Out of My Element

Today was an interesting tutorial in my Indigenous Studies class. We read an article titled, “What's a Koori word for hello? Sorry, why don't we know?” describing the historical illiteracy of the Aboriginal people; however, the article brought up the point that perhaps it wasn’t the Aboriginal people that were illiterate, but rather that white Australians were. The white Australians, with one in particular, opened an education center in order to give the Aboriginals the opportunity to read and write English such that they “cure” the illiteracy “problem” of the indigenous populations. As a white American, I initially saw nothing wrong with this gesture. It appeared as a humanitarian attempt to better the often impoverished lives of the Aboriginals living in Australian cities.

Yet, the more I read into the article and discussed it with actual Australians, I realized how ethnographic my thinking was. We were forcing our English culture upon them without making the reciprocal attempt to learn from them, especially about the land. The overwhelming majority of English Australians are illiterate about the land, how it really works, and how to “speak” with it while that is something an indigenous child learns from the beginning. Really the whole point of this ramble is that it really made me stop and think about how I perceive and process things. I hadn’t really thought of this new perspective, and it intrigued me so much that I decided to ramble about it here. I realized even more so that I was truly an ignorant American when it came to the world’s cultures. It will be very interesting for me to continue exploring these tensions throughout the semester as I had no idea that these conflicts even existed in the first place. Just me being nerdy and rambling. Apologies.