Indigenous knowledge, place and pedagogy

Ngarrindjeri, as First Nation peoples of south-eastern South Australia enter the ‘contact zone' as informed sovereign agents engaging as a nation within the Australian nation state. As a nation the Ngarrindjeri continue to exercise their authority to speak for particular people, issues or country through their variously constituted governance systems. These Governing systems are informed by the Ngarrindjeri philosophy of Ruwe/Ruwar (land, body, spirit) and the embodied ethical obligations to the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of the lower Murray River, Lakes Coorong in the South East of South Australia. Inter-generational learning and knowledge transmission takes place through Ngarrindjeri histories and Ngarrindjeri ontological understandings of body, land and spirit - locating, in part, Ruwe/Ruwar as a pedagogy of place. This formation of meaning around the philosophy of land and body and the social geographies of the relations between ruwe and ruwar is educative and political. In this paper we are interested in how an intense Ngarrindjeri consciousness of place (Gruenwald, 2003) and understanding of power in the contact zone are used to produce counter narratives to the ‘fraught conversations' (Clifford, 2004) that distort identities and colonial understandings of Indigenous ethics of care responsibilities. It interrogates the possibility of Ngarrindjeri educators employing a politics of hope through cultural translation that engage ‘narrative hospitality' (or an exchange of memories) and ‘forgiveness' models (Ricoeur, 1996 p. 292) in a complex arrangement of strategies involving conscientisation, resistance and transformative praxis.
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Gruenewald, D. (2003). "The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place." Educational Researcher 32(4): 3-12.
Ricoeur, P. (1996) Reflections on a new ethos for Europe. Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. R. Kearney. London, Sage3-39.