A Meeting of Freshwater and Saltwater: Opening the Dialogue of Aboriginal Concepts of Culture within an Academic Space

The panel members who confirmed my PhD candidacy were non-Indigenous and particularly interested in how culture is interpreted as a set of culturally safe practices and represented in other settings. This confirmed to me that the complex concept of culture and that the contemporary definitions of cultural safety and cultural competence needed some deeper exploration from an Indigenous perspective. Particularly the language that is used in relation to culture and how that language can be interpreted, often incorrectly. Clarification of Aboriginal culture and language appears to lie in the sole responsibility of the Aboriginal person. Even when the onus of that fails to the non-Indigenous person to seek further understanding on Indigenous culture.

When discussing this with Liz Cameron, venting frustration about how Indigenous people repeatedly need to frame and re-frame language and need to define our use of language to “set the scene” before discussing actual topic we want to discuss. I exclaimed “how far back do we need to go?” She said “200,000 years and then some more.” Liz is wise. She has experienced exactly the same thing many times. From this we decided perhaps we needed to explore this further and write a chapter about this phenomenon.