Capitalising on Success: Relationality and Indigenous Higher Education Futures

Abstract

The type of future that a tertiary qualification can provide remains available to very few Indigenous people. Despite increases in the overall number of Indigenous people completing university, including research degrees, NAPLAN data suggests that the number of school students achieving National Minimum Standards in reading and writing standards has—at best—plateaued since 2008. In the context of ambitious new targets for Indigenous higher education these data are part of a broader conversation about indigenisation and governance of the academy. In this context, universities are not simply degree-conferring institutions. They are places of hope and change. They are employers and networkers and innovators and archives and lobbyists. They exist not simply to increase the number of tertiary qualified consumers but also to help us (re)create the future. These are relational challenges as much as they are policy challenges. They require us to rethink our expectations of both settler scholars and ourselves to consider how we enter academic spaces, how we govern knowledges, and how we reach beyond these walls to put ourselves in service of communities traditionally exploited by the academy.