6 - Shedding the Colonial Skin and Digging Deep as Decolonial Praxis

Summary

Introduction

Indigenous Australians continue to be viewed within a racialized lens that too often keeps our bodies out of the ‘norm’ of academic teaching and learning spaces. As Indigenous academics, we are too often relied upon to bring Indigenous knowledge into tough and confronting spaces in which ‘race’ as a theoretical and methodological concept is never really named or spoken about. As sovereign beings, we enter confronting and dangerous spaces of settler colonialism with a strong desire to disrupt and change that damaged landscape. This raises the question of our bodies as damaged landscapes, especially in the sense of what work we do as sovereign bodies in the context of landscape/ bodies when blood is spilt (McKittrick, 2021). ‘Race’ in Australian coloniality was advanced through an oppressive lens, merging with the development of racist ideological literacies and policies, legislated to deny Indigenous people's rights to land and culture. The process of colonization continues to structure Australian society and privileges whiteness in the racialized entangled assemblages that shape the teaching environment in Australian universities. Racialization and the impact of colonization on our lives have resulted in events, practices and segments that make up the assemblages that force Indigenous peoples to conform to the dominant hegemonic values considered ‘normal’ (Blanch, 2016: 50). Yet the study of race is omitted from the agenda as instrumental in curriculum development or as a central theme to adhere to within the teaching space. In academic teaching and learning, race only appears in the curriculum when Indigenous people teach it, or when non- Indigenous allies willingly undertake the responsibility to develop topics that explore race as a social construct and deconstruct what this may mean in their own teaching journey.

This chapter digs deeper into a critical anti- racist framework that advances a process of decolonization while teaching in those difficult and dangerous spaces. I draw from the seminal Australian and international critical Indigenous, critical race and decolonial scholarship of Aileen Moreton- Robinson, Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick to further contextualize the realities of raced bodies and racial literacies. We are more than what we are told and read about in the racial grammar of the settler- colonial state that represents us as abject and that deems us non- human, and that informs knowledge production.