Hi Bully,

No, I'm no authority on anything, I just have a warped point of view and a bit of experience.

Obviously, I can't give out names, but think of the issue this way - of the Indigenous teachers and nurses and conservation managers and so on who are actually working, genuinely working, every day, in the sorts of positions that they have trained for. The great majority of Indigenous teachers that I know of, for example, are out there now, this morning, working in classrooms.

Yes, many organisations employ usually unqualified Indigenous people to stand there and do nothing, to validate the organisation, but usually graduates have to actually work. Fair enough.

Yes, some Indigenous graduates are in positions where they don't appear to do anything either, at least when they are back from overseas conferences - their role also seems to be that of shop-front dummies, appointed to provide a veneer of political respectability to enterprises and organisations. Usually this is in some Indigenous-oriented field, where, if you look hard enough, you may see non-Indigenous people behind the scenes who actually pull the strings.

A system of mutual patron-clientage seems to operate - the Indigenous elite providing respectability for their non-Indigenous minders in the Indigenous sphere, while the non-Indigenous minders provide respectability for their selected Indigenous clients amongst the senior (by definition, non-Indigenous) management of their organisation. For minders and elite alike, win-win. For anybody else, it's the mainstream.

But places in the patron-client system are already taken up: future Indigenous graduates will have to take their chances entirely in mainstream employment, unless they are closely related to somebody already in the system. Again, there is another valuable role for Indigenous student support services - to line up employment in mainstream organisations and enterprises for their upcoming graduates. We worked on this at our uni, back in the late eighties, but funding was definitely not forthcoming, so phht !

Joe

“But it is still a world that can impose constraints on Indigenous people. Policies may come and go but attitudes and expectations linger. Indigenous professionals may be subtly shunted into segregated units, or expected to focus on the needs of Indigenous clients, pupils or patients”

”subtly shunted into segregated units” ?
Joe, surely you are not referring to them “Indigenous Units” aka “Research Centres” by any chance !?

As Lois O'Donoghue observed, “They Get Comfortable In Them Uni's”

They are there by choice Joe !

( They are unemployable anywhere else ! This from me on my website, whitc.info, made a few years back, but still there and still relevant ! Obviously ! )

But enough of that and back to, “Obviously, I can't give out names”

Joe, are you saying that you “can” identify 100, “Not” employed because of their “Aboriginality” but just won't name them ?

Not necessarily, Bully. There are plenty of Indigenous graduates - in fields which are not easily co-optable - who just want to do a job, teachers who just want to teach, not necessarily a segregated class but a 'normal' class, teachers who don't want to get lumped - why should they ? - with all of the Indigenous 'problems' of a school, of other teachers.

Yes, one suspects that some initiatives have been rorts. You mention Research Centres, but I couldn't possibly comment, except to say that I'm not aware of any meaningful research that has ever come out of them. But I'm pretty much out of touch these days :)

To get back to your earlier contribution - out of the 28,000 graduates by the end of this year, besides the 1500 graduates for this year, another twenty thousand would be working, usually in the mainstream, but sometimes in Indigenous units, such as Indigenous university student support units - if you do that job right, then you are flat-out !

Yes, there are others who have turned token jobs into lifelong perks, who never seem to be able to actually say what they do.

For example, some Indigenous staff at universities don't provide student support, they say that they teach and tutor.

When you have a good look, they don't teach or tutor (whitefellas do that for them), so they will say that they do research.

When you ask about the research, their one piddly project has been going for ten or more years, and they really are busy writing papers about it for the next overseas conferences.

When you compare their new papers to older ones, they don't look that different, or any different.

So the bottom line is that they spend their time and six-figure salaries duplicating a paper that they helped to write a decade ago, getting it ready for a new conference, where it will be even more irrelevant than it was ten years ago.

{TBC]

[contd.]

And of course, a major task in some units seems to be to keep university senior management oblivious to how little they actually do in relation with Indigenous students, by harping on self-determination and academic autonomy, and how to fob them off with the implicit and racist view that 'they're only Blackfellas, what can you expect ?'

So yes, I've got great respect for the great majority of Indigenous graduates who want to work and to do a good job, but very little for the elites and the 'researchers'. It comes down, very much, with whether or not Indigenous staff at universities actually do their job and either work hard at supporting Indigenous students or work hard on their other teaching duties, OR spend their time cultivating their careers, and powdering their freckles.

Joe

"Not necessarily, Bully"

Joe, is that a "Yes" or a "No" !?

Seems like a "maybe"

David