Students engaged with the environmental sciences at the University of New England (UNE) are being offered the chance to view their subject from the inside, by taking an Indigenous point of view.
The Australian Aboriginal Sustainability Systems course taught by Goomeroi woman and UNE PhD graduate, Dr Brooke Kennedy, presents the natural environment from the perspective of those whose lives literally depend upon it.
“Our Western education system tends to look at ‘the environment’ as something to be studied from without,” Dr Kennedy says. “For Indigenous people, the environment is something they inhabit and live within. That calls for a different ways of understanding.”
The new course, an initiative of Environmental Sciences Course Coordinator Dr Adrienne Burns, has been introduced as part of UNE’s Environmental Science curriculum.
“We explain that this alternative way of thinking about environmental issues is not an entirely different thing to Western science, but another way of viewing the same subject,” Dr Kennedy says.
“For instance, Indigenous knowledge is empirical. It is built on 60,000 years of observation and cause-and-effect. Aboriginal people on their own country have this intimate, culturally-embedded knowledge of their landscape and what occurs in it that can’t be replicated by the best-funded study project.”
The way that Aboriginal people assimilate and transfer knowledge is different, too. Dr Kennedy observes that Western universities have built a system in which knowledge is communicated almost exclusively through words. Books or lectures are used to transfer knowledge from teacher to student, and students display their understanding of the subject through writing.
“This makes it pretty difficult if you’re a visual learner, which applies to a lot of people.”
Dr Kennedy is drawing on the NSW Department of Education program, 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning to show students other paths to knowledge. The program introduces concepts like storytelling maps, nonverbal communication, and nonlinear learning.
“At the last intensive school I ran, student could choose how they presented their work – it could be oral, or they could draw it, whatever form of learning worked for them. Some created small masterpieces out of their work.”
On a practical level, Dr Kennedy points to Aboriginal use of Lomandra, a family of native strap-leaved rushes, for weaving.
Use of Lomandra has been embedded over millennia of experimentation, she observes. The fibrous Lomandra leaves last longer than other grasses, so the living resource needs to be harvested less. When Lomandra is harvested, Aboriginal people carefully trim leaves from the outside, making sure to preserve the plant’s integrity so that it lives for another harvesting and provides shelter for animals as it regrows.
“So a system has developed that enables Aboriginal people to harvest Lomandra in a way that supports the plant, supports the creatures that live in it, and gives them a resource. Western systems don’t tend to work in this holistic way.”
“If we want to better engage with Indigenous people and their knowledge systems, we need to understand that we can’t just approach these matters with our Western intellectual toolkit. We need to see things from a completely different perspective, starting with the nature of reality itself.”
