

Diverse histories and interactions with colonialism and education shape points of difference between and among Anangu (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara/Ngaanyatjarra) standpoints (Nakata, 2007a).
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Through investigation of a number of historical sources, the background to colonial contact and approaches to provision of education in the tristate area in the twentieth century is provided which correlates with the Anangu standpoints given in the series of interviews. A textual standpoint dialogue is staged between Anangu participants and trusted Piranpa (non-Indigenous) education leaders whom Anangu participants identify, describing practice from the 1950s to the current day. The series of interviews, held across several years and translated and presented with minimal editing, are predominantly held in local languages and demonstrate the priority of oral histories and stories as Indigenous genres for knowledge sharing. This thesis privileges Anangu standpoint accounts in relation to young people, education and the future. This study seeks to inform Anangu education policy and practice from Anangu standpoints and to explore the potential for standpoint dialogue in negotiating alternatives in tristate education (Harding, 1992). Anangu children are frequently positioned as deficient in mainstream educational achievement narratives within colonial and neo-colonial educational endeavours. Contact with Europeans is relatively recent, with provision of schooling moving from centralised mission-based schooling to decentralised community schools following the 1967 referendum. Here Aboriginal people live in relatively small, dispersed desert communities with close language and familial connections. This thesis attempts to redress this gap in a small way by in-depth conversations about education with Anangu in the tristate area of central Australia (the region where Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory meet). In the process we are better able to respect Indigenous land and marine tenure systems, as well as the Indigenous right to maintain a long-standing and on-going relationship with other beings and all that this entails.Īboriginal education in remote areas of Australia continues to be a contested focus for policy and practice, with little debate that actively involves Aboriginal people themselves. By accepting western-based science as one among many ways of producing knowledge, space is made for other forms of knowledge. Doing so requires engagement with any number of ontological propositions and it requires a confrontation with hegemonic ontological assumptions inherent in the Western scientific, bureaucratic and legal paradigms. In the spirit of reconciliation, decolonization and a renewed understanding of ontological multiplicity we are challenged to create analytical frameworks that include both human and nonhuman interests and relationships. In this ethnographic and ethnohistorical account of the relationship between Laich-Kwil-Tach people and fish I grapple with the question of how, within a framework of ontological difference, we can better understand foundations of Indigenous rights and find ways to respect and give agency to multiple forms of knowledge in practice. Through an analysis of ethnographic texts I work to elucidate the 19th-century human-fish relationship and through collaboration with Laich-Kwil-Tach Elders, based on Vancouver Island on the Northwest Coast of North America, I seek to understand how the 19th-century enlivened world informs 21st-century Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology.

Here, I examine the divide between the relational world and what Western ontology considers a natural resource fish. Through exploration of Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology I engage with the theoretical concepts of animism, historical ecology and political ecology, in what I call relational ecology. With its myriad of relationships, my study considers the Laich-Kwil-Tach enlivened world in which multiple beings bring meaning and understanding to life.
