education

In making sense of the students’ experiences as a reflection of broader structural injustice, I find it useful to extend the reality that settler colonial invasion is ‘a structure and not an event’ (Wolfe, 2006: 388) by drawing on peace scholar Johan Galtung’s theory of violence. Such a consideration allows a complex reading of the connection between Indigenous educational disadvantage as a product of colonial dispossession. In doing so I suggest that Indigenous educational disadvantage, and the policy failure to adequately address this inequality, are forms of structural violence.

Johan Galtung (1969) argues that it is often assumed that policy serves the cause of peace. Yet policy is frequently implemented irrespective of ‘how tenuous the relation has been in the past or how dubious the theory justifying this as a reasonable expectation for the future’ (1969: 167). Galtung’s theory of violence is useful as it proposes violence as the cause of difference between the actual and the potential. When the actual is avoidable, as in the comparative Indigenous educational disadvantage, then violence is present. If we are to view the qualitative difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational achievement, this discrepancy signifies structural violence. Galtung makes the basic distinction between direct violence – violence that works on the body, and structural or indirect violence – violence that works on the soul (1969: 169). In both cases the violence may culminate in individuals or groups being hit or hurt ‘in both senses of the word’ (1969: 170) but in the latter, unlike the former, the concrete actors can be identified as having committed the violence. With indirect violence, or what Galtung (1969) also terms social injustice, ‘violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as un-equal life chances’ (1969: 171).

In the settler colonial context of nation states like Australia and Canada, the direct and physical violence of land theft and (the purpose) of child removal arguably continue in the indirect violence of the school curriculum and policy which locate disadvantage as an inherent and ‘self-evident’ part of Aboriginality (Walter, 2009: 2). Galtung also transverses the temporal in thinking about specific violence and its origins by stating that often forms of structural violence ‘can, by closer scrutiny, be traced back to personal violence in their pre-history’ (1969: 178). Within an Australian context the consideration of structural violence as occurring within multiple interrelated sites, such as the comparative disparity in life expectancy, rates of imprisonment and educational success, can be seen as an extension of previous forms of colonial and direct violence.

Galtung (1990) also extends this definition of violence to include cultural violence, as the aspects of ‘the symbolic sphere of our existence’ support the structures that enable social injustice to occur (1990: 291). Thus, the under-representation of Indigenous people, culture and ways of knowing at all levels of the education system gain new epistemological significance. This resonates with Torres Strait Islander theorist Martin Nakata’s notion of the ‘corpus of objectified knowledge’ about Indigenous people created primarily by non-Indigenous people. This corpus is primary in informing general understandings of our lived realities (2007: 215).

Educational disadvantage of Indigenous students is a form of structural violence, amidst the cultural violence of the continued repression of Indigenous symbolic capital and culture. Bourdieu (2007: 83) describes capital as the ‘immanent regularities of the social world … inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practice’. The insistence on Eurocentric education as the only legitimised form of knowledge transmission at the expense or non-recognition of Indigenous cultural and social capital within this context, limits the potential benefits Indigenous students may gain from a ‘Western’ education.

Conclusion

The issues discussed in this article are seemingly intractable. How do we change an education system, that has been and continues to be a linchpin of settler colonial dispossession, to benefit Indigenous people? Or, more specifically in the context of this research, what needs to occur to begin to ensure the futurity of Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal young people in an education system which has sought to erase them? ‘Indigenous education’ has been described as an impossible space full of wicked problems (Gray and Beresford, 2008). Decades of concerted policy efforts have aimed to address the ‘Aboriginal problem’ through education, yet these efforts have failed. This failure is manifest in the presence of these young people who haunt high school classrooms, unsettling notions of ‘shared history’, while their intellectual capacities and critical knowledge remain misrecognised.

This misrecognition extends to, and is constitutive of, research and policy premised on the a priori assumption that the problem of Indigenous people is first and foremost disadvantage and deficiency. Yet the experiences shared by the participants in this research would indicate that if a student did not attend a history class, for example, the repetition of an exclusionary curriculum could be the reason. This strategic decision on the part of a student to mitigate a traumatic experience can only be interpreted through current deficit frameworks as failure – for the student, their parents and community – and as indicative of a lack of learning capacity.

In response to this, the self-evident assumptions that underpin education research and policy (and inform teacher training in universities across Australia) in ‘Indigenous education’ need to be interrogated. In doing so, how about we revisit some important questions, like: what are the problems and, importantly, who is defining them (Bacchi, 2012)? It might emerge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do not feel it necessary that a ‘shared history’ or anthropological version of culture (Lowe and Yunkaporta, 2013) be taught in schools, because culture is a thing to be taught by our families and communities. And it might also emerge that teachers need to develop their skills in safely facilitating difficult conversations around the legacies of colonisation, including racism, so they can move beyond limited understandings of Aboriginality with all learners and value the perspectives and experiences that are already part of their classrooms (Walter and Butler, 2013).

Another step in the right direction might include the revision of the national curriculum informed by meaningful consultation with Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal young people. As noted, the intellectual and critical perspectives carried by Indigenous students are not being realised in history, social science and civics classrooms across the country. For the development and delivery of meaningful, complex and responsive curriculum, the critical perspectives of Indigenous people, but Indigenous young people particularly, needs to be valued.

In considering Australia as a liberal-democratic state, it is, as Hobsbawm (2010) notes for many countries outside of Europe: ‘political democracy assumed the elimination of the former indigenous populations’ (2010: 24). Ironically, this goal was being nurtured as the white Australian population sought increasingly to conform to ‘that of legally free and equal individuals’ (2010: 24). Stoler and Cooper (1997) talk of these contradictions as tensions of empire. In reflecting on Australian policies of assimilation and segregation, McConaghy (1998) argues that these tensions are most notably manifest in education:

On the one hand, while various policy initiatives have resulted in the most brutal deprivations of liberty and nurturance, physical violence and cultural genocide of Indigenous Australians, on the other hand educational policies promised enlightenment and all of the special liberties and civilities of life within the British Empire. (1998: 343).

Throughout most of the 20th century, education was incorporated into Indigenous policy as a justification for dispossession. These policies culminated in personal, physical and direct violence. In the 21st century, education is necessarily seen as a positive initiative necessary for the wellbeing of the Aboriginal community. Yet, as I have argued, due to an insistence on forgetting the violence of the past and its relationship to the essence of the Australian nation, Indigenous educational disadvantage has emerged and the preconditions for its existence are not acknowledged. The insistence on forgetting is inhibiting a more nuanced, appropriate and applicable way of addressing Indigenous educational inequality, and inhibiting the provision of generative learning spaces for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners while allowing structural inequality and thus indirect violence, to continue.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Charlie Perkins Scholarship Trust. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

Notes

ORCID iD

Lilly Brown

Author biography

Lilly Brown is an educator and researcher, currently completing her doctorate with the Youth Research Centre and Indigenous Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Throughout her work across secondary and higher education, she has maintained a focus on the relationship between knowledge and power, and the potential of education to affect positive social change. She belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales.

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