Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, please note that this article mentions deceased persons.
A 100-page report on a First Nations model of education can be understood through a single image. The concept is that of a coolamon — an Aboriginal container made of wood or bark designed to carry water, food or goods.
“The coolamon shape was used to represent the thing that holds everything you need to be strong in culture and as a person,” Arrernte artist Amunda Gorey told Crikey and reporting partner ICTV.
“The idea is that each child starts with nothing in their coolamon and as they grow, they add to it.”
Gorey was part of the First Nations governance group that developed the pictorial framework for the MK Turner report — a landmark policy document named after the late Arrernte Elder Dr MK Turner OAM that lays out the case for the recognition, resourcing, and rollout of a standalone First Nations model of education.
Gorey points to the circular network of Arrernte words that all revolve around Apmerengentyele (Ap-mer-ung-n-jel-a), meaning “from the land”, and explains that the rich selection of knowledge areas — “Aboriginal topics” — contained in the conceptual coolamon are what children “need to gather and learn” to become a strong Aboriginal person.
Although every Indigenous nation has its own governance structures and worldviews, the core principles contained in Apmerengentyele, are universal — a never-ending circle of learning and giving.
“You keep passing on knowledge. Just like a string, it can’t break. It just goes on and on,” Turner’s daughter Amelia Kngwarraye Turner said.
So what’s in the diagram? Another of Turner’s daughters, Sabella Kngwarraye Turner, says the image might look simple, but there’s huge amounts of context and meaning embedded in each word that she’d like people to learn and understand: “It’s the language of lore and land. To recognise us, they should learn it.”
At the centre of everything is Country: Apmerengentyele. Surrounding that are elders, land managers, land owners, language, kinship and people, and spirit.
“Spirit is the most important,” Turner’s third daughter Veronica Kngwarraye Turner said.
Next comes wind and skies, little people of the land, ancestors, sacred places, respectful relationships, story, painting and dance, and songlines. And in the outer circle is mediator/spokesperson, plants and animals, land and water, traditional lore, sacred knowledge from the land, spouse, partner, traditional healer, healing, and ceremony.
“The stupidity of it is that when they [colonisers] first came, they included us as a part of the flora and fauna. They used it as an insult, but that’s who we are,” Sabella said.
The report describes Apmerengentyele as a gift and a guide to all First Nations peoples — akin to “a library of the greatest standing in the world” that holds 65,000 years’ worth of knowledge.
“It’s been there all this time,” Amelia said. “We were born with that. We are taught that. To this day, we still recognise the principles of that core structure that mum made.”
The dot painting surrounding the Apmerengentyele framework is Gorey’s work. Done in traditional ochre colours “from the land and from the clay”, she says that it’s simply there to support and speak to Turner’s vision: “I didn’t want it to take away from mum MK’s framework”.
Just a question, but it arises from a huge gap in the reporting of Dr MK Turner’s work.
A complete indigenous model of eduction is proposed, that will fit every Aboriginal child to become a strong aboriginal adult.
There appears to be nothing in it that allows for any sort of Western education at all.
So the question is, is it proposed that this indigenous model contains all the teaching that is to be given to indigenous children? Or is it assumed that there will also be a sufficient amount of Western teaching and learning to enable the indigenous children, when they reach adulthood, to survive and make a living in the world in which they will find themselves?
No mention of prison there either. Must be good.
It’s OK, we won’t need all that western education soon. Climate collapse brings society collapse. We may well find ourselves relying on blackfella knowledge of country to keep us alive. If I may para-phrase Sabella Turner, “We are all fauna and flora.”
From the NYT
Should Americans, as part of their school curriculum, learn Arabic numerals?
CivicScience, a Pittsburgh-based research firm, put that question to some 3,200 Americans recently in a poll seemingly about mathematics, but the outcome was a measure of students’ attitudes toward the Arab world. Some 56 percent of the respondents said, “No.” Fifteen percent had no opinion.
Those results, which quickly inspired more than 24,000 tweets, might have been sharply different had the pollsters explained what “Arabic numerals” are.
There are 10 of them: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
That fact prompted John Dick, the chief executive of the polling company, to label the finding “the saddest and funniest testament to American bigotry we’ve ever seen in our data.”
Presumably, the Americans who opposed the teaching of Arabic numerals (Republicans in greater proportion than Democrats) lacked the basic knowledge of what they are and also had some aversion to anything described as “Arabic.”
Which is indeed sad and funny — and also a reason to pause and ask a simple question: Why is the world’s most efficient numerical system, also standard in Western civilization, called “Arabic numerals”?
The answer traces to seventh-century India, where the numerical system, which included the revolutionary formulation of zero, was developed. Some two centuries later, it moved to the Muslim world, whose magnificent capital, Baghdad, was then the world’s best city in which to pursue an intellectual career. There, a Persian Muslim scholar named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi developed a mathematical discipline called al-jabir, which literally means “reunion of broken parts.”
In the early 13th century, an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci, who studied calculation with an Arab master in Muslim North Africa, found the numerals and their decimal system much more practical than the Roman system, and soon popularized them in Europe, where the figures became known as “Arabic numerals.”
Meanwhile, the discipline of al-jabir became “algebra,” and al-Khwarizmi’s name evolved into “algorithm.”
Today, many words in English have Arabic roots; a short list would include admiral, alchemy, alcove, alembic, alkali, almanac, lute, mask, muslin, nadir, sugar, syrup, tariff and zenith. Some scholars think that even the word “check,” which you get from a bank, comes from the Arabic word sakk, which means “written document.” (Its plural, sukuk, is still used in Islamic banking to refer to bonds.)
There is a reason these Western terms have Arabic roots: Between the eighth and 12th centuries, the Muslim world, whose lingua franca was Arabic, was much more creative than Christian Europe, which was then in the late Middle Ages. Muslims were the pioneers in mathematics, geometry, physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, architecture, trade and, most important, philosophy. To be sure, Muslims had inherited these sciences from other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks, Eastern Christians, Jews and Hindus. Still, they advanced those disciplines with their own innovations and transmitted them to Europe.
Love the focus on the land contained herein. And, without being presumptuous, the detailing of spirituality in this public space. In a very real way this article and it’s authors Julia and Damien are genuinely brave. Who else puts such a soft approach amid a world dominated by concerns and chutzpah for money and our customary tone of cynicism? Well done. Good piece.
Good point, and good question – “who else…?”.
Some other people who make a similar point about spiritual connectedness to the land are those farmers who tell us, when threatened with eviction by that bank, that their family has been on the land for more than a hundred years.
The ABC Fact Check is getting a lot of use today:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
“We were not classified under the ‘flora and fauna act’ but we were treated as animals.”
We need the wisdom of the elders more than ever before, as the natural world is under threat from an artificially constructed world of commerce that has come to replace the real world in our mind’s eye. We have failed to deal with the threat of climate collapse, even though we have known about it for 30 years. Democracy has failed us utterly, becuase it has been captured by the fossil fuel industry. Capitalism has failed us utterly because without growth it will collapse, but due to growth the climate is collapsing around us. Imagine iof the world had a council of wise elders who have spent their entire lives learning about the way the natural world functions, then using that knowledge to avert calamities.
The extraordinary longevity of blackfella culture is due to the structure of their system. The council of wise elders is at the centre of that structure. The most successful political system the world has ever known!
Maybe a combination of Plato’s Philosopher State (aka The Republic) and our Modern Indigenous voices. Mmm.