In this article, I argue that settler colonial violence is manifest both in the experiences of Indigenous young people in their engagement with the education system, and in the fact that despite a decade of targeted efforts to close the gap in Indigenous educational ‘disadvantage’ – it still remains. Drawing on a small qualitative study undertaken with Indigenous high school students from across New South Wales, Australia, this research reveals that the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives within the classroom is reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future. Before concluding, I bring settler colonial theory in relation to sociologist Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation of violence to put forward a complex reading of Indigenous educational disadvantage as a product of colonial dispossession.

A strong educator-learner relationship is continually identified as the most significant form of involvement affecting the student experience. Yet, within the current dominant higher-educational context, student-faculty interactions are also identified as an area in need of improvement. This paper explores the educator-learner relationship within a space created by “Indigenous pedagogy” and epistemology through a case study conducted with undergraduate students at The University of Western Australia. Within this context distinctions such as “inside” and “outside” the classroom are seen to inhibit interconnectedness within a holistic system of knowing. Extensive qualitative enquiry in the form of observations, non-Indigenous and Indigenous student focus groups and faculty interviews, informed a descriptive case study of the unit offered through the University of Western Australia titled “Aboriginal Ways of Knowing”. It was found that this space, as Indigenised, offered students the opportunity to connect spiritually and personally with themselves, one another and their educators. Furthermore, in reading this space as an “interface” between Western and Indigenous systems of knowing, a productive tension emerged in emulation of what Indigenous people experience throughout their daily lives. This research contributes to a growing body of literature indicating the potential of Indigenous pedagogy and epistemologies within the tertiary context.

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This chapter traces the emergence of racialized conceptions of Indigenous youth in Australia as they emerged in education discourse in the decade after the success of the 1967 Referendum. A rhetoric of contingent self-determination was enabled through the pathologizing of Indigenous Peoples in response to reports of statistical inequality and poverty. This pathologizing forged racialized conceptions of Indigenous youth as foundational to normative economic futures for First Peoples more broadly. During the early 1970s these conceptions emerged to undermine First Peoples’ demands for self-determination and came to form the basis upon which, after 1977, subsequent neoliberal discourses of youth would intersect. By analyzing the government’s discursive practices during the period under examination, this chapter shows how Indigenous youth emerged as a problem for education through the formation of inescapable deficiency. Through this discursive formation, First Peoples’ mounting demands for a self-determined future were slowly co-opted within sanctioned political discourse, which positioned Indigenous young people as a malleable site of redress in response to the “Aboriginal problem”—through education and employment—for the inherent poverty and disadvantage Indigenous Peoples were figured as facing. The chapter concludes by noting how this early formation of seemingly inescapable deficiency forms the bedrock of the more contemporary policy platforms, such as Closing the Gap in education, in response to the issues facing young First Peoples.