This book takes us inside the complex lived experience of being a First
Nations student in predominantly non-Indigenous schools in Australia.
Built around the first-hand narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander alumni from across the nation, scholarly analysis is layered
with personal accounts and reflections. The result is a wide ranging and
longitudinal exploration of the enduring impact of years spent boarding
which challenges narrow and exclusively empirical measures currently
used to define 'success' in education.
Used as instruments of repression and assimilation, boarding, or
residential, schools have played a long and contentious role throughout
the settler-colonial world. In Canada and North America, the full scale
of human tragedy associated with residential schools is still being
exposed. By contrast, in contemporary Australia, boarding schools are
characterised as beacons of opportunity and hope; places of empowerment
and, in the best, of cultural restitution.
In this work, young people interviewed over a span of seven years
reflect, in real time, on the intended and unintended consequences
boarding has had in their own lives. They relate expected and
dramatically unexpected outcomes. They speak to the long-term benefits
of education, and to the intergenerational reach of education policy.
This book assists practitioners and policy makers to critically review
the structures, policies, and cultural assumptions embedded in the
institutions in which they work, to the benefit of First Nations
students and their families. It encourages new and collaborative
approaches Indigenous education programs.
