Inspiring indigenous research
by Michèle Nardelli
In his first three months in the job, one thing that has really
excited Peter Buckskin is the renaming of the research area he leads – a
symbol of good things to come.
Buckskin is the new Head of the Unaipon School and the Dean of the newly retitled David Unaipon Indigenous College of Education and Research.
"It invokes the spirit of endeavour, thirst for knowledge and determination
that was so much a part of the character of David Unaipon," Buckskin says.
"It is that passion for knowledge we want give to our students and researchers."
Buckskin’s own career can rightly be seen as a great role model for young Indigenous people. A Narrunga man, he spent his childhood in Point Pearce and was much inspired by his grandfather, a pioneer in the SA land rights movement who worked with the Dunstan government to draft some of the first legislation that gave land back to Indigenous people.
Buckskin trained as a primary school teacher at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and then went north as one of the first qualified Aboriginal teachers in the beautiful but challenging country of the Kimberley.
"I worked in Marble Bar and Broome and it was just great country, great people and an inspiring experience," he says. "But essentially I was teaching English as a second language in the classroom."
By the early 1980s Buckskin had been drawn into the politics of teacher education and Indigenous education issues. He moved to South Australia to help establish Warriapendi School in Moore Street, Adelaide.
"Warriapendi was established on an alternative model but was essentially a ‘school of last resort’ for a lot of kids, so I became even more engaged with the rights of children who needed support to succeed – children who through poverty or neglect were being set up to fail in life."
Big issues like education, social inequality and Indigenous rights soon drew Buckskin to Canberra where, during the Hawke/Keating years, he felt he could make an impact in changing policy, developing programs and making the public sector more responsive to Indigenous issues.
"Today the public sector and political leadership have let Indigenous people down, making it difficult to feel any sense of integrity where I could hold my head high in the community, so I left," he says.
"When I was growing up my heroes were Martin Luther King and the Kennedys because they were making such an impact on the world through the civil rights movement. But what I didn’t understand then was the common history of forceful colonisation and its impact on Indigenous people in other parts of the world. When we compare Australia’s situation with the fate of First Nation people in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, we are still the worst off. We have much to learn from other Indigenous nations through scholarship."
Buckskin says his two main goals are to increase Indigenous participation and graduation rates and to ensure every student who studies at UniSA has the chance to learn something about Indigenous people in a way that portrays them as another important social group in Australia contributing to the social and economic fabric of the community.
"The huge challenge we have is to gain credibility for Indigenous perspectives in our research and teaching and learning," he says.
"We need to be able to translate our traditional knowledge into a framework that is understandable and accessible to the general research community. At the same time it is vital that there are research environments where it is safe and nurturing for Indigenous scholars to explore their thoughts and their notions of issues from their own cultural perspective."
Buckskin says, right now, making UniSA one of those places is his main game.