Dear Foxy,

It's called 'obsession'. Or maybe 'misplaced faith'. Anyhow, Indigenous higher education will be in the spotlight, sooner or later, in numbers that the elites can't control: in the next ten years, maybe 40,000 graduates ? How to absorb that many more into the Industry ? Particularly if government start to question what they're getting for thirty billion of the taxpayers' dollars ?

Love,

Joe

No Joe, a passion not an obsession, a passion to see good young people aspire to better things in life than poverty, crime and an early end. Rightly we no longer see Indigenous as suitable for low paid menial employment like domestic servants for the girls, and station hands for the boys.

A little story, I was telling my wife about the numbers of Aboriginal kids taking on tertiary education, she was impressed.
Her own story; when she completed high school with good grades, the careers adviser, a female teacher, asked her what she wanted to do. She told her "I want to go to collage and become a Maori language teacher". The CA lady who was very nice but condescending, said "Öh... you do not want a job straight away? I know of good jobs for Maori girls going in the shoe factory in Auckland, it would help your family... and what about marriage?" T; "Marriage? No not for some time."
"T" took on the shoe factory job for a little while, she did want to help out at home. Boarded with a relative in Auckland during the week, her father insisted she catch the late train home on Friday afternoon, about a five hour trip up north, and return to Auckland on Sunday afternoon. Her father did not want her at 18 to be in the big bad city on weekends. "T" said the job was very hard and the pay was bloody lousy, what she didn't give to mum, went on board and train fares, she was lucky if she had 5 bob a week for herself. She left that lousy job, and thankfully was able to make a worth while career for herself later on.

To Paul.

Sometimes domestic violence is actually a cultural thing. Or at least in the fact that it is fed by the culture and is more common in one culture then another. That it has ties to socioeconomic factors I will agree with as well. But at some point you have to look hard at a population that stay in a specific strata of society and observe that they have a cultural influence to help keep them in that place of society.

Where we agree is that a higher education might be a solution to this. From your view education on it's own is the solution, possibly also by enabling them to have better jobs and an economic place. From my perspective, college is an influence to break down and challenge people's previous ideals (unless their ideals already matched what the college teaches). Because of this, college has the ability to change the culture of a population and let them accept or reject certian cultural elements that would support a hostile home, or even a hostile work enviornment.

Make no mistake though I think there are benifits to just starting a life and getting a job, instead of wading through college before moving on in life. But for a cultural change, a ratio of people challenged enough in their ideas can cause a change in that group as a whole by introducing the same challenges and ideas to the community. College can do this for the cultural factors that feed domestic abuse.

//Sometimes domestic violence is actually a cultural thing//
NNS I'm not familiar with any culture where "bashing the wife" is done as a accepted cultural practice, a bit like celebrating Christmas. What there is, in some societies, including our own, where domestic violence has become accepted by many as a male justified right, a bit like drinking beer. I do agree that at times the line between a cultural practice and common practice is hard to define, but there is a distinction between the two. In either case it does not make it right in our eyes, a bit like cannibalism.

To Paul

Here you go.

•A cultural link of male dominance in Mexico to rampant violence towards women both in the family home and outside of it.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/026975800000700305

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-36324570

(Just google Mexican culture and abuse to see more articles).

•Native Americans struggle with domestic violence. (Part of their culture is their history, and much of that is unfortunately getting the short end of the stick).

https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/diverse-populations/americanindian/mentalhealth/

•recognized domestic and family violence in Aboriginal community. At what point do you say a behavior is rampant in a specific population group, and therefore that group's current culture needs to change. If it was no cultural influences then the data would look differently. Look at current culture, not past tribal cultural that might have been there. By looking at current trends and beliefs (what makes up a culture), we can address several factors that are part of bad common and cultural behaviors.

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/domestic-and-family-violence

•for a further understanding on the term culture consider the realities of a drug culture. There's no reason to to not call it as it just is because it's insulting and therefore avoided in a PC world.

https://www.cascadementalhealth.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=58688&cn=1409