Shedding the Colonial Skin and Digging Deep as Decolonial Praxis

Indigenous Australians continue to be viewed within a racialized lens that too often keeps our bodies out of the ‘norm’ of academic teaching and learning spaces. As Indigenous academics, we are too often relied upon to bring Indigenous knowledge into tough and confronting spaces in which ‘race’ as a theoretical and methodological concept is never really named or spoken about. As sovereign beings, we enter confronting and dangerous spaces of settler colonialism with a strong desire to disrupt and change that damaged landscape. This raises the question of our bodies as damaged landscapes, especially in the sense of what work we do as sovereign bodies in the context of landscape/bodies when blood is spilt (McKittrick, 2021). ‘Race’ in Australian coloniality was advanced through an oppressive lens, merging with the development of racist ideological literacies and policies, legislated to deny Indigenous people’s rights to land and culture.