Indigenous Methodology: is it Invented or is it Legitimate?

With some 25 years exposure within Indigenous Australian Higher Education industry, both nationally and internationally I continue to be dismayed at the colonial attitudes of some scholars, Research Higher Degree supervisors and their institutions. At the opposite end of the spectrum I am also continually invigorated by the achievements and elevated thought processes of other culturally astute Indigenous scholars who seek excellence within a concept of Indigenous methodology, epistemology, pedagogy and ontologies.

Indigeneity has in general been an industry of extraction, exoticness or plagiarism by the academy as some colonial actors benefit from Indigenous knowledge. Even the creation of the ‘Aboriginal Dreaming’, so widely accepted in modernity by both Aboriginal and on-Aboriginal people, is in its essence a colonial construct. It was invented around 1896 by Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, the then Alice Springs Telegraph Stationmaster. Indigenous methodology, is it invented or legitimate? This paper is a summary of the author’s academic interpretation and experiences.