In Australia, Indigenous peoples continue to fight against coloniality, and education remains a crucial theatre in the war for sovereignty and self-determination.  For well over a decade, despite reinvigorated educational and Indigenous social welfare policies, the creation of federal agencies, a national curriculum and a standardised literacy and numeracy assessment program, Indigenous learners remain behind Australian learners (Fahey, 2021). After iterations of exclusionary legislations were repealed at the state levels enabling Indigenous learners to attend white classrooms (Kerwin and Van Issum, 2013), education, and to a greater extent literacy, continued, as Rogers and Mosley (2006, p. 462) notes, “to function as a replacement of property as a means of preserving the rights of citizenship for whites”.  Politically determined intimacies between property rights, rights to become literate and social inclusion, have functioned, as “a set of socio-economic assets available only to those who have been certified as white by major economic, legal, and cultural institutions” (Harris, 1993, p. 1707). The intersection between education, whiteness and property has been discussed for some time by Gloria Ladson-Billings (2003, p. xi), observing, “literacy represents a form of property. It is property that was traditionally owned and used by whites in the society”.   Whiteness then is endowed the privilege to possess education as institutional and psychological entitlement, which from micro-cultural practices within classrooms, excites, so to maintain, racial hierarchies necessary to reify multi-level coloniality projects. Aboriginal scholar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2016, p. 112), ascribes within the context of Australia, “Racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct difference in bodily attributes and to designate them as markers of hierarchical social categorisations within discourse”.  

Health and physical education (HPE) is a discursively white, Western learning space (Flintoff, 2018). Classrooms are managed by practitioners who are mostly white, despite an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-lingual student body (Flintoff and Dowling, 2019). Within HPE, orthodoxy is derived from scientism, heteronormativity and gender disparity (Azzarito and Solomon, 2005), body image, classism, racism, and competitive and elite sports, surreptitiously silences student diversity, and seeds quotidian racism and microaggression in learning encounters (Blackshear and Culp, 2021; Clark, 2019). Despite minor disruptions to orthodoxy through radical scholarship, such as critical whiteness (Matias and Boucher, 2021), queer and anti-racism scholarship (Clark, 2020), and the implementation of curricular devices promoting inclusion and diversity, such as the cross-curriculum priorities in the Australian Curriculum and Yulunga: Indigenous Games (Edwards and Meston, 2007), much work within the discipline remains.    

As curricular encounters occur upon stolen Aboriginal lands and the congealed blood of ongoing racially constructed conflict; unreconciled histories, Indigenous languages, and Indigenous Knowledges (IK) have a fundamental role to play in the continued disruption.  However, IK remains largely invalidated by Western science, as such, distinct languages, protocols, ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies, conflict how non-Indigenous practitioners can approach these complex systems as tools of curriculum and pedagogy.  Given Australian educational institutions are yet to move beyond defensive, racist, assimilationist and authoritarian postures relative to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson, 2016), as the early work of Nakata (2002) reminds, one cannot essentialise the relocation of living, community-familial centric IK, by simply dropping IK into the contested mires of Western institutions.  For advocates to lean into Indigenous cultural tropes as tools of healing and disruption, it is necessary to properly grapple with the terse reality of the historically contingent, socio-political Indigenous present (Moreton-Robinson, 2020).  In this paper, we engage the complexity of invoking IK within the discursive landscapes of Australian educational institutions, and guide educators toward the need for building, progressive, non-linear racial literacy, so to better unlock the disruptive qualities of IK in HPE.   

In this paper we employ trans-systemic theorisation, drawn from legal scholars in Canada seeking to bridge Roman and British legal traditions (see Emerich, 2017), contending this offers a useful theoretical foundation to engage the liminal spaces between contested and divergent knowledge traditions.  Bargallie and Lentin (2022) argued in their work engaging the epistemological distance between critical race theory and critical Indigenous theories and methodologies, of which, Indigenous Knowledge and community context are central, the nuances of Australian settler-coloniality calls for a specificity of approach, premised upon interweaving local theorisation with theorisation from abroad, so to better embolden the fight against race.  However, underpinning Indigenous-centric trans-systemia, Battiste and Henderson (2021, p. vii) outline, are imperfect, stymied ‘tightropes’ premised upon Eurocentric knowledge which is,   filled with absences and gaps, such that learners are both what they know and what they don’t know. Moreover, if what we know is deformed by absences, denial, or incompleteness, our knowledge is partial and limited. This view of knowledge suggests that ignorance is an essential part of learning [and] the belief that knowledge systems need to learn from each other.  So, to better wield Indigenous Knowledges within HPE for disruptive purposes, strategic shifts in practice is desperately required.  Therefore, an inter-weaving of theory is necessary, so to construct an apt and pointed, applied logics of the present, which clarifies and accentuates the effects of settler-colonialism upon the institution of the Indigenous body, its places of space, mind, materialist forms and metaphysics of spirit. As there is a necessity to accurately engage the relationship which exists historically between Indigenous places and bodies, in parallel to Western institutions, research, and educational practices, and the recently acquired proximity of Indigeneity to participate in, act as stakeholder, arbiter, and producer of neo-Indigenous/Westernised educational practice. By utilising trans-systemic coalitions drawn from Critical Race Theory, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous Knowledges, we advance, HPE curricular encounters, driven via a racial literacy framework to preface engagements with Indigenous Knowledges, offer a much richer, pointed learning encounter.

Inside the domain of global Health and Physical Education, racialised ways of knowing, being, and doing (Martin, 2008) are associated with the normative functioning of whiteness and Western knowledge systems. In the Australian context, via curriculum models and pedagogical practice, limited but growing opportunities are being taken to broaden, challenge, and disrupt these racialised enactments of Health and Physical Education. We have illustrated how Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian Curriculum can function as disruptive opportunities, where and when, educators have the will to intellectually invest in building racial literacy and enactments geared toward epistemic justice. We have critiqued examples from scholars who have employed Indigenous knowledges as a pedagogic and/or curricular devices, or as a device for integration, and have discussed some of the challenges emergent from this practice. We reasoned that Indigenous knowledges within Health and Physical Education are necessary for disrupting settler-colonial interpretations of Indigeneity across the Australian social collective, laying seeds for broader societal change. However, this is only possible by employing trans-systemic frameworks drawn from Critical Race Theory and Critical Indigenous Studies and critical whiteness studies, which prevents the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges as another settler-colonial act of cultural appropriation and possessionism. Indigenous knowledges in built into Health and Physical Education offer available opportunities to open critical conversations, moving both educators and students forward via dialectical synergy. It is within this synergism that the utility of racial literacy and epistemic justice becomes apparent. Bringing Indigenous knowledges and Western knowledges into tension with each other, to interrogate what is known and to seize agency where possible, will create messy, non-linear disruption sites necessary inside Health and Physical Education.

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