• Limitations or Limit conditions:
  • Underlying conditions or sets of situations that cause or initiate the cycle of “poverty”, marginalisation oppression or dependency.
• Predatory systems:
  • These are systems that are perpetuating the oppression cycle by taking advantage of the limitations people experience. These systems need to be identified and negated to free people from the cycle.

As discussed in the previous article Cultural Spaces (An example of the Limit Conditions the people face), one of the limit conditions that create Indigenous “poverty” is that Aboriginal people must engage in foreign cultural spaces, that are controlled by the Dominant Culture.  These spaces marginalise Indigenous groups and they struggle to access the necessary information they need to make choices, find solutions, or communicate their needs.

However this does not explain the factors that keep people from conquering the strange cultural spaces of the “white man’s” world.  In the article on Indigenous poverty we called these factors predatory systems.  In this article I put forward some suggestions as to what specific predatory systems maintain this situation.  These are:

• The Convenience of Maintaining English Dominance
  • Negotiating in English controlled environments
  • Discouraging the development and use of Local Languages
• Low expectations for engaging with Indigenous knowledge and systems
• Accepting short term personnel turn over
• Lack of dependence on local Indigenous workforce
• Systematic favouring of short term outcomes over effective communication
• Reporting of false positives

Explaining myself

Now before I get to that I must point out that this is an extremely complex topic, and that it is very difficult to simplify things as I have.  The mechanisms that maintain the marginalisation of Indigenous  groups are very very complex and subtle.  While there are individuals who take advantage of people’s marginalisation consciously - the chaos of remote communities encourages corruption - most Dominant culture (DC) systems are not consciously designed to oppress people.  But, because I attempt to identify the advantages the Dominant culture might be getting from maintaining Indigenous marginalisation, what I write will be controversial to some, or many.   So please give me some credit that I am not intending to blame anyone and I know I am over simplifying.  But people have been asking for me to write about this, and I would like to start the discussion. So here are my flawed ideas of what are some of the predatory mechanisms maintaining Indigenous disadvantage (please comment on these, I would like others opinions).

I have grouped the predatory mechanism under headings describing the limit conditions they prey on.

Language barriers

The  Convenience of Maintaining English Dominance

Mechanism: English only speakers working in Indigenous communities unknowingly create an advantage to themselves by maintaining an English only environment, by using English as the dominant language or the only language in the work place and at meetings. In this way they empower themselves at the expense of the people, because they prevent people from easily getting the information they require to escape their dependency on these English first language workers.

Advantage: Why does this happen? This system of marginalisation is maintained largely because it is easier for DC workers to use their own native language “English” than working with the difficulty of learning and  utilising local languages.

Negotiating in English controlled environments

Mechanism: Similarly Government and NGOs, by ignoring Indigenous languages, are better able to control the conditions and outcomes of negotiations, surveys, consultations and even education, because in the English speaking environment they create, they limit peoples ability to compete and challenge government workers policies, views and arguments.

Advantage: Government, NGOs and other entities benefit by being able to more easily control, influence  and dominate negotiations.  They can even subconsciously utilise misinformation to get the result they want.

Discouraging the development and use of Local Languages

Mechanism:Government and NGOs working in Aboriginal remote communities, refuse to require or adequately support the training of staff in local Indigenous languages.  Everyone believes that it is too hard.  If they ensured staff developed local language skills this would make the interaction between Indigenous people and the DC an exchange of information between equal parties, rather then all the effort to overcome the language gap being forced on the Indigenous people. Furthermore, DC departments and NGOs do not encourage the production of resources, training, or even dictionaries in Indigenous languages. Their excuse for this is the that people need to just learn English. Only English cannot be learnt well (to a professional level) without utilising Indigenous languages to teach new complex ideas or without access to cross language dictionaries for professional reference. It takes many many years of effective exchange of information between two cultures to effectively chart complex terminology within each language – so that rich meanings can be exchanged. The DC refuses to start this journey in a serious way.

Advantage: The advantage for the system in doing nothing, is that Government and organisations don’t have to put in the money or the effort to change the way they do things. The short term financial gains on sticking with English only win over long term empowerment of Indigenous people.  A case in point is the NT Government’s recent introduction of an English only policy for remote community schools (2009-2010), which strips resources for local language training and utilisation out of remote schools. They did this because of a poorly researched belief that ignoring local languages will some how teach English more effectively. The international evidence shows that ESL kids who learn how to read and write in their own language first are more easily able to learn English, and learn it better than English only speakers.   But for the NT Education department system the savings in money and organisational complexity is clear, they can discard the hippy language experts and even the local Indigenous Teachers, who now have little purpose for being there. In this way the system favours the status quo, English language deficiency in Indigenous communities.

Lack of understanding about Dominant culture systems and knowledge.

Low expectations for engaging with Indigenous knowledge and systems

Mechanism: The imposition of Western culture and ways keeps Dominant Culture (DC) workers comfortable while dis-empowering local Indigenous people, because Indigenous people in remote communities have very little knowledge of how the Western world works (and vice versa). DC workers are not required to truly participate in or learn Indigenous ways of doing things. So they do not learn the difficulties Indigenous people face nor how to use local knowledge to help the people learn DC knowledge.  And the lack of engagement in understanding Indigneous systems prevents DC systems such as policing and education from fitting in with Indigenous systems that would give people more control.

Advantage: Low expectations in this area makes it easier for Government and other organisation to recruit workers even though they are less effective. By ignoring cultural issues, Indigenous understandings, and local Aboriginal systems, short term targets are sometimes met (ie you can get things done quickly), but long term achievements are undermined.

Instability of Personnel and Relationships with the non-indigenous world.

Accepting short term personnel turn over.

Mechanism: There is constant replacement and change in DC personnel in Remote Aboriginal Communities. Most stay 6 months to 2 years. Short term contracts are the accepted norm and there are few services to support personnel to stay in communities long term.  The constant change of personnel in communities undermines stability, relationships, and the creation of useful corporate knowledge/history.  The result is that organisations never learn from their mistakes and continue to push ideas that are based on old assumptions and continue to have negative impacts.

Advantage: This at first glance would not seem to benefit the Australian system because it is costly and ineffective. But it does allow feel good benefits to the Australian mainstream and the Individuals invoved.  I believe this is significant enough to maintain this kind of inefficiency. Going and working in Arnhem Land or other remote communities for a short stint, alleviates our sense of guilt about the Indigenous “problem” in Australia. This is a hard thing to say, but most if not all people (including ourselves at times) tend to feel a sense of “well I’ve done something to help the Indigenous people.” This helps us in the mainstream individually and collectively to feel good about our efforts for Indigenous people and even justifies a subtle blaming of the people themselves. The Australian Mainstream can still effectively say, “Look we are trying to help Indigenous people but its not working, they are not doing enough themselves.” So this “Instability Shark” works in this way; the DC gets the benefits of feeling like it is doing something, without the very difficult task of creating, and supporting long term stability in the remote work force (See our article on Supporting Dominant Culture Personnel to explore how this might be overcome).

Lack of dependence on local workforce.

Mechanism: Indigenous communities are driven by a false economy. Government grants, funds and welfare are the main sources of income, both personal and for businesses, in remote towns.  And alot of this money actually goes to pay income for DC personnel who have come from outside the community.  This situation never improves because the availability of  Government monies, and the tight DC time frames, make it more convenient to simply import new DC personnel when a job needs to be done, rather than train Indigenous people.  Training of local personnel is a lower priority than getting program outcomes.  This is partly because most Government departments consider it someone elses job to do the training.  But the simple fact is the DC simply does not need the local people. In a sense the locals get in the way of building infrastructure, acculturating (…oops, I mean educating), developing industries and running shire council services. This is the despite the fact that these things are suppose to be of benefit to the locals.  Contrast this with 40 years ago when the Christian missions in North East Arnhem had to run everything without masses of funding and access to fly in personnel. They, by simple need, were dependent on training Yolŋu (as there was no one else to do the work that needed to be done) and as a result by 1978 the local people were doing almost everything in the community, including teams of locals building houses, and local bookkeepers.

Advantage: There is of course a huge financial benefit for most personnel who take positions in remote Aboriginal communities, that may play some role in perpetuating the situation.  Like mine workers it is often convenient to stay a while, save your dough and take your cash back south to buy a house.  Plus it is simply easier, and it has become part of the DC way in the “Indigenous Industry”, to rely on enticing contractors and ready trained personnel, with big pay packets, than to deal with the challenges of training Indigenous people.  But the primarily benefit is that the DC (and the Government is a big part of this) is more focused on outcomes than people.  They get more done, much quicker,  if they are not dependent on local labour.  Importing workers ensures jobs get done quickly, statistics get filled, grants get acquitted, and politicians get re-elected.  The alternative, relying on the local workforce is the more difficult and slower path.  The time spent training, upskilling, and letting the people gain experience, slows progress in measurable outcomes – at first.  The hump of getting the first set of locals trained and then relying on them in their inexperience in the next round of work, with the inevitable media outrage at things undone (eg. houses un-built)  is just too much for the DC to take.

Difficulty communicating to Dominant Culture systems.

Systematic favouring of short term outcomes over effective communication.

Mechanism: The Indigenous “Industry” in the NT is a money spinner for the NT government and economy. Solving the problems through better communication might actually reduce the amount of money spent by the Federal Government on communities. While I doubt most in the NT Government actually plan to negate outcomes (some in the private sector definitely take advantage), the drive to be truly cost effective and therefore locally effective in the long term is just not there. Rather the focus seems to be on short term outcomes, or band aid measures.

Advantage: This benefits bureaucrat portfolios, while giving only lip service to long term goals. We all know of the shonky tradesmen in the private sector that will do a dodgy job to save money, well government funding budgets work the other way around. Do a job inefficiently and spend more of your budget may just get you a bigger budget next time round, resulting in more jobs for inefficient buddies (Again I’m not saying this is intentional – but correct me if I am wrong).

Reporting of false positives.

Mechanism: It is easy to create false positives by using poor communication. Even if you genuinely want to be honest, it is all too easy to use good processes and investigate clearly positive comments and communications, while paying limited attention to negative comments and results. Additionally, emphasising the outcomes one is looking for, results in a failure to communicate problems and allow reflection on how people are not being served.

Advantage: False positives (saying something had fantastic outcomes when it really did not)  when reporting on outcomes in Indigenous communities help governments, NGOS and privates businesses working in the “Indigenous industry” presents a good picture to their funders and their voters (who are usually not Indigenous).

Everyone thinks, dreams and understands in the language/s that they grew up with or with which they are most familiar.  Nothing anyone can do can make a person understand what is being said to them when a new or foreign language is used.  This is because words are just sounds, they do not actually carry a meaning.  Meaning is found in the ability to decode (interpret) the sound in the hearer’s brain into a concept that is similar to the meaning expressed by the speaker.  A person always understands a new word from a new language by translating the new sounds they have learnt  into words and concepts from their native language/s.  Thus, almost all the intellectual power of people to communicate, and obtain new information, is found in the way their brain uses their native language/s.  To access that power, in order to teach or communicate information clearly, one must access the language encoded in the person’s head.

If we use a new or unfamiliar language to communicate we rely solely on the hearers ability to first decode or interpret the new sounds of the language being used, and then to comprehend it with a meaning similar to that expressed by the communicator.  If the hearer does not know some of the new words, the meaning may be lost or different to that intended.  If the hearer’s interpretation of these sounds is different to the communicator’s then to the hearer the words will have little information, the incorrect information, or be completely meaningless.  Furthermore, if the communicator cannot access the native language, their ability to check that the information being provided is being understood negligible.

To be effective in communicating to an English second language Indigneous speaker one must either

1. If using only English, know all the English words that an Indigenous person understands and how they understand them (what they mean for that person),
2. Use their local language, recognising that dialogue will be required to ensure communication is being understood.

The first option forces the Indigenous person to be the learner and interpreter. The English speaking communicator is dependent on the Indigenous persons ability in English in order to achieve understanding.    If the Indigenous person has limited knowledge of English or is just learning,  it is not possible to know how a new English speaker understands intangible English words, with out knowing their native language to check that their understanding is correct in the first place.  So while it seems the easier option for the english communicator, it is near impossible to be effective in english only.  Furthermore Option 1 limits communication to the number of English words the hearer understands.  The second option is difficult for the communicator, but very possible and rewarding as the communicator grows in effectiveness over time.  Option 2 allows the communicator to become a translator (if even a poor one) who can be a source of information for Indigenous people to learn new English words and concepts with greater ease and accuracy.

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. Common concerns and assumptions about using local Indigenous languages

1. Local Aboriginal Languages are very difficult to learn? – It is true that Indigenous languages are not simple languages and they are a challenge to learn. But they are no more difficult than most other foreign languages. Indigenous languages are in some ways easier to learn than the major European and Asian languages, for the following reasons.
   • Australian Aboriginal languages have consistent gramma and phonetic rules, primarily because they are very ancient and pure languages. Until recently they have experienced little mixing with different languages as has been the case of the major world languages English, French, Spanish and even Chinese.
   • Word order is usually not highly important. Indigenous gramma rules are based primarily on the use of suffixes and/or prefixes. English gramma is based primarily on word order, but also uses suffixes (attachments to the end of a word like; -ed or -ing). So while using only suffixes or prefixes for gramma can take some time to get use to, the student of an Aboriginal language does not need to be greatly concerned about word order which is in some ways the hardest aspect to change for an English speaker.
   • Indigenous Australian languages did not have a written language prior to European arrival, consequently the alphabets developed for Indigenous languages are entirely phonetic and aid in the process of learning new sounds and pronunciation. When learning major world languages often the written and spoken languages are like learning two separate languages.
   • There are no tonal aspects to pronunciation of these local language terms as in some Asian languages, like Thai.
   • There are few gender specific terms and common nouns and verbs are not gendered like in French or Hindi.
2. There are too many Local Aboriginal Languages? – This is the excuse used by many government departments. However, the truth is that there are common ‘linga franca’ languages that cover large regions, courtesy of Indigenous people speaking several languages, before English. This leaves just a couple of small areas such as Groote Eylandt that are linguistically unique. Under current approaches working regionally remains a difficult because departments and organisations often try to centralise services in major urban centre as theses are easier to administer. Such centralisation then requires personnel to work in several different languages areas. Secondly, most personnel do not stay long in a single area. However, if we were to focus more on local approaches this could be overcome. One of the reasons for leaving one region for another is the stress that results from poor communication and a sense of isolation. Learning the local language is a major step toward reducing these stresses on personnel.
3. It takes forever to learn enough language to be useful? – It takes 6- 9 months of intensive study to become effective in communication in your given field, but you can start to work in your field after the first 6 months. By 9 months you will not be entirely fluent, but you will be able to use a large range of key words and phrases in the topic areas of your work. You will understand at least half of what is said (which is more often better than in English only) and you will be more aware of cultural and language issues that are affecting specific situations. You will also be able to efficiently investigate new terms for difficult concepts you wish to communicate. All these aspects improve your effectiveness over English only. By introducing local languages as a medium for communication you allow locals to begin to use their own language in the work place, in your presence, giving them more control in conversations – effectively you are beginning to share the cultural space. This is greatly appreciated, it encourages friendships in the local community and also allows you to continue to learn the language on the job.
4. Most Aboriginal people already speak English? – Across the whole of Australia this true. However, in places were there are still Indigenous languages being used English is the second, third or fourth language. In these places adults often speak English well but do not clearly understand intangible English concept terms, words like ’serious’, ‘contract’, ‘lease’, ‘infection’, ‘responsibility’, guilty …etc. In places where English is the only language spoken the common language used may be an Aboriginal version of English, which uses different meanings for a whole range of intangible English words. Many intangible terms may still be misunderstood or not used at all. Sometimes it is ‘Aboriginal English’ that is the local language that must be learnt.
5. Mixing English and Aboriginal languages produces a bastardised kriol, that reduces literacy outcomes. – English itself is actually a kriol, a mixture of Olde English dialects, a well as German, French, Latin and more. For English, this ‘bastardisation’ actually improved the vocabulary and the accuracy of the language, so that today it is one of the most accurate languages in the world. So the original assumption about kriols is simply not true. However, kriols can result in a loss of linguistic and conceptual ability when the parent languages are not being properly taught. This is happening on Aboriginal communities today due to the exclusive use of English by dominant culture personnel, limiting the ability of personnel to communicate, or teach, intangible English terms to locals.

All together, local Aboriginal languages are no more difficult to learn than any other language, in some way they are easier, but using them in education does require a local/regional approach to education.