Reflecting on Reconciliation

The week reminds us of the complex ways the past and present overlap and influence the future — it is also an opportunity for truth-telling. To address hurt and injustice, to reconcile and reckon, and to move forward together.

The Australian Academy of the Humanities committed in its Strategic Plan (2020-25) to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, knowledges and practices as foundational to our national story, and recognise the role and contribution of Indigenous researchers and knowledge custodians. As we work toward our Academy’s next Strategic Plan we are reflecting on where this commitment has led us and the goals we should set for our future.

A major initiative has been the establishment of an Indigenous Studies Section which recognises the vital multidisciplinary approaches of Indigenous Studies.

On 23 November 2023, our Academy welcomed Indigenous Studies to its expanding network of 12 Sections representing the Humanities disciplines.

The Section was proposed by Indigenous Fellows of the Academy, endorsed by its more than 600-strong Fellowship and remains Indigenous-led. Today the Section is emerging as a vital forum to discuss and promote the diversity, strength and impact of Indigenous Studies and its engagement with the other Humanities disciplines; and to advise the Academy in its work to advance Indigenous scholars and scholarship in all its activities.

The Academy recognises the colonial origins of much Western knowledge-acquisition, and that there is much to reckon with in the ways Western knowledge systems have been used to justify the inequitable treatment and dispossession of, and continuing violence against, Indigenous peoples.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge holders and scholars, and the dynamic cultures, knowledges and methodologies they sustain, are integral to leading Australian humanities scholarship today.

The Indigenous Studies Section is led by Associate Professor Shino Konishi FAHA and comprised of leading scholars whose expertise stretches across Indigenous peoples’ engagements in history, literature, education, health, law, visual culture, music, digital media and more, demonstrating the myriad ways in which Indigenous perspectives enrich the humanities.

These leading scholars are contributing to vital research across a range of nationally important topics including:

• how to reshape and rethink Indigenous biography outside of the western scholarly constraints and prejudices of research and biography
• the long trajectory of survival and political struggle by Indigenous people;
• the vital importance of Indigenous data governance and the right for Indigenous peoples to determine the management of Indigenous data;
• holistic, self-determining and culturally appropriate approaches to Indigenous health;
• solutions for change, racism and intimate partner homicide;
• constitutional law, and the human rights of Indigenous peoples;
• shifting perceptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts;
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander healing programs;
• the impacts of climate change on remote Indigenous communities;
• the preservation and dynamism of Indigenous languages.

I invite you to spend some time getting to know the Fellows of the Indigenous Studies Section and their work via the Indigenous Studies Section webpage.

This brings us to the future, and the future Strategic Plan for our Academy. Our Academy’s commitment to forwarding and celebrating Indigenous Scholarship across the humanities continues to strengthen, and we continue to forward First Nations First initiatives.

Many of you will have already contributed your ideas to our forthcoming Strategic Plan via your Section or our Strategic Plan Survey, which is open until Monday 9 June 2025.

If you have not yet done so I encourage you to complete the survey now and tell us what big steps you think the Academy and the Australian Humanities should take as we walk on a shared path of truth telling, reconciliation, and reckoning in the Academy’s next Strategic Plan.

I also encourage you to contribute your thoughts with me directly by emailing president@humanities.org.au.

Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FASSA FRAHS FRSN living and working on Gadigal land.

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