How we messed up our first attempt at talking about Indigenous peoples in Australia (and what we’re doing to fix it)
We knew for our Australia workbook that we wanted to talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders respectfully and carefully.
Too often, ATSI people are missing from the picture of “modern” Australia, and their histories are only taught about as an after-thought or from a perspective which emphasizes the exotic.
It’s also common for Aboriginal knowledge to be shared when and where it shouldn’t be.
In our first version of our Australia workbook, we had an activity related to a Dreamtime story – an indigenous story about the creation of the world and the land. The story was publicly available knowledge, but its exact provenance was unclear.
Upon further research we realized that sharing traditional stories without permission is unfair, so we removed it. Initially we replaced the story with a box explaining our decision to kids – talking about how we had originally shared a story without permission, and that it isn’t kind to share traditional stories. We wanted to make sure that our mistake didn’t just disappear, but that we noted it and explained how we made a wrong choice.
In later editions of the workbook, we replaced the activity completely, instead focusing on how non-indigenous people can be allies to ATSI peoples.
We have a quiz talking about manners in indigenous communities – some behaviours which are unacceptable – while also emphasizing that many Aboriginal people live in mainstream society while still holding onto their traditions and histories.
You can try the quiz out here…
Our main activity focuses on recognizing that ATSI culture is not one static body, but made up of multiple groups with their own languages and traditions.
The activity makes use of the brilliant AITASIS website, which provides a searchable map to find out which indigenous group holds guardianship over which parts of Australia.
We encourage children to explore this resource, asking them to find different Australian towns or cities and to find their indigenous owners, then asking them to find out more. The activity is a way for kids to begin to understand ATSI land ownership or guardianship, while providing them with a task they can repeat if travelling to Australia themselves. We remind the kids how important it is to find out about the indigenous peoples who have traditionally held the land they’re travelling to, as a mark of respect when visiting.
We also recognize that as non-Indigenous people we’re not in the best position to be teaching this. Although we have plans for how to incorporate (and pay for) the input of people from the countries we write about, in the meantime we’ve encouraged kids and parents to use resources created by ATSI peoples to further their learning. We’ve compiled a blog post of ATSI created resources, for both parents and kids to learn more, as well as warning readers about certain sources of information.