Indigenous Study Group - Caring for Country inside the Illegal Clearing
In this discussion, Mat Jakobi frames the Australian university as being the complexification of the settled but still illegal clearing; tracing how frontier genocidal and assimilatory logics inform the settler’s justifications, and rights to know and organise Aboriginal minds, bodies and territories.
Aboriginal staff teaching across the university landscape are working at this cultural interface, where illegally pegged-out settler logics are colliding with Aboriginal knowledge and relationships to country, kin and ancestors.
Knowing that the survival of our communities is dependent on changing higher education’s colonial relationship with Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal teaching staff are working with and against these institutional logics, savaging the disciplines (and their disciples) that have organised the ‘corpus body about us’. This often-invisible labour that cares for country, kin and ancestors decolonises and indigenises the university teaching and learning relationships, and is the everyday cultural workload for Aboriginal teaching staff.
Bio: Located in the Moondani Toombadool Centre, Mat Jakobi recently started at Swinburne, as a lecturer of Indigenous cultural capabilities.
Working in and across Swinburne’s teaching and learning programs, Mat’s role is to support university teaching staff as they embrace the responsibilities of indigenising and decolonising ‘teaching and learning’.
In previous work, Mat coordinated and taught across higher education landscapes, writing in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoints across education, health and arts undergraduate and post graduate programs.