Nomo munanga, main kantriman (‘not a ‘white’ person, but my regional kinsman’)

Abstract

Stephen Harris’s life, career and even his family’s history were bound up with Aboriginal people, my people. This chapter tells one of many stories of Stephen and his engagement with Aboriginal education, focussing on his role at what is now Charles Darwin University, in the early 1990s. It is written from a personal perspective as a student of his, and also as a colleague based in an Indigenous learning space in the university. It is also written from an Aboriginal positioning, informed by colonially ordered Black and White relationships and the ascendancy of whiteness in Australian universities. A key theme is Stephen’s visionary and strategic commitment to supporting Indigenous leadership and privileging Indigenous knowledge, and the methods employed to do so. A second and equally important theme, woven throughout the chapter, is the mundane, everyday expression of colonial whiteness in educational institutions and how, in varying degrees, the actions of Stephen Harris had the effect of disrupting, defying and displacing it by empowering individuals, and in multiple ways, supporting Indigenous identified goals. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Document Type

Book Chapter

Date of Publication

2022

School

Kurongkurl Katitjin

Copyright

subscription content

Publisher

Springer

Comments

Ngarritjan Kessaris, T. (2022). Nomo munanga, main kantriman (‘not a ‘white’ person, but my regional kinsman’). In B. C. Devlin, J. Kinslow-Harris, N. R. F. Devlin & J. E. Harris (Eds.), Stephen Harris—Writer, Educator, Anthropologist (pp. 33-46). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8648-1_3

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1007/978-981-16-8648-1_3