Designing an Australian Indigenous Studies curriculum for the twenty-first century: Nakata's ‘cultural interface’, standpoints and working beyond binaries

Abstract

We discuss the recent reworking of Murdoch University's Australian Indigenous Studies major. For the discipline to realise its charter of decolonising knowledges about Indigenous peoples, it is necessary to move Indigenous Studies beyond the standard reversalist and unsustainable tropes that valorise romanticised notions of Indigeneity and Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies over those of a demonised ‘western’ other. Drawing on Martin Nakata's contribution to scholarship on the future of Indigenous Studies, we argue that his problematisation of the cultural interface provides a discipline-based rationale for working beyond the Indigenous–western binary, and that his notion of standpoints encourages the ongoing production of diverse, historically and politically informed scholarship, while preparing students to enter the workforce with a contemporary, ethically sophisticated grasp of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, which is consistent with the decolonial goals of the discipline.