‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in your world’: Minecrafting terra nullius

Abstract

The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in classrooms and in popular media. Drawing from classroom observations in an urban primary school in Australia, this article enters the technology in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videogames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers and students, we interrogate how the school’s use of Minecraft, a best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of settler colonialism in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the curriculum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both classroom and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius: the doctrine which determined that land, prior to colonization, was empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms, students’ voices manage to interrogate the curriculum, resisting the reproduction of erasive coloniality in school.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal
• Indigenous
• curriculum
• Minecraft
• terra nullius
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgements

The authors recognize and respect the Elders, families, and forebears of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin Nation, who are the owners of the land through which this educational inquiry takes place. They thank Jane Mavoa and Professor Mitra Sharafi for their comments on sections of this piece.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although these terms are significantly different, the teachers used them interchangeably in the lesson.

2 All names are pseudonyms.

3 https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Resource/LandingPage?ObjectId=927761ca-6a0c-
4adc-8b31-3a5db70e61c5&SearchScope=Teacher. Accessed 21-07-2019.

4 The quotations – around Aboriginal, Indigenous, and any other ways of drawing borders around particular peoples and ways of being – signal their historical making as particular kinds of people (López López 2018). In placing quotation marks around words that name ‘First Nations’ peoples in Australia, we seek to disrupt colonial nomenclature, recognizing that ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Torres Strait Islander’ people represent over 250 language groups. We also recognize that the production of language groups themselves operates is the making and remaking up of ‘Indigenous’ peoples as human kinds which is an extension of coloniality.

5 School quotations were noted from school displays, announcements, expressions, and written notes.

6 Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) (1992) HCA 23; (1992) 175 CLR 1 (3 June 1992).

7 The entire speech can be found online: https://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-
country/our-people/apology-to-australias-indigenous-peoples. Accessed 21-07-2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Melbourne [McKenzie Fellowship].