Land, labour, and sovereignty in school: the Strelley mob and zones of contest in Indigenous education

ABSTRACT

Schooling has been a site of harm for Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts, as a tool of dispossession, assimilation and separation from country and kin. However, schools have simultaneously been sites to work against this and build alternatives to settler colonial systems that nourish Indigenous futures. This article centers the connections between Indigenous labour, land, sovereignty and schooling. It focuses on the Strelley mob’s innovative remodelling of schooling during the first phase of national Australian government policies of Indigenous self-determination and self-management between 1972 and 1983. Working with Indigenous-authored texts and oral histories, I explain how the Strelley mob and supporters worked to exploit and reshape schooling to bring together and sustain their communities on their land, developing a practice of local control over repossessed country with an Indigenised schooling system at the heart. I show how the tensions centred on five ‘zones of contest’ where the Strelley mob clashed with norms of settler state governance in schools. I suggest these zones – political economy; school sovereignty; knowledges, technologies and temporalities; language and linguistic power; and spaces and lands – may provide an analytical tool for situating contests over Indigenous schooling within wider contests over land, labour and sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous education
• sovereignty
• self-determination
• bilingual education
• dispossession
• land-based pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this manuscript contains names of people who have passed away.

2. ‘Mob’ in Australian Aboriginal English is a word often used to describe family-cultural groups.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Archie Thomas

Archie Thomas (they/he) is an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher. Their research considers issues such as Indigenous control and multilingualism in schools, how schools and other institutions include and exclude historically marginalised groups, and how discourses frame the aspirations of historically marginalised groups. They are particularly focused on racialisation, colonialism, and gender and sexuality. They are the co-author of Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations? (2020, Aboriginal Studies Press) and Yipirinya: the True School of Mparntwe (forthcoming). Archie is the Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the School of International Studies and Education and the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges at University of Technology Sydney.