(Re)positioning Indigenous games in HPE: turning to criticality

ABSTRACT

In 2011, the Australian national curriculum called for the inclusion of Indigenous histories, cultures and perspectives/knowledges, prompting Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers in schools and academics within higher education have experimented with and reported upon different purposes and ways of teaching Indigenous Games. However, Australian schools remain sites of epistemic injustice, where the privileging of Western knowledges marginalises alternative voices and knowledge systems, maintaining disciplinary terra nullius [terra nullius means ‘empty land’ – it was a legal fiction, overturned by the High Court of Australia in 1992, used by British settler-colonisers to justify the invasion of Australia. In this context, we mean that Physical Education in Australia still assumes erroneously that Western knowledges are the only available knowledges]. Worryingly, experimentation with Indigenous games, by predominantly white educators with minimal understanding of Indigenous histories and cultures, has resulted in confusion and apprehension over their purpose and place in the curriculum, leading toward either omission or cultural appropriation, rather than deep, critical engagement with Indigenous Knowledges. Centring on the publication and implementation of Yulunga: Traditional Indigenous Games [Edwards, K., & Meston, T. (2009). Yulunga: Traditional indigenous games. Ausport. http://www.ausport.gov.au/participating/indigenous/resources/games_and_activities/full_resource], we reappraise the Australian approach toward Indigenous games, suggesting this work has occurred over three distinct time periods or ‘waves’. Conceptualising this work with the heuristic of ‘three waves’ provides a useful contribution to the field, revealing a lack of substantive progress in including Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in HPE. We argue HPE educators and researchers are complicit in the marginalisation and/or omission of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives and must shift current practice toward a ‘fourth wave’ of implementing Indigenous games with criticality. We call for a revisiting of Martin Nakata’s [(2002). Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. IFLA Journal, 28(5-6), 281–291. https://do.org/10.1177/034003520202800513; Nakata, M. (2007). The cultural interface. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36, 1–7. Nakata, M. (2011). Pathways for Indigenous education in the Australian curriculum framework. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 40(1), 1–8. https://do.org/10.1375/ajie.40.1] theory of the Cultural Interface – a theory of critique of knowledge systems. Nakata [(2002). Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. IFLA Journal, 28(5-6), 281–291. https://do.org/10.1177/034003520202800513] cautioned that Indigenous knowledges and perspectives cannot be simply dropped into contested knowledge domains. Now more than ever, knowledge of critical frameworks like Nakata’s are required to disrupt the entrenched white disciplinary praxis of Australian HPE.

KEYWORDS:

• Health and physical education (HPE)
• Australian curriculum
• Indigenous knowledges
• critical indigenous studies
• cultural interface

Introduction

In 2007, Australia initiated a shift toward the creation and implementation of a national curriculum and standardised literacy and numeracy testing program. The Australian curriculum provides unique imperatives, such as the five propositions (or key ideas) of HPE,¹ and the cross-curriculum priorities,² which should offer opportunities to add cultural depth and richness to student learning across content descriptors and elaborations (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2023a, 2023b). Learning in Health and Physical Education (HPE, as it is typically called in Australia) is uniquely practical and embodied and ‘is not only an individual affair but is also closely linked to the cultural and institutional contexts of different sport, health and PE practices and traditions’ (Quennerstedt et al., 2011, p. 160). HPE should be ideally placed for centring Indigenous perspectives, as the subject purports to develop critical inquiry skills, through research, and to develop empathy, through active engagement with the subject matter (ACARA, 2023a). Through varied psychomotor, cognitive and affective learning opportunities, students in HPE could deepen their knowledge of Australia, to ‘explor(e) personal, community and group identities to build understanding of the differences and commonalities in systems of knowledge and beliefs’ (ACARA, 2023b). While the propositions and cross-curriculum priorities have created the necessary ‘cracks in the pavement’ for the inclusion of Indigenous histories, knowledges ad perspectives (Whatman & Singh, 2015), HPE remains a discursively white, Western learning domain (Azzarito, 2009; Flintoff, 2015; Flintoff & Dowling, 2019; Williams, 2016). In this domain, most educators are non-Indigenous and may not yet have developed the necessary critical reflexivity and positionality to recognise the opportunities presented.

Indigenous knowledges and perspectives have a crucial role to play in Australian education, as curricular encounters occur on the unceded territories of Indigenous Peoples, and schooling, an essential institution in the racial colonial power structure,³ functions to justify the ongoing possession of stolen lands through the privileging of Western knowledges and disciplinary domains (Meston, 2023). Within HPE, learning the suppressed knowledges of Indigenous Peoples not only offers contextually rich and relevant opportunities to fulfil the Indigenous cross-curriculum priority but more importantly extends what Leahy et al. (2013) have argued for, to ‘engage with a more complex reading of … critical inquiry and its place and function’ in HPE (p. 178).

We have argued previously (Meston et al., 2023) that HPE educators must first gain a deep, visceral understanding of how history continues to shape the present, while progressively acquiring racial literacy⁴ from critical scholarship (e.g. Critical Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory and decolonial frameworks). However, critical scholarship is not typical, or is often suppressed in Initial Teacher Education or in-service professional development.⁵ This absence necessitates a personal investment in nurturing a lived, reflexive racial literacy, which evolves from foundational understandings of shared histories, self-reflection and reciprocal coalitions drawn from listening to, and walking beside Indigenous Peoples (cf. Meston et al., 2023).

In presenting this argument, we reveal our positionality, to locate ourselves according to our relationality (Martin, 2008) and establish our place as situated knowers in this research. Author 1 is a Gamilleroi critical and decolonial teacher–educator, known nationally for establishing the presence of Yulunga in schools, sport and recreation bodies and community programs. Author 2 is a non-Indigenous Australian physical education teacher–educator and critical Indigenous studies scholar, who employs critical race theory to decolonise university curricula. Author 3 is a Kamilaroi and Wonnarua critical race scholar known for award-winning doctoral research examining Indigenous employees’ experiences of racism in Australian workplaces (Bargallie, 2020) and postdoctoral research on racial literacy (Bargallie & Lentin, 2022; Bargallie et al., 2023).

Using the production of Yulunga as the catalyst in the shift toward Indigenising the discipline, we offer a way of understanding how Indigenous games have come to be implemented in HPE, using the heuristic of ‘three waves’. We then outline our argument for a turn to critical Indigenous and decolonial frameworks as the ‘fourth wave’ of implementation. To assist educators with this turn to criticality, we introduce Torres Strait Islander critical educator Martin Nakata’s (2002, 2007, 2011) cultural interface theory. This theory provides educators with a means to understand the contestations, negotiations and agentic synergies occurring between Western and Indigenous knowledge domains within the cultural interface. We conclude with a call for disruptive voices and practices, alternative narratives and the reinstatement of silenced or marginalised knowledges, to enable educators to address their complicity in perpetuating racialised learning encounters in HPE.

Approaches or ‘waves’ to implementing indigenous games

Introducing Indigenous content to HPE is a growing phenomenon internationally (cf. Burnett, 2006; Madondo & Tsikira, 2022; Matsekoleng et al., 2022; Nxumalo & Mncube, 2018) and increasingly Australian physical educators have sought to implement Indigenous games. Bonato et al. (2023) recent scoping review into Indigenous games research included 91 unique papers, with a telling finding that only 9 papers were written by Indigenous educators and 9 papers involved the cultural interface. Indigenous games, freely available through the publication of Yulunga: Traditional Indigenous Games⁶ (Edwards & Meston, 2009), offer discipline-specific cultural knowledges fit for the purpose of fulfilling the requirements of the cross-curriculum priorities. Indigenous games are not static, nor are they a relic of the past. Existing prior to colonisation, Indigenous games were adapted or newly created out of colonial contact (such as ‘Mission games’, cf. Edwards, 2012). In dominant PE classes, Indigenous games should function as political and epistemological disruptors (i.e. as counter-stories), as they provide ‘living’ knowledge connections to the dynamics of Indigenous social cohesion, pedagogy, language and cognition, as well as political and cultural resistance (Ryan, 2020; Ruddell, 2015).

The development of an Australian specific Indigenous games resource in the mid-2000s represented a shift away from the ‘smorgasbord of looks like sport’ (Ward & Quennerstedt, 2016, p. 13), characterised by dominant (settler-colonial) Australian sport enactments in HPE programs (e.g. hockey, cricket, rugby). Yulunga is a significant contribution to the Australian corpus on Indigenous physical cultures which built upon nineteenth century accounts, characterised at first by racialised observations from an array of explores, settlers and anthropologists.⁷ These accounts continued into the twentieth century with research conducted by non-Indigenous⁸ and Indigenous⁹ contributors. The privileging of Indigenous games by the Australian Sports Commission in the production of Yulunga (Edwards & Meston, 2009) offered an important moment to disrupt in the discipline which we argue has occurred in three waves of implementation.

In the ‘first wave’, preceding the development of Yulunga (prior to 2002), Indigenous games remained largely in the memories of Elders, or as practices continuing in a handful of Aboriginal communities¹⁰ (cf. Hegarty, 2003; Holt, 2014; Stephen, 2009). Numerous Indigenous games were documented in the field, alongside a thriving culture of play, physical activity and organised competitions in Aboriginal communities, such as games using toy boomerangs and spears (Haagen, 1994), contests involving spears, weaving or dancing contests and string figure games (cf. Bamblett, 2011; Phillips & Osmond, 2018; Osmond, 2021, 2019; Evans et al., 2020). During this pre-Yulunga period, the implementation of Indigenous games in HPE were often small-scale initiatives, based around the location and work of the original authors of Yulunga, and largely centred in the south-east corridor of Queensland.¹¹ These were primarily one-off events or programs, designed to expose non-Indigenous participants to Indigenous culture as enactments of reconciliation, or to enhance Indigenous health through physical activity, and to promote inclusion in school for Indigenous learners. Author 1 was involved in delivering these small-scale events and the nature of them is recalled from author 1’s direct experiences.

In the ‘second wave’, during the production phase of the Yulunga resource (2003–2008), Indigenous games programs grew beyond Queensland in parallel with Australian Sports Commission (ASC) funding to conduct archival research through State and Territory Sport and Recreation bodies. This work involved qualitative research in the Aboriginal communities of Kalgoorlie, Palm Island, Aurukun, Redfern and the Torres Strait Islander community on the Kaurareg lands of Waibene (Thursday Island). Partnerships formed with key organisations such as QLD Health, QLD Sport and Recreation, Police Citizens and Youth Club QLD, the Noonga Reconciliation Group, the Brisbane City and Logan Councils and BlackBase.¹² The second wave, also led to further investment from the ASC, to produce an Indigenous module in the ‘Sports Ability’ program – an in-school para-Olympic program¹³ (see Figure 1), while Queensland Health partnered with BlackBase to develop the Woomeras and Wellbeing resource (see Figure 2) designed to introduce Indigenous games into primary schools (2004–2007).

Figure 1. Example of Indigenous Sports Ability game kit (Sport Australia, 2023).

Figure 2. Woomeras and wellbeing resource (Queensland Government).

Coinciding with the then-recent release of the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s, Embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Perspectives in Schools (EATSIPS-ISSU, 2011) program, over a three-year period, Queensland Health coordinated two-day Indigenous games professional development (PD) events with approximately 120 physical educators in 60 schools across the Brisbane, Logan and Bayside catchments, and Townsville and Cairns regions of north Queensland. The PD centred Woomeras and Wellbeing, driven by talks from Elders and community performances, a socio-historical overview of games in Aboriginal communities, and practical sessions which workshopped over 20 Indigenous games from an earlier collection of Indigenous games called ‘Choopardoo’ (Edwards, 1999).

This work occurred alongside the development of the published Yulunga resource in the second wave, with our collective experiences driving our call to approach the implementation of Indigenous games with criticality. For the purposes of this paper, criticality means to do ‘extra socio-political educational work’ by linking autonomy, reason and education (Pettersson, 2023, p. 479). Despite the breadth of the initiative under the auspices of EATSIPS and Queensland Health over a three-year, multi-site project, Author 1 experience as a member of the PD team was that most teachers were troubled on where and how these games fit inside their HPE practice. Author 1 recollects HPE teachers describing feeling challenged by the requirements of proper pronunciation of language names, acknowledging the Traditional Owners as well as communicating and collaborating with local communities. The PD team soon realised that HPE teachers were comfortable with enacting the psychomotor dimensions of modified Indigenous games yet were hesitant to engage with the potential for cultural cognitive–affective dimensions. In addition, the PD team found little evidence of integration of games into overall HPE units, as teachers were unable to provide the PD team with examples of their own planning. Overall, the majority of schools approached Indigenous games as an add-on to the core business of HPE, despite the EATSIPS policy directive to embed Indigenous perspectives into content and teaching approaches across the curriculum. Tellingly, it was the Health Department, not the Department of Education, who led the investment into embedding Indigenous perspectives via Indigenous games in the State. It appeared that educators at this point failed to see Indigenous games as educative for all students, rather, the games were seen as culturally responsive physical activity interventions by those with public health imperatives to fulfil.

We argue that the ‘third wave’ of implementation of Indigenous games occurred with the publication of Yulunga by the Australian Sports Commission in 2009 (Edwards & Meston, 2009). Indigenous games were being taken up broadly across the country and HPE researchers began investigating what, how and why Indigenous games were being taught. Kiran and Knights (2010) reported on a study of primary schools in North Queensland which had used Indigenous games to ‘increase physical activity and cultural connectedness’ (p. 149). But as a specific strategy to increase children’s physical activity levels, the authors found no significant differences in physical activity participation between control and intervention groups (p. 150). Their research design was unable to demonstrate whether the Indigenous or non-Indigenous students felt any heightened sense of cultural connectedness through playing these games (p. 151). Dinan Thompson et al., 2014) argued that Indigenous games have potential as an integrative device, allowing for the transfer of learning across contexts. Her study of Indigenous games with students in Years 5 and 6 illustrated that learning ‘in’ movement (personal meaning making) and ‘about’ movement (knowledge behind it) (Brown, 2013) was not only possible, but strongly evident (Dinan Thompson et al., 2014). Williams (2016, 2018) and Williams and Pill (2020) have reported on various cases where they as academics have either introduced or evaluated the use of Indigenous games as forms of invasion games (as defined by Werner, 1989; Werner & Almond, 1990). Evans et al. (2017), buoyed by the directive to now include Indigenous content in the Australian curriculum, discussed the need to address the pedagogical challenges of implementing Indigenous games to enhance social justice and inclusionary dynamics for Indigenous learners. Their 2017 work, and subsequent research with Pill et al. (2021), detailed arguments which emphasised that integration of Indigenous games could be considered a type of culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy if implemented through an amalgamation of mainstream pedagogic models such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), Game Sense or Sport Education, in alignment with what they described as an Aboriginal pedagogy, specifically Yunkaporta’s 8 Ways pedagogies (Yunkaporta & Kirby, 2011).

In a similar line of inquiry, Wrench and Garrett (2021), following the work of Lester Irabinna Rigney, a Narungga, Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri educator (cf. Morrison et al., 2019), argued that Indigenous games units within HPE offer a form of culturally responsive pedagogy and curriculum redesign. They suggested this as a way for Indigenous students to ‘have a right to feel valued, culturally connected and supported in all aspects of schooling’ (p. 576), while simultaneously highlighting non-Indigenous student resistance to and disengagement from Indigenous ways of knowing (p. 573). In another study of Year 7 boys (non-Indigenous) being taught Parndo, an Indigenous game of the Kaurna people of Adelaide, Pill et al. (2022) reported their inquiry as ‘teachers creating a cultural interface’ (p. 1) using Yunkaporta’s 8 Ways as one type of Aboriginal pedagogy (p. 3). While acknowledging the existing literature that teachers generally feel challenged and uncomfortable about embedding Indigenous knowledges in their classes, some HPE teachers in this study reported that they avoided teaching Indigenous content because of their fear and anxiety of getting it wrong (Pill et al., 2022, p. 13). This was a missed opportunity to employ Nakata’s idea of the cultural interface as something we all live and work in everyday, where knowledges intersect, converge, prevail or are obscured within hegemonic practices.

The reporting of research into the implementation of Indigenous games in HPE is welcome and needs to occur. Nakata’s (2007, 2011) warning that Indigenous knowledges cannot be simply dropped into existing disciplines without significant reconfiguration of the disciplines is evident in much of the existing scholarship. We argue that HPE educators are unknowingly complicit in the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledges by failing to contribute to this reconfiguration as a part of their professional work – ‘fear of getting it wrong’ is code for enacting white privilege to refuse to engage. Researchers of Indigenous games are also complicit by failing to critically analyse and report these examples of reluctance and deliberate omissions as entrenched hegemony. Hence, we suggest that the implementation, and research into, Indigenous games must move into a ‘fourth wave’, whereby critical frameworks to disrupt entrenched white disciplinary hegemony in HPE are taken up alongside efforts to implement Indigenous knowledges through Indigenous games.

Turning to criticality: the fourth wave

In this section, we draw on our extensive knowledges of critical scholarship in parallel to Author 1’s 20 years of community and school-based implementation of Indigenous games, to establish a claim for criticality in implementing Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in HPE via Indigenous games. This idea of criticality in HPE is informed by Nakata’s (2002; 2007; 2011) careful theorisation of the cultural interface. Nakata articulates a theoretical mid-point or third space between the Western and Indigenous domains, building upon Homi Bhabha’s (2012) postcolonial sociolinguistic explanation of the location of identity, community and culture (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The intersecting places and spaces of the cultural interface, where Indigenous and Western standpoints are negotiated (adapted from Nakata, 2007) [for personal communication] – https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/personal-communication – citing reflection of the teacher resistance to teaching the games.

Nakata (2002, p. 5) articulates the complexity of this space for Indigenous Peoples:

I see the Cultural Interface as the place where we live and learn, the place that conditions our lives, the place that shapes our futures and more to the point the place where we are active agents in our own lives – where we make decisions – our lifeworld. For Indigenous peoples our context, remote or urban, is already circumscribed by the discursive space of the Cultural Interface. We don’t go to work or school, enter another domain, interact and leave it there when we come home again. The boundaries are simply not that clear. The fact that we go to work means we live at the interface of both, and home life is in part circumscribed by the fact that we do.

Nakata’s view of the interface denotes a reflexive, evolving experience of tensions between competing lifeworlds and knowledge domains. Nakata theorises an interstitial space, which buffers and negotiates hegemonically white domains, enabling the ability for knowledges to interrogate each other via historical-social locatedness. Nakata posits that Indigenous knowledges and lifeworlds are shaped by their proximity to Western knowledges and so are Western knowledges and lifeworlds in their proximity to Indigenous knowledges and lifeworlds, as he explains:

The cultural interface refers to the contested space between Indigenous people, non-Indigenous people, and that body of knowledge on Australia’s Indigenous people that establishes the order of things to the ways we can and cannot understand each other. The omnipresent tensions that result from these contestations go on to inform as well as delimit what can be said in this space between us. As a priori conditions, they situate a particular ‘locale’ for the ways Indigenous learners, non-Indigenous learners and teachers should or should not engage. (2011, p. 2)

Educational sites are characterised by what Moreton-Robinson (2011) described as knowledge hierarchies informed by white supremacy, racism and the privileging of Western scientific discourses. She argues that this establishes the Western domain as the pinnacle of these knowledge hierarchies and that non-Indigenous peoples are the arbiters of who can know and what can be known (Moreton-Robinson, 2011). Nakata’s framing of the cultural interface as a place of colocation of competing knowledge systems assists to, firstly, make apparent these knowledges alongside each other rather than fixed in hierarchical order and, secondly to engage with the complex task of negotiating with, unsettling and potentially dismantling hegemonic tendencies in education to reinforce knowledge hierarchies. A pragmatic and contextual knowledge of how the cultural interface works enables keen insight into where and how to begin the work of ethically implementing Indigenous games without falling into racialised knowledge reproduction, or cultural appropriation.

Indigenous games in HPE are what Nakata (2011, p. 7) would describe as an opportunity to be seized in situ. This means culturally appropriate content relevant to the subject, the students involved and community context of learning. However, despite years of in-school experimentation, Indigenous perspectives are yet to be naturalised in common learning encounters (Griffin & Trudgett, 2018). According to Gamilaroi educator Michelle Bishop (2021), schools have yet to prioritise Indigenous knowledges, and when they do, they focus on surface forms of inclusion rather than deep engagement. The normalisation of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives can only occur after educators have grappled with the complexity of their own, and the school’s role, in contributing to the oppressive foundations of the Indigenous present (Meston et al., 2023). Next, educators must have the capacity to engage with the tensions presented by competing knowledges systems, in order to appreciate ways in which respectful incorporation of Indigenous knowledges can occur through the dominating knowledges, pedagogies and assessment practices (of valued knowledges) of HPE. As through enacting this curriculum, predominantly white teachers, with an ignorance of the tensions, contestations and negotiations naturally occurring within an ever-present cultural interface, engage in what Pohlhaus (2012, p. 717) called wilful hermeneutic ignorance whereby ‘dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally … enabling those dominantly situated to misunderstand, misinterpret and/or ignore whole parts of the world’.

Evans et al. (2017) paper noted Nakata’s utility to identify hidden curriculum (p. 195) and to combat ‘forced choice’ for Indigenous learners but stopped short of explaining how the cultural interface assists to do this work. Pill et al. (2022) indicated they employed a ‘cultural interface’ based upon an interpretation of Yunkaporta’s 8 ways pedagogical framework (Yunkaporta & Kirby, 2011), without employing Nakata’s theory to position teacher identities and hegemonic practices which suppressed Indigenous knowledges vis a vis their struggle against dominant knowledge domains in the cultural interface. Nakata’s expanse of work in developing his theory of the cultural interface (2002, 2007, 2011), invites educators to move beyond wilful hermeneutic ignorance and to critically consider Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing), ontologies (ways of being) and axiologies (ways of doing) (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003) to become strategic disruptors of HPE.

Considering the wider potential of Indigenous games as Indigenous knowledges that surround, are within, and are of HPE, leads to productive questions about the value and purposes of HPE as education for shared futures (Nakata, 2007). Nevertheless, the disciplinary road forward is not linear, neat or a midway point between reform and revolution, like a form of ‘gradualism in curriculum reform’ (Macdonald, 2013, p. 96), nor will it occur as a process of theoretical or curricula symmetry. As our three-wave heuristic for Indigenous games implementation has underscored, implementing Indigenous games is not a simple matter of adding in Indigenised kinaesthetic movements into an existing dominant enactment of ‘looks like sport’. For example, the playing of Kai-Wed (as described in Edwards & Meston, 2009) as a warm-up game or skills drill for volleyball, brings Indigenous knowledges in direct tension with existing, normative traditions (i.e. the ‘way’ you teach PE), in a space of competing knowledge systems and worldviews. Rather than asserting Kai-Wed should not be included in Australian HPE classes, instead the question becomes, ‘what does playing Kai-Wed do in a HPE unit on volleyball?’. The game was traditionally played using the thick, oval, deep-red fruit of the kai tree, which is quite light when dry (Edwards & Meston, 2009, np). The central feature of the game was collaborating and the singing of the Kai-Wed, a ball song. While resembling volleyball with the use of motor skills resembling the ‘dig’ and ‘set’ of volleyball, there are culturally specific values underpinning motivations for games and play, which are different across Western and Indigenous knowledge paradigms (Hallinan & Judd, 2012). Importantly, Kai-Wed had no team or individual competition and to be successful, a group of players in a circle aim to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible while singing the Kai-Wed song. Kai-Wed is cooperative, communal and requires players to support each other, rather than dominate an opposition. Kai-Wed belongs to language groups from the Torres Strait, teaching language, relationality and song, continuing a cultural practice which is thousands of years old. With this locatedness, Kai-wed, as with all Indigenous games, opens questions about the Traditional Owners, who are the keepers of these games, and the impact of continuing colonisation on both People and place. Logically, how can non-Indigenous physical educators implement Indigenous games without reifying dominant knowledge domains or cultural appropriation? This is indeed complex and messy work, as physical educators must be taught how to disrupt the hegemonic, racialised boundaries of the discipline, while interrogating their own dominant teacher identities, in parallel to grappling with the depth of Indigenous knowledges, with low threshold knowledge of Indigenous perspectives, in the absence of reciprocal Indigenous community relations.

Conclusion

Since the publication of Yulunga in 2009, HPE educators and researchers have had a popular and widely adopted form of guidance on the cross-curriculum priority to value Indigenous knowledges. Our heuristic of waves of implementation of Indigenous games has shown little disruption to the normative function of white, Western knowledge tradition and practices in HPE. We have critiqued examples from scholars employing Indigenous games as a pedagogic and/or curricular device, or as a device for integration, and have discussed some of the challenges faced by teachers emergent from this practice, as well as opportunities missed in scholarship for critique. We have argued that health and physical educators require the guidance of a critical theory such as the cultural interface (Nakata, 2002, 2007, 2011) to wilfully disrupt the privileging of Western knowledges in HPE and the hegemonic disciplinary suppression of Indigenous knowledges. Developing criticality in the uptake of Indigenous games will enable educators to recognise their complicity in perpetuating the racial logics and hierarchies in HPE. Approaching Indigenous games with an appreciation of the cultural interface establishes an evolved basis, or fourth wave, for implementation to shift beyond the exotic, toward becoming disruptive, while not diminishing their educative potential.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The HPE propositions include focusing on educative purposes, taking a strengths-based approach, valuing movement, developing health literacy and including a critical inquiry approach (https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/teacher-resources/understand-this-learning-area/health-and-physical-education).

2 https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-histories-and-cultures?organising-idea=0

3 We define the racial colonial through Bargallie's (2020) work applying Mills (1997) racial contract theory, the actual social contract, to interpret historical and contemporary Indigenous oppression. Author 3 astutely argues that these structures function and are maintained in Australia to explicitly advantage non-Indigenous peoples.

4 Bargallie et al. (2023, pp. 2–3) explains that ‘race in racial literacy is understood as discursively produced and reproduced; hence, ‘literacy’ refers to the provision of concepts for talking about race, and the skills to decode the rhetorical practices and power of racial ideology. Racial literacy is conceptualised through the seminal works of Lani Guinier (2004), the late American educator, legal scholar, and civil rights theorist, and Frances Winddance Twine (2004), a Black and Native American sociologist.

5 See Moreton-Robinson et al. (2012) evaluation of Australian ITE sector, where it was found most programs favoured cultural curriculums over critical.

6 Through its recounting and adaption of more than 100 Indigenous games, Yulunga offers access to Indigenous knowledges, exposure to Indigenous languages and social mores, teaching cues, game descriptions and equipment, as well as practical hints for inclusion and reconciliation.

7 For example, included Alfred Cort Hadden (anthropologist), Daisy Bates (journalist), Walter Roth (Protector of Aborigines), Alfred William Howitt (anthropologist) Robert Brough Smith (geologist), William Blandowski (geologist) and Norman Tindale (anthropologist).

8 E.g., Meston, (2023) and Meston & Hickey, (2004) Trad, Rad & Active! Games from the Dreaming, and Indigenous scholarship elicited by the ‘Football History Wars’ (Hegarty, 2012; Dinan Thompson et al., 2008).

9 E.g., Claudia Haagen’s Bush Toys: Aboriginal Children at Play (1994) and Ken Edwards’ Choopardoo: Games from the Dreamtime (1999).

10 Examples include the game of Marngrook, played by the Kulin peoples of Victoria and Edor played by Wik, Wik Way and Kugu children around the Queensland community of Aurukun.

11 Indigenous games, as presented in the Choopardoo: Games from the dreamtime (1999) publication, were taught by then Head of Physical Education at a large private boys’ school, Dr Ken Edwards (non-Indigenous), who was researching and developing the pre-cursor to Yulunga as a part of his doctoral studies. Using Choopardoo, Mununjali man, Paul Paulson, ran a series of games programs throughout the Brisbane Anglican school sector over several years (cf. https://www.nahri.com.au/about/). Academics from the Queensland University of Technology coordinated the ‘Our Games, Our Health’ project (Pettersson, 2006), where Elders from the communities of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Logan City and the community of Cherbourg learnt a selection of games which they would then teach to children in community schools as a form of cultural reclamation.

12 BlackBase was an at-risk Indigenous youth development organisation developed by physical education teacher educators under the guidance of Dr Ken Edwards. BlackBase recruited Indigenous youth to consult as games facilitators who ran after-school and holiday programs, winning the Queensland Reconciliation Award (2005) Emerging Business category. During this time, BlackBase also started to offer Indigenous Games as a workshop at the annual conference of the peak professional body for HPE teachers, the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

13 Integrating Indigenous games into Sports Ability led to the development of novel resource cards, games, videos and equipment, and contained a national Professional Development initiative, where para-Olympians worked alongside Indigenous physical educators in schools and sports and recreation organisations.