Their homes have been stolen, their land occupied, language banned and priceless cultural relics destroyed. Exiled, and yearning to reconnect with their own country, they have overcome dispossession and disconnection to forge a new future, and a new higher education system.
There is a lot in common in the lived experience of Displaced Ukrainian and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – with lessons in data protection and knowledge sharing for the Higher Education Sector.
This NAIDOC week, we are releasing a remarkable interview between Australian Adjunct Professor and former PVC (Indigenous) of the University of Canberra, Maree Meredith and two Ukrainian Professors, Yana Sychikova and Igor Lyman from Berdyansk State Pedagogical University. It is an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of Indigenous culture not just in Australia but internationally.
The conversation traverses the challenges of setting up and sustaining a university without walls in Ukraine, after Berdyansk was occupied by Russian forces in 2022, and the importance of data, through lessons painfully learned both in Ukraine and Australia.
Professor Sychikova said Ukrainian institutions had drawn from the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) to help protect data.
With students studying in occupied territories and on the front line, protecting the privacy of student data was literally a life and death matter, she said. In addition, research data was also collected and preserved according to CARE principles.
“Researchers must act carefully and respectfully. Data work must not harm people,” Professor Sychikova said.
Professor Meredith said that data sovereignty also involved recognition that Indigenous knowledge had existed for millennia and was a key step in building and reclaiming identity.
“This is also about overcoming a deficit discourse. This is actually about strengths and part of the Ukrainian experience that I see is, is about resilience and reclaiming.”