Options for the future of indigenous Australia
The Australian Government is committed to closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. This includes the gap in literacy, numeracy, infant mortality, health outcomes and overall life expectancy.
The Government is also committed to working with Indigenous Australians to ensure they are able fully to participate - both socially and economically - in the life of the nation. This includes providing access to high quality education, health services generally and addressing alcohol, violence and homelessness in those communities where these threatens the safety and wellbeing of individuals and families.
The Australia 2020 Summit will examine:
- How we forge a new partnership with between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia to overcome disadvantage and provide practical pathways to the future
- The role of targeted programs and interventions such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the Cape York Welfare Reform Trials in achieving change in remote communities
- How we might promote economic development in remote Australia to provide Indigenous community members with the opportunity to be economically independent
- Improving access to mainstream programs by Indigenous Australians
- Promoting and preserving Indigenous culture, languages and traditions.
Use this online forum to contribute your ideas to the Summit.
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Comments
Time for a Little Respect
We walked across just about every bridge there is, but now we need to actually build them. We should be looking at integrating more indigenous studies, including indigenous language studies into a compulsory national curriculum. Respect and knowledge go hand in hand and it’s about time non-indigenous Australians learnt a little bit more about their own history.
Indigenous subjects in the curriculum
I partially agree, but I also think that there should be a curriculum especially set for Indigenous children. Such a curriculum would include cultural studies and teach them about the Holocaust, the slave trade, the genocides in Cambodia, Uganda and Rwanda. This would give indigenous children some sense of their role in the world, their human rights and how to move forward positively with non-violence (they are not usually a violent people anyway, they appear to turn on themselves rather than mainstream whites). For children who have been the subject of abuse, or not, the curriculum could include, subjects that introduce children to basic psychological theorists such as Viktor Frankl who came to priority after the Holocaust, such as Abraham Maslow who proposed the heirarchy of needs and self actualisation or tapping into your own inner strengths, and such as Erik Erikson who suggested the developmental life stages which are so relevant to abused adults and teenagers who were abused in childhood, with their emphasis on the need to learn to trust before being able to move onto the next stage. Even a simple understanding of and exposuire to these concepts might contribute to the recovery of abused indigenous children and lead them to seek out further education and knowledge. In addition they need to learn about their own language and culture (as we do) and to learn practical skills that will enable them to support themselves until such time as they find a suitable career pathway to pursue, even if this means, learning to ride camels or learning to track animals and being in touch with nature and the earth, as well as other skills relating to the civilised world.
Why Learn Aboriginal Languages
The language is created by a culture (as in pidgin languges) or grows with the culture (native tongues) to express the ways of thinking of that culture. Pidgin was created as English does not accomodate much in the way of story telling, or description that is used in Indigneous cultures.
Look at the history of english. It is a language of diplomacy, to be able to speak to all other European language, and some asian, and say very formally, without expression and not open to misinterpretation (ie not flowery) and so not rude, very polite... "We are taking your land, and if you fight we will kill you". The best language for expressing such ideas.
Now if you want to describe that land, how to look after it, how the aspects of it are closely linked, what the process for maintenance are, you need a more expressive "round about" and descriptive language based on action, doing words, and less on objects. The indigenous languages studied in Australia and the US are based on verbs and suffix/prefix addiditve to verbs, with some nouns, often derived form a verb describing what that noun does. Hence they suit the context of the expression of the culture and its priorities.
Languages give you a new way of seeing the world, through another cultures eyes. Something we very much need in Australia and the rest of the world with the effect of our present living processes on the environment.