An Indigenous-inspired ‘call and response’ allows us to speak from the heart. This truth-telling makes it a powerful way to build connections, particularly with new migrants.
How Indigenous-inspired ‘deep listening’ can help new arrivals connect
When moving home – no number of forms or information packs can make you feel truly welcome in a new community.
This year, an estimated 260,000 new migrants will move to Australia and millions more will migrate globally, but many of them will remain disconnected from the local community and unaware of Australian First Nations history and culture.
Through our research, we learned that migrants particularly want to connect with First Nations people. This important connection requires deep listening and understanding.
That’s why we worked with local schools and UniSC staff to create the Wan’diny event on the Sunshine Coast, an Indigenous adaptation of a South African ‘call and response’-style poetry format.
Wan’diny offers people an opportunity to connect with First Nations peoples through creativity and sharing – whether they are new to the community, or not.
We delivered it for the first time in 2020, and it was so well-received that we are now gathering data to build a case for rolling this out nationally.
This event has been held every two years since 2020, with the next event on Thursday 22 August 2024 at UniSC Sunshine Coast campus.
How ‘call and response’ works
During the ‘call’, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Elders, poets, musicians and storytellers share their stories, histories and art.
Sometimes it’s the words that tell the story. Sometimes it’s the tone, the emotion, and the body language, or the art.
The audience – made up senior secondary school students, teachers, university students and academics and migrants – is then invited to create a poetic written ‘response', guided by authors and UniSC academics, Associate Professor Paul Williams and Dr Shelley Davidow.
The experience is inter-generational and inter-cultural as we share our journeys through this Dadirri (deep listening) approach. The end result is a published anthology.
An example of a 'call' by Dr Hope O’Chin
An example of a ‘response’ by school teacher Alison Chan
Be-longing
Longing for sand, sun, salt
Warm cheeks, liquor poured into a green coconut,
Laughter, and languages my heart knows even when my brain can’t keep up.
Lunch: A gift, from the garden, from the sea, from my old people – new to me,
Soil, toil, the right amount of rain, a good day on the boat.
Coconut flesh scraped with shell, squeezed to make milk, onto the fish, and onto the fire.
Stories, old photos in shoeboxes, a litter of puppies chewing on tails in the dust.
Kids, and me, piled into the back of an overfull ute, in the breeze, at dusk.
The most beautiful sunset.
‘This is yours too, you know,’ says my Uncle.
‘Home. Mine.’ – I try the words on but they don’t quite fit right yet.
Wan’diny has been a landmark project for UniSC’s Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre because it offers a wraparound welcome.
It epitomises how Indigenous understanding can solve problems that are yet to be solved by the current Western, monocultural societal model, which remains the dominant view in Australia.
The key principle of Indigenous knowledge is relationality – understanding that we are all connected and influence each other’s way of being, and that we are also connected to country and the natural world.
This recognises the need for harmony and togetherness. In First Nations knowledge, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
And this is not always a focus of traditional science.
The support migrants currently receive officially is instrumental, but not emotional, and it is this feeling of emotional belongingness that is key.
Indigenous knowledge is not complementary – it’s vital
What we saw during Covid is that the science we have isn’t solving all the problems, so we need to look to other knowledge systems to improve people’s quality of life.
As the climate crisis intensifies globally, we are going to be welcoming more people from refugee backgrounds. We need to be prepared to welcome more migrants to Australia.
Through yarning we can quickly identify how our histories and places can be knitted together. And that is how Indigenous and transcultural understanding plays a vital role.
But more than this, we need to support the knowledge of Australians living here already. This is why we have looked closely at decolonising the high school curriculum.
Following the Black Lives Movement, there has been a significant increase in Australian interest in learning from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and engaging more with First Nations communities.
People do want to learn more, and to understand a culture that has thrived for 65,000 years.
People are curious, and isn’t curiosity – and a willingness to connect - at the heart of a good welcome?
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