Cultural Worlds

I have very carefully considered commenting on political issues on this blog. However, the more I think about it the more difficult it is to separate how personnel interact with the people in Aboriginal communities and the decisions being made at State and Federal levels of Government.

The latest issue before us is a policy presented by Kevin Rudd and Jenny Macklin to suspend the welfare payments of parents whose children do not attend school. Even if this policy is implemented nationally it hugely discriminates against Indigenous parents, because many Indigenous people in Australia live in situation that are wholly different to other Australians, and a large proportion of Indigenous people are dependent on welfare payments, due to the historical impact of colonisation. In the remote Communities of the NT 80% or more adults receive some form of welfare payment, and most of these parents want to see their children educated. Such an approach suggests that parents are to blame for non-attendance in Indigenous communities and ignores the evidence that it is schooling on Indigenous communities that have failed the parents and the children not the other way around.  Suspending welfare payments of parents if children are not attending schools will undermine further the parents struggling to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances.

The issues for Indigenous people are just to complex to handle with broad brush approaches. Indigenous parents in North East Arnhem have adopted a wide range of strategies to try to improve their children’s prospects, from saving for private boarding schools to starting their own private schools, to home education in traditional knowledge. For example of the diversity in remote areas, some of the most functional and productive families in the North East Arnhem Land area those who live in villages on their home lands or ‘outstations’ where they choose to live a more traditional life style. On these small home lands family are reliant on the little money that comes in through a few people’s welfare payments to maintain the whole village.  Although be many not be earning their own wages they are working towards sustainability and economic development on their own land.  Schools may be some distance away on relatively disfunctional communities.   Some of the parents on these ‘outstation’ (and sometimes parents living in communities also) have made the bold choice to try to teach they children in the ways of their own culture in order to keep them away from the negative effects of schooling in Balanda run schools, such as drug abuse, depression and violence, to name a few. Instead their focus is on attempting to train their children to be able to live sucessfully on their home lands, which includes; training in traditional knowledge and attempting to acquire other skills training to create economic enterprises in their home lands. Will this choice be removed from indigenous parents? This is just a sample of the problems with using such a blanket and authoritarian approach to create educational outcomes.  We must be very careful we do not add to the burdens with which Indigenous parents are already struggling.  Good community development arises out of working alonside people, particularly parents, and supporting them in their efforts to be successful as parents, adults and citizens. 

Have you ever noticed how it seems that other people just seems to know what they are doing when it come to relating to other people? I believe that no one really does know what to do, how we act and what we say in any given social setting is a balance between two things. How much we express of ourselves - what we are really thinking and feeling - and what bubbles up out of our cultural programming. Now I’m very socially awkward. I really do not programme very well. As a result I end up thinking too much about how I should be acting and what I should be saying, so much so that I usually feel very awkward in a social setting. Being a socially awkward person can be turned to an advantage when we enter a new culture, such as in an Aboriginal community. First being socially awkward we are used to standing around looking stupid while we work out what we should be doing. Second, we are more likely to admit we are out of our element and thus ask questions, this is a good thing. Third, we are patient and wait for a more socially adept friend to guide us. Cross-culturally it is good to find friends within the new culture who can be your social and cultural guide. So by observing and asking plenty of questions, and following our cultural guides we can learn a lot about a new culture and how to respond. And as we learn more we will become more capable in relating to Indigenous people. However, the socially awkward should be warned you by no means have the advantage in the cross-cultural situation.

The stand backish approach I have just described is a very safe way to engage in a new culture such as when one starts working with Aboriginal people. But the real trick is to balance this learning and understanding of culture in your head, with a different kind of understanding. We could call it learning, by experience, but it is not the experience I want to emphasise. It is letting go of our fear to let our real person inside come out. A genuine expression is much more valuable than a cold and calculated one when it comes building relationship with others even in another culture. I have recently realised that for all my experience with Yolngu people, I have huge difficultly knowing how to simply relate to an Indigneous person. Meeting someone in the street the other day I just didn’t know how to express myself to this person. I felt like I needed to know what would be the right thing to do? However, after thinking about this I realised that my awkwardness was a disadvantage in this and that I needed to allow a greater degree of self expression. Some ‘white fellas’ get along very well with Indigenous people because they are able to remain genuine or respond naturally to people. This is a more extrovert characteristic and it is very important for enabling personal relationships with people in other cultures. Visiting, meeting and talking to others is essential to learning to relate to another culture. If we do not allow relationships to blossom we remain marginal to the culture looking at it from the outside. Instead, get involved and let yourself bubble out when ever you can. The danger here is breaking a social rule or taboo and this can be embarrassing or even harmful to yourself or others. However, we cannot allow this to keep us introverted. The trick is to balance natural self expression and being aware of the cultural environment you are in, learning both from the mistakes, and relationships that arise from letting go, and from the observations and questions that arise from awkwardness.

The Federal Government has embarked on a process they call “Closing the Gap”. It recognises that there is a gap between the outcome for Indigenous people and rest of Australia in key social indicators. Indigenous people and their communities face poor health outcomes, poor job prospects and poor educational outcomes compared to the rest of Australia. As Australians attempt so help to rectify such social problems we must distinguish the symptoms from causes, and ultimately find a way to treat the cause/s. We cannot just assume that poor housing, or lack of teachers, or inadequate funding for services are the causes of these ‘Gaps.’ Let me illustrate the difference between symptom and cause using a parable.

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An interesting report called “An absence of mutual respect” was released at the beginning of June by our friends at ARDS which gives great insight into the difficulties faced by English second language Aboriginal people. It is a report on the problems that arise for the Yolngu peoples in their relationship with the Australian Balanda (non-indigenous) legal system and it goes some way to explaining part of the reasons why Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia are so over represented in the Jails. The report is of interest from a cross-cultural perspective because it gives insight to the problems that are arising for Aboriginal people at the cultural interface. First the report highlights the effects of Balanda (non-indigenous people) not understanding Yolngu legal systems and the resentment that this can produce for Yolngu people (see page 12 -14). The executive summary states

During the research, many Yolŋu people expressed the opinion that most non-Aboriginal people demonstrated a serious lack of knowledge and understanding in relation to Yolŋu people, Yolŋu law and Yolŋu ways. Consequently, the current situation was perceived by many Yolŋu as being a two-sided problem. Yolŋu conveyed distress that many Balanda did not even recognise that a Yolŋu legal system was in place, hence the title “Bäyŋu Ŋayaŋu-Dapmaranhamirr Rom ga Ŋorra” which means “no existence of deep and mutual respect”.

The report then goes on to investigate the misunderstanding Yolngu people have about the Balanda legal system. One must really read past the executive summary to get at the real value in this report as the summary fails to highlight the power of the reports content. It is an easy report to read, and is packed full of quotes from Indigenous people and short case studies. The real shock comes from page 21, where the research shows that:

Over 95% of Yolŋu surveyed were unable to correctly identify the meaning of the 30 commonly used English legal terms.

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For an Indigenous person on a community where English is a second, or even sixth language, all their peers will have similar difficulties in understanding and learning certain English words. When a person in such a community does hear a new English word from an English based training or education session, they can not easily learn the meaning, because their parents and peers do not use it, do not know it or they may use the local assumed meaning, which can be very wrong. Without someone explaining the meaning of difficult English words in their local language it is very difficult for Aboriginal people to establish the correct meaning. Just recently I came across the assumed meaning that an Aboriginal interpreter had pick up for the word ‘infection’. They weren’t confident, but said in their language that the word meant, ‘to reoccur’ or an ‘illness that keeps coming back’. They had interpreted for years in the health system without anyone picking up this potentially dangerous misunderstanding. However, it was corrected in a few minutes by the concept being explained to her in one of her indigenous languages. Read more

Generally, government agencies and organisations working in communities do not encourage staff to speak local languages. The result is that education and training of remote Aboriginal people in Australia is usually provided in an English dominated environment. Furthermore one of the prevailing views in regard to education, particularly english literacy, is an english only approach. Accelerated literacy for example, while it certainly has merits for teaching english, encourages an english only classroom. Such an environment can actually mask the problems of not utilising first language knowledge and concepts to teach english. It is important to understand how education or training can be going wrong without an english only speaker even knowing it, as a result of neglecting language use. I will discuss these problems over a series of posts.

Some of the advantages of teaching in the Aboriginal students’ native language are obvious; english words and concepts can more quickly be explained using terms locals already understand well. Some argue that by speaking english only it exposes students repeatedly to new english words, which allows Indigenous people to increase their vocabulary. This can occur in highly contextualised teaching sessions. However, contextualising in english to ESL students is difficult because of the loss of information that occurs as the student tries to understand english. When a learning a second language many of the words that a person does not know are not even heard by the brain, and if they are heard they are quickly discarded as the brain tries to decipher the meaning of the sentence using the word its does know. If you have learnt a second language yourself you would recognise this process, which leaves you hoping the words you missed were not too important. You may be able to see how this kind of word deafness can go unnoticed. This process of word loss is particularly detrimental to learning when contextualising, giving instructions, or explaining a meaning or concept, because these processes depend the most on information being transferred correctly. This is when the use of local language is most important. If local languages were used for these parts of the training process, particularly in literacy education, the learning process could be accelerated beyond what is achieved now by even the most successful english based strategies.

I recently participated in an online forum by GetUp seeking to nut out ideas to present to the 2020 summit in April 2008. One of the things I chose to highlight was the importance of using local languages in education.

Australia values indigenous languages as shown in our public art, but in practice it is easy to have excuses. Photo by Superciliousness, some rights reserved

My experience in North East Arnhem Land is that education continues to fail here because cultural and language differences continue to be ignored. We expect Aboriginal people everywhere to learn english but make no attempt to teach them effectively by requiring personnel entering Aboriginal communities to use local languages. … A look at the history shows that in the 60’s and 70’s there were parts of the NT where indigenous people had high literacy rates. In NE Arnhem Land by the 60’s and 70’s the missions of this region trained adults and children using local languages. This changed after the late 70’s as the long term mission staff were gradually replaced by Government personnel who were not required to learn language and rarely stayed more than 2 years. … Let’s do things differently and learn from the past for a change.

The comments received from others about this post were very insightful and they can be viewed here. For some there are a number of concerns about learning Aboriginal languages and educating using local languages that become blockages, or even excuses, that prevent personnel individually or corporately from putting time into learning to use Aboriginal languages. I wish to briefly respond to these common concerns. Read more

We shall be regularly publishing short articles on how to work more effectively across the cultural and linguistic barrier that exists between the mainstream social/cultural systems and the cultural worlds of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. We believe that it is shared ignorance about the other, misunderstandings, and information barriers cause by the cultural divide that limits the effectiveness of policy and programs in and for Australian Indigenous communities. Furthermore, the cultural complexities that must be tackled when working with many Indigenous people in Australia are one of the main causes of the burn-out experienced by staff working with communities. Through this blog we will provide a free resource to help you serve Aboriginal Communities better and better prepare yourself to face the difficulties that exist in many parts of Aboriginal Australia. We will post info on living in communities, on aspects of Indigenous culture, on cross-cultural skills and perhaps even some glimpses of new material being written by the author of ‘Why Warriors lie down and die’.

We hope you might visit regularly and please feel free to comment on our articles; we would appreciate your feed back.

If you are working with, for, or planning to enter an Aboriginal community in Australia the first thing you must do is begin to think like you are about to enter an overseas country. Of course physically these Aboriginal communities are in Australia, but the social and cultural reality locally is more like being in a developing nation that has been invaded by western international aid organisations. The primary difference from the situation in actual developing nations is the degree of invasion of dominant culture structures and the availability of financial resources. The Australian Government as the main ‘aid organisation’ in communities has the ablitiy to provide welfare payments consistent with first world living standards. This results in an economic situation on communities that is entirely different from developing nations. But on the other hand like developing nations most social, linguistic, political and cultural aspects of the communities are essentially foreign to the miscellaneous English speaking cultures of Australia. Most Australians are probably aware that people in many of Australia’s remote Indigenous communities speak several local languages as their first languages before English. But what they may not be aware of is that there is a different social order operating behind the back of the mainstream agencies. Take for example law and order. In Arnhem Land, as in other more remote Aboriginal areas the people use kinship structures, as well as ‘ordained’ elders, to determine the appropriate person/s to control violence and mediate a disputes. In the case of a physical assault certain persons in particular kinship relationships have a right, and duty, to use force to stop the assault just as a policeman might in mainstream Australia. Such situations have in the past, and recent history, been mistakenly interpreted by Australian police personnel arriving on the scene. Seeing the force used by the man stopping the original assault, they have attacked or charged this ‘traditional policeman’ instead of the criminal. Such outcomes are devastating for the community, because the original offender may get away to offend again, and the communities most effective system for controlling abuse has been undermined by the errors of the foreign mainstream system. Such errors are not primarily the result of ignorance by dominant culture personnel, but the greater fault is that dominat culture personnel fail to recognise their ignorance. They do not recognise even the possibility that another system may be in operation here. When Australian personnel are positioned overseas in places such as the Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, Timor or with any Australian embassy, there is an understanding that a different jurisdiction, political system and language exists in that place. Expatriate personnel working in foreign countries make every attempt to work with and understand the legitimate pre-existing systems. The same should be the case in Aboriginal Communities, we must be aware of our ignorance and avoid gross assumptions that assume that our western systems are the only ones in operation. Instead, when working with an indigenous community assume you are in a foreign society with its own legitimate and effective social system, recognise your ignorance of it, and ask the seemingly silly questions. If you do people will respect you for it, you will save much damage to the community and you will begin to glimpse the legitimate order, rules and structures through which the local people operate.