Plea for autochthone education systems
Maya Newell’s latest film, seen online at the Viennese film festival ”This Human World”, exceeds the standards usually set for a film. It is part of an extensive campaign to improve educational opportunities for indigenous Australians, which culminated in a short speech given by the film’s 12-year-old lead, Dujuan, to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Accompanied by his father, Dujuan, reportedly the youngest speaker in the history of the Council, pleaded the Australian government to put an end to jailing and abusing 10-year-olds and insisted that Aborigines need their own schools — while valiantly struggling with his reading himself.
This describes the film’s intention without revealing anything about the film itself. The documentary feature film depicts everyday school and family life in Alice Springs from the perspective of Dujuan, exposing the gulf between the values and ideas their state school education and the traditional Arrernte education (the Arrernte are a tribe of Aborigines in Central Australia who live in and around Alice Springs). The persistent assimilation policy of the last century is repeatedly interwoven, as well as a current abuse scandal in the juvenile detention system. Take note: In Australia, the age of criminal responsibility begins at the age of 10, yet 100 % of the children and young people in detention are Aborigines.
Prototypical for the film and its theme is the scene in which his teacher explains with the help of an illustrated textbook that the history of Australia began with the discovery of the continent by Captain Cook, thus whitewashing the 65,000 years of Aboriginal history. Astonishing as it seems one momentarily begins to doubt the credibility of the documentary. Dujuan, on the other hand, never loses his composure and comments succinctly: “The history we learn in school is for white people”.
In my opinion, the deeper explosivity of the film lies in the question: To what extent can one completely alien concept of education find a place in a majority society at all? Against the backdrop of a global hegemony of key competencies, to what extent is there room for an educational conception that favours completely different basic skills? National education systems tend to teach homogenised national or global knowledge, depicting indigenous cultures as ignorant, primitive or backward (Smith, Tuck & Yang, 2019). In Europe, this fundamental problem can probably only be appreciated to some extent in the case of the Roma and the Sinti (recommended viewing the documentary film “The Angry Buddha” by Stefan Ludwig from 2016). The demand for instruction in the language of the minority is an important and obvious aspect that is not overlooked in the film. How any other elements of indigenous basic education might look like however, remain unexplored.
For instance, the film shows how he learns to steer a truck through the outback, despite being barely able to see beyond the dashboard. But this cannot be the great antithesis to the dominant educational paradigm. Although I do understand well his excitement for this formative learning experience, after all my cousin as my ‘driving instructor’ and I were probably not much older when I first tried driving my uncle’s tractor.
Yet, there is a possible larger dimension implicit in the film. We see at the beginning Dujuan collecting bush medicine and at end how he learns to burn the scrubland purposefully. In this way, the Aborigines imitate and support the natural cycle of Australian nature. In doing so, the film references millennia-long, non-codifiable, ignored Aboriginal knowledge that could be used in the fight against Australia’s increasingly devastating wildfires (Bardsley, Prowse and Siegfriedt, 2019).
References
https://inmyblooditruns.com/
World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education (WIPCE), https://wipce.net/
Smith, L. T., Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2019). Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view. New York: Routledge.
Bardsley, D. K., Prowse, T. A., & Siegfriedt, C. (2019). Seeking knowledge of traditional Indigenous burning practices to inform regional bushfire management. Local Environment, 24(8), 727–745.
Dujuan's speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva
Maya Newell, In my blood it runs, 2019, Australien, Trailer
Dujuan by truck through the outback, In my blood it runs, 2019,, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
Dujuan in School, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
Dujuan with his mother, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
Plea for autochthone education systems
Maya Newell’s latest film, seen online at the Viennese film festival ”This Human World”, exceeds the standards usually set for a film. It is part of an extensive campaign to improve educational opportunities for indigenous Australians, which culminated in a short speech given by the film’s 12-year-old lead, Dujuan, to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Accompanied by his father, Dujuan, reportedly the youngest speaker in the history of the Council, pleaded the Australian government to put an end to jailing and abusing 10-year-olds and insisted that Aborigines need their own schools — while valiantly struggling with his reading himself.
This describes the film’s intention without revealing anything about the film itself. The documentary feature film depicts everyday school and family life in Alice Springs from the perspective of Dujuan, exposing the gulf between the values and ideas their state school education and the traditional Arrernte education (the Arrernte are a tribe of Aborigines in Central Australia who live in and around Alice Springs). The persistent assimilation policy of the last century is repeatedly interwoven, as well as a current abuse scandal in the juvenile detention system. Take note: In Australia, the age of criminal responsibility begins at the age of 10, yet 100 % of the children and young people in detention are Aborigines.
Prototypical for the film and its theme is the scene in which his teacher explains with the help of an illustrated textbook that the history of Australia began with the discovery of the continent by Captain Cook, thus whitewashing the 65,000 years of Aboriginal history. Astonishing as it seems one momentarily begins to doubt the credibility of the documentary. Dujuan, on the other hand, never loses his composure and comments succinctly: “The history we learn in school is for white people”.
In my opinion, the deeper explosivity of the film lies in the question: To what extent can one completely alien concept of education find a place in a majority society at all? Against the backdrop of a global hegemony of key competencies, to what extent is there room for an educational conception that favours completely different basic skills? National education systems tend to teach homogenised national or global knowledge, depicting indigenous cultures as ignorant, primitive or backward (Smith, Tuck & Yang, 2019). In Europe, this fundamental problem can probably only be appreciated to some extent in the case of the Roma and the Sinti (recommended viewing the documentary film “The Angry Buddha” by Stefan Ludwig from 2016). The demand for instruction in the language of the minority is an important and obvious aspect that is not overlooked in the film. How any other elements of indigenous basic education might look like however, remain unexplored.
For instance, the film shows how he learns to steer a truck through the outback, despite being barely able to see beyond the dashboard. But this cannot be the great antithesis to the dominant educational paradigm. Although I do understand well his excitement for this formative learning experience, after all my cousin as my ‘driving instructor’ and I were probably not much older when I first tried driving my uncle’s tractor.
Yet, there is a possible larger dimension implicit in the film. We see at the beginning Dujuan collecting bush medicine and at end how he learns to burn the scrubland purposefully. In this way, the Aborigines imitate and support the natural cycle of Australian nature. In doing so, the film references millennia-long, non-codifiable, ignored Aboriginal knowledge that could be used in the fight against Australia’s increasingly devastating wildfires (Bardsley, Prowse and Siegfriedt, 2019).
References
https://inmyblooditruns.com/
World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education (WIPCE), https://wipce.net/
Smith, L. T., Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2019). Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view. New York: Routledge.
Bardsley, D. K., Prowse, T. A., & Siegfriedt, C. (2019). Seeking knowledge of traditional Indigenous burning practices to inform regional bushfire management. Local Environment, 24(8), 727–745.
Dujuan's speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva
Maya Newell, In my blood it runs, 2019, Australien, Trailer
Dujuan by truck through the outback, In my blood it runs, 2019,, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
Dujuan in School, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
Dujuan with his mother, In my blood it runs, 2019, Filmstill
© Maya Newell
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