Being non-Indigenous in an Indigenous education space: Two perspectives on white privilege and the desire to move beyond the mimicry

In this paper, we, as two non-Indigenous authors explore what the implications might be of engaging with diverse knowledges as racialised within thecontext of Batchelor Institute. In order to tease this out we have been inspired by, and will be drawing from, recent work by our colleague Kathryn Gilbey (2014). Of course we work on a daily basis with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island staff at Batchelor Institute, and indeed we have regular discussions with those colleagues about the context in which we all work, including discussions about the meaning of ‘both ways’ and where the Institute (and Indigenous education more broadly) should be heading. However, rarely do we have in-depth conversations about white privilege and how it operates, even though it clearly permeates much of what we do, and it informs many of the organisational structures, processes and discourses within the Institute. Through engagement with Kathryn Gilbey’s work, we will be sharing our own personal reflections on white privilege and Bhabha’s
(1994) concept of mimicry in order to raise questions and ideally open a new space for discussions on Batchelor Institute’s espoused ‘both ways’ philosophy, whilst confronting the challenge of moving beyond the Institute as a site of interdiction.