Stats and studies of young Indigenous people often measure their success in ways other than their own.
“Findings confront institutionalised and hierarchical ideals of Indigenous Australian success premised on dominant neoliberal ideation and the accumulation of White cultural and social capital,” Matilda Harry (Western Sydney U) and colleagues write.
Success is mainly measured across government by “deficit thinking” – recording what young Indigenous people are assumed to “lack or need” rather than their aspirations and ideas of post-school success.
The authors used a decolonising qualitative approach to explore aspirational development and ideals of success with 15 young Indigenous Australians who are respected in their communities and participated in on-line yarns “a form of informal conversation employed as an Indigenous Australian research method.”
Findings include:
- “mob define success through notions of connections to culture, community and Country”
- “their most influential motivators of success were kinship responsibilities, regional location and cultural obligations”
- “reflections confirm Indigenous and critical race scholar criticisms of neoliberal conceptualisations of success founded on Western capitalist constructions and understandings of intellectual imperialism”
- “while performativity and conformability are often perceived as desirable by tertiary education institutions and workplaces, such pressures are racially biased, marginalising and exclusionary”
- participants also pointed to pressures to succeed from community and family.
a take-out. “the young Indigenous participants in our study conceptualise Indigenous success as connection and agency, highlighting how Indigenous principles of relationality, respect, reciprocity, nationhood, stewardship and paying it forward impact young mobs’ aspirational ideations and trajectories through the post-secondary school transitional phase.
