International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination

The 21st of March is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

This date was chosen as it is the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations states:

Each year we mark this Day on the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. We can never forget the 69 unarmed and peaceful demonstrators who were killed by South African police as they protested the country’s unjust apartheid laws. Apartheid has long since been dismantled and there have been other important advances in the struggle against racism. These include treaties and declarations, the development of an international framework to combat racism, and national protection systems by numerous States. Despite much progress, racism remains a pervasive menace to individuals and ethnic and religious groups worldwide. It is a threat to stability and a grave violation of human rights. We must join forces to end racism, and sport can help reach this goal. On this International Day, let us recommit to ending racial discrimination and realizing our vision of justice, equality and freedom from fear for all.

It is my personal experience that Australian's do not have a sophisticated understanding nor an ability to identify, talk about and/or critically reflect on their own racism - individual, institutional and systemic. "I'm not racist" is frequently heard in the media as a defence. I would argue that probably all of us are racist to some degree or another. It doesn't make it okay of course. But it does mean that when you attempt to defend yourself with "I'm not racist", you look, sound and probably are being absurd, and un-productive. It takes a long time to grapple with one's own racism - to be able to self-identify it, to challenge it. It's an ongoing journey of reflection and personal challenge.

Here are some links that may assist you on your journey to better understanding racism -

• All Together Now - is a not-for-profit foundation set up to directly challenge and combat racism in Australia
• It Stops With me - campaign to challenge racism from the Human Rights Commission
• Racism: No Way - education campaign to challenge racism from NSW Government, Department of Education and Training

It's good to also share individual experiences of racism, so I've "mined" the Deadly Bloggers list for some personal reflections on racism -

• "Nigger" does not belong in the school yard from Not Quite Cooked
• I wonder what Johnny's mum was up to today from Not Quite Cooked
• White Privilege is Totes a thing from Sarah's World of Procrastination
• Response to racism in Rugby League from Dr Chris Sarra
• Am I White enough for you? from Clouds on a distant horizon
• The Racism post: I'm calling you all out from Black thoughts live here

I'll end with this poem by the very very deadly Murri poet Steven Oliver....

In Australia, other commemorations are also held on the 21st of March. These include Harmony Day and Closing The Gap.

If you know of any other deadly posts on racism, let me know so I can add update the list above ...

Cheers, Leesa

Happy Birthday David Unaipon

Today, the 28th of September is the 140th birthday of David Unaipon. He was the first published Aboriginal author. He was a scientist and mathematician, an inventor and a religious educator.

We can only image what his life, as an Aboriginal man must have been like 140 years ago. It is not hard to imagine the hardships and disappointment he would have experienced as a result of society's embedded racism against Aboriginal people. And we can only imagine what he might have achieved had he been given the same opportunities as other men of his age.

Sadly, most Australian's, young and old, will say "who?" when we mention his name. Let's spread the word of him and work and begin to make him the household name he should be.

More information about David Unaipon:

• Diju Know about David Unaipon from ABC's Message Club. Written by Anita Heiss.
• Local and history information about David Unaipon from Adelaide
• Fact Sheet from the Racism No Way resource. 

Image credit: A deadly birthday cake for David Unaipon by Annie Ah Kee using Minecraft.

The Deadlys

It's time to celebrate The Deadlys. Created in 1997, The Deadlys celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians, artists, sports people and community leaders. In 2012 the Deadly Awards will be held on the 25th of September at the Sydney Opera House.

The Deadlys, like the NAIDOC awards, provide a positive affirmation of identity and achievement. In the face of overwhelming negative depictions in the mainstream imagination for over 200 years, affirmation is important.

Best of luck to all the nominees. The Critical Classroom team will not be in Sydney, but we'll definitely be watching the social media feed as well looking for the broadcast.

Will you be following The Deadlys? 

ANZAC Day from an Indigenous perspective - online resources

I posted recently three conceptualisations of ANZAC Day from an Indigenous perspective. This post provides a number of useful online resources based on these ideas.

The War of Colonisation
The war of colonisation has not been recognised as a "war" despite the devastation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and cultures.

Some useful resources: 

• National Gallery of Australia: Aboriginal Memorial exhibition which recognises all thoseAboriginal people who have lost their lives since 1788. http://nga.gov.au/AboriginalMemorial/home.cfm
• A chilling read is a list of massacres of Indigenous Australians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians
• The Myall Creek Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myall_Creek_massacre
• Tracker: ANZAC Day march labelled as disrespectful  http://tracker.org.au/2012/04/anzac-day-marched-labeled-disrespectful/
• Tracker: Invasion debate: Was Australia settled peacefully?  http://tracker.org.au/2011/08/the-invasion-debate-was-australia-invaded-or-peacefully-settled/

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were diggers too
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women have given their lives in every official military operation since Federation.

Some useful resources:

• Story of quest for a local Aboriginal War Memorial (Adelaide) http://city-messenger.whereilive.com.au/news/story/no-sign-of-aboriginal-memorial/
• The Australian War Memorial: Too Dark for the lighthorse: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in the defence forces http://www.awm.gov.au/education/resources/box/3/
• Australian War Memorial: Reginald Saunders, the first Aboriginal person to be given a commissioned rank. http://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/aborigines/indigenous.asp
• The Australian War Memorial: "One ilan man": the Torres Strait Light Infantry http://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/12/ilan-man
• Tracker: Aboriginal War Veteran on memorial on Bondi memorial  http://tracker.org.au/2011/11/aboriginal-war-veteran-featured-on-bondi-memorial/
• Tracker: Renewed calls for an Aboriginal veterans memorial in Sydney  http://tracker.org.au/2011/05/renewed-calls-for-an-aboriginal-veterans-memorial-in-sydney/
• ABC: A light is shone on Aboriginal soldiers'service. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-10-29/a-light-is-shone-on-aboriginal-soldiers-service/2316108

Social Media resources

• Facebook: Mark of respect for Indigenous Australians. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-of-respect-for-indigenous-Australian-soldiers/159267687432284

Leesa Watego

Exploring ANZAC Day from an Indigenous perspective

[Note: This post contains images, words and works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are now deceased]

 

We can understand ANZAC Day in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in a number of different ways. Here are three ways of conceptualising Indigenous responses -

1) Challenge the authority of ANZAC Day
ANZAC Day as a commemoration remembers the sacrifices of Australian men and women in Australian wars since World War 1. It is a recognition of those who "wore a uniform" in official battles. From an Indigenous perspective, this day is flawed as it fails to acknowledge the thousands of Australians - men, women and children - who fought and lost their lives in the War that was/is Colonisation. The above National Gallery of Australia exhibition created in 1988 is a recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died since colonisation.

2) There were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers too
This perspective acknowledges ANZAC Day but recognises that there have been Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers in every Australian conflict since Federation. These men and women fought proudly beside their comrades. That there has been little acknowledgement of the contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers is linked to the third concept.

3) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers were treated as second-class citizens
This perspective is about a recognition that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers, despite their sacrifice and contribution in wars overseas, were treated as second-class citizens when they returned home. When they returned home they were subject to the same individual and systemic racism from White individuals and institutions as they were when they left.

William Cooper, Secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, argued in 1939

that Aborigines should not fight for White Australia. Cooper had lost his son in the First World War and was bitter that Aboriginal sacrifice had not brought any improvement in rights and conditions. He likened conditions in White-administered Aboriginal settlements to those suffered by Jews under Hitler. Cooper demanded improvements at home before taking up "‘the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by the White race without compensation or even kindness'. Quote source

There are multiple ways of conceptualising ANZAC Day, these are just three. The key is to be considerate and understanding of these different perspectives (and the many others you will encounter) as you approach your investigations of this annual event.

Leesa Watego

A quick craft activity idea

One of the downfalls of using Blogger is that there is no space to upload files and documents. I have to upload them somewhere else and then link them here. When The Critical Classroom is a bit bigger, we'll move over to a self-hosted site with loads of space. But til then, we'll have to stick to linking.

I've uploaded the craft activity we gave to visitors to our QEDREX earlier this month. You can download the file from either the SlideShare or Google Docs.

Teacher Activity: Create a jigsaw

View more documents from Leesa Watego

More to come soon ....

Leesa Watego

Gathering information and curating the past - some ideas and challenges

Historically, many east-coast Australian communities have paid little attention to the cultural history of their places. Most communities proudly display plaques to their war dead, the young men and women from families that marched and died on battle grounds in Europe, the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Occasionally there are plaques to explorer and settler families, but quite often these are held in the naming of places, streets, parks, mountains, and hills.

Generally there is little recognition of the people who walked and lived the land we now know of as Australia, since time immemorial.

Gathering and then curating this knowledge and information to suit classroom purposes is our modern day challenge. Quite often information is held within individual families, but mostly it's in the archives, in old newspapers, explorer/settler diaries and/or historical books that are out of print. Some of this information is on the web, but most is on shelves.

The community I live in, Everton Park in the north-west suburbs of Brisbane, is one such place. Over the past few years I have slowly cobbled together some information in my spare time.

My first effort at compiling information in a way that was presentable was using Google Maps. I was inspired by Stilgherrian's 50-50 project.  Using a word list from Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of early Queensland, I used place markers to mark the Aboriginal names of places throughout Brisbane. My next effort was in creating a Picasa/Google album of Aboriginal Place Names. Unfortunately, life has got in the way of my extra-curricula activity and I've not progressed as far as I'd like - still so many places still to add.

This is one of the on-going barriers to the challenge of curating information for a specific purpose - time, energy and focus. The other key challenge comes in making sure that any texts (in the form of maps, albums, podcasts or books) is done in a way that is appropriate to the memory of Aboriginal peoples of the past as well as respectful of Peoples that live in communities today.


A recent query from a teacher at the local primary school has prompted me to compile what I have so far here in a  a public Google document . I suspect that much of this information would work well and be useable in a blog format - perhaps I'll leave that one for an empty weekend.

What tools have you used to gather and present information about your community? What are some of the barriers or challenges you have faced?

Cheers, Leesa

Update - I'm not certain if the Map link is working. I'm going to try to embed the map below to see if this works.


View Aboriginal Place Names of Brisbane in a larger map

Blak History Month Poster

32/365 Blak History Month poster
Originally uploaded by leesawatego

Last week I ordered a poster created by Aboriginal artist Sam Cook from Redbubble.

Australian Blak History Month is a very grassroots celebration of history, people, events, stories from a Blak perspective. I have written about it elsewhere on this blog, and there is a link also to my Blak History Month website which has a range of free resources.

I highly recommend all schools purchase this poster. Not only does it look DEADLY, supports an Aboriginal artist, but it will resonate with your students and their families when they see it hanging in your school and classroom.

The poster I chose is print mounted on a matte board. I chose the white matte board. There are different options of purchasing with RedBubble including already framed prints.

You can see all Sam's artwork at www.redbubble.com/people/kissmyblakarts.

Leesa Watego

Thinking the 26th of January

For many people the 26th of January is a day of celebration, while for others, it is a day of sorrow or mourning. We have created a series of lessons designed to assist teachers to create activities that are inclusive and respects the beliefs of their students. The document is created as a Google Doc and is accessible via this link.

You will need this Google Presentation - Stimulus Texts for the 26th of January. I will be adding to this presentation over time.




More posts on this topic:

•  Time to celebrate what's great?
• 26/01 What will you teach on Australia Day?
• Australia Day: Part 2

Any difficulties downloading, contact me: lwatego [ @ ] gmail.com

Deadly Ways - Democracy & Politics

Here is the first of the Deadly Ways presentations. It currently sits at 5 Deadly Ways to Explore Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives of democracy, politics and civics in your classroom, but will definitely grow in the coming months.

I did want to note that Annabel Crabb, political commentator and journalist, made an important point on the 1st day of the opening of the 43rd Parliament. On the Drum on the ABC, her and Chris Uhlman were discussing the recent changes to the opening procedures where from now on a Welcome to Country would happen and also changes to the Standing Orders which now instruct the speaker at the start of every sitting of Parliament an Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners must happen. Annabel Crabb while noting that this was a significant step forward, it was still a 'step' that was 'given' by the Parliament (and one that could be taken away).

Indigenous Science in P-3 Project with CSIRO

Earlier in the year I headed off to the launch of a partnership between the CSIRO, as part of their Indigenous Engagement Strategy and Education Queensland - P-3 Indigenous Science project. Teachers are trained to deliver Indigenous perspectives in their science curriculum for the early years. Here are my images from the evening. As part of the teacher's training, they went on an excursion to Tully to undertake Uncle Ernie Grant's training at Echo Creek.

Play Letterbox & learning Indigenous language

Play Letterbox
As promised yesterday, here is another resource, though you don't need to buy this one.
Letterbox was produced by Carbon Media, an Indigenous Australian media company. The Letterbox programme was televised on NITV and ABC3, and is targeted at primary school aged kids.

You can play the games online. Unfortunately the games aren't leveled and many of them may be for higher level students (Michael & I had a bit of a hard time with alpha bubbles but rocked on word it out!). I suggest that teachers check out the words to make sure that learners can cope (maybe its a site that hard workers can aspire to)
Overall though, its a great spot for fast finishers and I'd definitely bookmark it.

Learn Language
The other great part of this site is the Winanga-Li section (I think Winanga-Li means "to know, to remember" - I'm not sure which language).

Here you can watch the short beautifully produced language videos from over the continent. They're designed to teach young people language. And as I've just discovered their embeddable!! See here below.




(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 04/07/2010)

Resource Preview - Sharing culture the Yolgnu Way

The third of our Easter holiday Indigenous education resource producer series - checkout Sharing Culture. Qld based, but Yolngu culture, this deadly family produce CD-Roms for literacy, art, language, culture learning. These look great - and are very reasonably priced too!

Resources - Sisters Dreaming

Am really conscious that I've spent too many of my last posts talking about me/us/ourwork.

To rectify that imbalance, I'll spend the next few posts over this Easter school holiday break checking out other Indigenous Australian educational resource creators.


Sisters Dreaming is a New South Wales based enterprise (but they sell online to all over the continent) focusing on literacy and numeracy activities (word bingo, alphabet cards, puzzles etc). You can find them at http://www.sistersdreaming.com.au. Fantastic for early childhood educators everywhere!

I love their illustrations that were created by Cecily Wellington-Carpenter. I met the SistersDreaming mob at the WIPC:E Conference in Melbourne a few years back - they're pretty deadly.

I love their byline - Indigenous Resources for All. Its really important that schools and teachers realise that these resources are relevant for ALL kids, not just Indigenous kids and "Indigenous" schools.

Check out their website and support this deadly business.

(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 04/06/2010)

Easter craft

Here are a couple of things we created using the Easter is Deadly book. The first is a little craft easter gift for someone special. Annie made one for her friend Shanae. The second is a sponge painting of Jaragun's nest. We use enlarged photoccopies to add in Jaragun and some eggs.



(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 03/25/2010)

Jaragun's Country - A slideshow!

Can't get to Idinji Country to see Jaragun's Nest? Here are some photos for your to explore when thinking and teaching about Easter is Deadly. You can also grab the link to post it into your own blog/wiki.




(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 03/25/2010)

Google Map of Jaragun's Nest (Walsh's Pyramid)

View Jaragun's Nest in a larger map

Would like to embed this image into your classroom blog? Click here for the link.

(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on 03/24/10)

You're Deadly!

Here is the "Too Deadly" poster for the Easter & Christmas books (and probably many of the books we'll publish in the future). It was actually quite difficult to create this poster, not because it is a feat of design wonder, but because I was confused about how to define "deadly".

Deadly is all of the things in the poster - smart, knowing, solid, excellend, cool, great, fantastic. But its more than that. "Deadly" is an English language word that has been appropriated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in many parts of the continent. Many communities and individuals feel an absolute sense of ownership over the word deadly.

Here is an article about the term by Troy Vinson. If you're unfamiliar with the term, try googling "deadly" & "Aboriginal". Have a look at the way the term is used. 

Grab the poster from flickr here.

(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 03/19/2010)

Easter is deadly - Timeline (Free!)

Have just uploaded a timeline with 2010 dates for the Easter celebration for Easter is Deadly.

You can use this one-page A4 sheet (either black & white or coloured).

Don't forget - you can embed these documents into your own class wiki or blog using the code next to the slides on slideshare.

(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on  03/02/2010)

Special Days Calendar - March events now added

New Events added for Feb/March -
24 February 2010 - Putsch by proppaNOW Aboriginal Artist's Collective

Their first group exhibition outside of Queensland and as part of the Adelaide Festival, Putsch opened on February 24th 2010 at Tandanya Cultural Centre.

16 March 1995 - The High Court decides against Western Australia's constitutional challenge to the Commonwealth Native Title Act in Western Australia v Commonwealth [1995]

The Native Title Tribunal provides a range of resources about Native Title Law, determinations and issues.

20 March 1969 - The Aboriginal Welfare Board abolished

This website contains detailed history of Aboriginal affairs in New South Wales.

22nd March 2003 - Linda Burney, first Aboriginal woman elected to New South Wales State Parliament.

Linda Burney was elected on the 22nd March 2003, and has since been promoted to various ministerial positions.

28th March 1922 - Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal person elected to Federal Parliament is born

Neville Bonner was born on Ukerabagh Island on the Tweed River. He was elected to the Senate in 1971. He passed away in 1999.

29 March 1984 - Charles Perkins is appointed Head of the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs


29 March 1995 - ATSIC (Indigenous Land Funds) Amendement Act passed.

This amendment created the Indigenous Land Corporation.

30 March 1962 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Qld, NT and NSW are given the right to vote at Federal elections.

The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (Cth) denied Aboriginal people the right to vote unless they were covered under s41 (allows for those who are already enrolled in State electoral rolls). The Commonwealth Electoral Act was amended in 1962 to allow Aboriginal people to vote if they wished (though it was not compulsory).

NB: This is a Google Calendar that we've created as a public calendar. We're uploading events month-by-month. If you know of any other events that we don't have and you would like to include, please send us an email. You can embed this calendar into your own website/blog by clicking here:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=c0uruhv7tm38vof0n2ib73jta0%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Australia/Brisbane

(Originally posted on criticalclassroom on TypePad on 03/02/2010)