Indigenous Stories: Knowledge Is Sometimes Where You Least Expect to Find It

Abstract

The famous American baseball player Yogi Berra, who played for and coached the New York Yankees once said, “this is like déjà vu all over again.” As we read the chapter Australian Torres Strait Islander Students Negotiate Learning Secondary School Science in Standard Australian English: A Tentative Case for also Teaching and Assessing in Creole, Berra’s famous comments rang true for us as a Native person who has worked in Native American schools for nearly three decades and as a white man who has worked in critical pedagogy as a teacher/researcher for many years. However, we are not trying to be glib. The similarities between Native Americans from North America and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities from Australia are just far too obvious. It is sad for us to see the same oppression and failed decontextualized pedagogy being implemented for the education of Aboriginal children as have been implemented in the United States for Native children. In our response, we reflect on the ways in which our educational experiences on the Menominee Reservation in Northern Wisconsin mirror issues similar to those experienced by Chigeza and Whitehouse in Australia’s Torres Islands.