Discussion Paper: Representation of Indigenous People in Policy
Order Description
Pick an Australian Indigenous Affairs policy (policy that is specifically about Indigenous people or has an impact particularly on Indigenous people) that you are
either familiar with or are interested in examining? When choosing a policy document, consider the following:

Make sure that it is something that is accessible and available in the public domain; or If you are looking at something which may be an internal document to your
workplace, then make sure you have your employer’s approval to use it. You and your employer can be assured of confidentiality at this end, but you must be sure they
are OK with it.
After reading through the documentation and commentary consider the following question:

How are Indigenous world views (ie epistemologies and ontologies) represented in the policy you have chosen?

If you think they are represented:

Demonstrate how they are represented using the text of the policy?
What evidence leads you to this conclusion?
What do Indigenous communities say about the policy and its development, implementation and reception?
If they are not represented:

Provide evidence of your assessment.
Demonstrate the lack of representation using the text of the policy.
What evidence leads you to this conclusion?
What do Indigenous communities say about the policy and its development, implementation and reception?
Preparation

Preparation in this instance involves you choosing a relevant policy, reading it and any commentary you can find on it. By commentary, we mean articles that critique
it or examine it’s application. These may take the form of written articles, promotional materials and news or journalistic commentary and perhaps personal
communications (where you have permission to use them).

Choose a policy or a part of a policy and see how the policy:

1. Represents Indigenous people – this might be implicitly and/or implicitly. What does the policy tell you about the ways the writers of the policy see Indigenous
people?

2. Represents valid ways of knowing – in other words: In the policy, how does the way that knowledge is understood to work, reflect a valuing of Indigenous ways of
knowing, being and doing (or not)?
For many policies, there is a dearth of commentary especially from Indigenous people. You should have a look and see what you can find. It will depend on the topic
(for example, you’ll find an ocean of commentary on the Intervention, but you might not find much commentary on say Indigenous Procurement Policy (perhaps)). if you
find commentary that helps you to answer the questions, that’s great. If you don’t, then your job is to make some inferences from the work of the Indigenous
philosophers you have already read (and others). What I mean by this is that you know have a picture of what those Indigenous people say about knowledge and the
process of knowledge-making – summarised in Arbon and Martin’s “knowing-being-doing”/”being-knowing-doing”. Look for the ways the concepts these folks talk about are
reflected/represented in the policy document you choose. This is sort of a little bit of forensic text analysis. What you have to do is look for the text or images or
whatever representations are in the document that makse you think the writers of the policy think in a particular way and then back it up with some evidence.

For example:

If the policy is full of words that dictate a position and say Indigenous people have to operate in a particular way to conform, then that gives you an idea of what
the ontological position of the policy is likely to be.
If a policy posits Indigenous people or their actions as a problem, that gives you an indication of the writer’s view of the world and her position on Indigneous
people, their knowledges and knowledges in general.
if a policy document is adorned with images of Indigenous people in more traditional clothing, that may give an indication of what the writer or the graphic artist
thinks about Indigenous people.