Aboriginal Knowledges in the Australian Market Place: Different Issue, Same Story

With Indigenous knowledges being increasingly available via different media, there is the risk of these knowledges becoming disengaged from the peoples who imparted them. A consequence of this disengagement is that it creates the conditions for the creation and perpetuation of misunderstanding and misuse of Indigenous peoples’ lifeworlds. This article explores issues surrounding tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of disseminating knowledge and it points to areas of possible change whereby the latter may seek to find its processes normalised within the former. In particular, it suggests that an approach to Indigenous knowledges that incorporates many of their original regulatory mechanisms would go a long way towards avoiding both the misunderstanding and misuse of these knowledges. The article draws upon examples from particular Aboriginal groups in the Northern Territory of Australia who, it can be said, have for a long time engaged in this process of ‘Indigenising’ dominant modes of information dissemination and use. In some cases, this process has proven successful but in others it has proven unsuccessful. The reasons for these different outcomes will be explored in regard to the extent to which ‘outsiders’ have personally engaged with the peoples from whom the knowledge was originally imparted and the extent to which the outsiders have themselves Indigenised their own normative Western modes of information use.