Meet our new staff member Aileen Marwung Walsh
My name is Aileen Marwung Walsh. I am named for my Irish grandmother on my dad’s side and my Ngalia (Spinifex People) grandmother on my mum’s side, whom I never met I might add. I’m Noongar, Ngalia and Ngadju and Mirning and a TO with voting rights for all, but the Ngalia. I have to live on Ngalia country to have voting rights.
I grew up with the strong influences of Noongar and Martu (Western Desert) because my Ngalia grandmother was sent to Moore River and raised my Aunty Daisy from Jigalong. You can read an article about some of it here; http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-back-to-moore-river-and-finding-family-107522
I’ve also published part of the story of my childhood in Anita Heiss’s anthology; Growing Up Aboriginal.
I’m very pleased to be working at NIKERI and helping to fashion the new major in Indigenous Studies to be offered by NIKERI. At The University of Western Australia where I worked previously, we were fortunate to have had Professor Tom Stannage champion the teaching of Aboriginal history by Aboriginal academics back in the 1990’s. We were then able to build on this and offer a major that taught Aboriginal history, absolutely vital for non-Aboriginal students to learn, and Indigenous knowledges and research ethics, both equally important.
My specialties in research and teaching revolve around understanding the mentalities of colonisers and consequent impacts on Aboriginal people since colonisation. My honours dissertation was on the colonial over-naming of Aboriginal people. I look back at it now and it seems rather winyarn in many ways (I got a 1st) https://emaxhealth.academia.edu/AileenMarwungWalsh, but the theoretical research launched me into understanding how language is weaponised by whiteness.
I’m currently undertaking a research doctorate at ANU, which is about how to care for country. Not the mechanics of burning or ceremony or moving, but what it takes to be able to care for country by what goes on in the mind. What is needed in the mind and what cannot be in the mind. In some ways my research is about free will.
Too many people who claim to know Aboriginal law simply don’t. I have found one of the key features of Aboriginal law is that if you didn’t want to live by it, you were killed, which when you think about it makes sense, especially when we consider the high degree of normalised psychopathy we now have to live with every day.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have been awarded the Nugget Coombs fieldwork scholarship which enabled me to go and live with my family out at Tjuntjuntjara on the edge of the Northern Territory and South Australian border. I went there to talk about how Aboriginal knowledge was transmitted to ensure its integrity with its origins many thousands of years ago. While there I saw how white people treat community people, even white people who had married into my family and were changing Ngalia culture to suit their own white beliefs.
The only thing that separates Aboriginal people from non-Aboriginal people is our culture, and not the outward expressions of our culture such as song and dance and ceremony. It is the different cultural mentality derived from the deep Aboriginal past that separates Aboriginal from non-Aboriginal people. Any other claims to Aboriginal identity because of the experience of being colonised conform to racist agendas, and race as we all know does not exist. Descent alone does not make us Aboriginal, we must know what Aboriginal epistemologies are so that we can indicate Aboriginal ontologies.
Hopefully, if you are reading this, you will be encouraged to enrol in one of the units in the Indigenous Studies major. I will be teaching Caring for Country and Working with First Nations People. In the future I would like to develop a unit on Aboriginal Ethics.