‘We wanted to be boss’: Self-determination and Aboriginal multilingual schools
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01front.pdf | contents and abstract | 374.86 kB | |||
| 02whole.pdf | thesis | 3.77 MB |
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Schooling has been a crucial site of struggle between Aboriginal people and settler colonial governments: both a site of assimilation and erasure, and simultaneously a site to work against these logics. This thesis investigates this dynamic in three schools between 1972 and 1983, during the first phase of federal policies of Aboriginal self-determination and self-management. Centering previously overlooked Aboriginal-authored texts and oral histories, it focuses on three case studies: the Strelley schools, independent bilingual schools emerging out of the Pilbara social movement in Western Australia; the mission-turned-government bilingual school Shepherdson College at Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island in North East Arnhem Land; and the independent multilingual Yipirinya School for town camp children in Alice Springs. Educators developed their own philosophies and strategic practices of ‘subaltern self-determination’ to exploit and shape schooling to bring together and sustain their communities. ‘Self-determination as state governance’ worked to both enable and constrain Aboriginal initiative. Through five identified ‘arenas of contest’, Aboriginal educators and their supporters contested settler state priorities to articulate their goals: political economy; school sovereignty; knowledges, technologies and temporalities; language and linguistic power; and spaces and lands. In this process, they formed part of emergent Aboriginal polities which engaged in processes of governance.
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