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Paper short abstract:

Indi Kindi delivers a learning curriculum that integrates place-based First Nations approaches with mainstream Australian approaches to early childhood education. This paper addresses the question of socio-environmental justice through a deep description of Indi-Kindi as a decolonial pathway.

Paper long abstract:

Indi Kindi is an education program designed by a Not-For Profit Organisation (Moriarty Foundation) for children up to five years old. The program is currently offered in four remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. The program delivers a learning curriculum that integrates place-based Aboriginal approaches with mainstream Australian approaches to early childhood education. This paper questions decolonial pathways and socio-environmental justice through a deep description of Indi-Kindi.

Indi Kindi is usually delivered outdoors in a place-based, multi-sited manner, by local Indigenous staff, all women. The staff decide on where to go in response to community politics, customary protocols, and seasonal environmental factors. While the learning experience is structured via a book reading and singing session in English and the local Aboriginal languages, the children are also encouraged to engage freely in imaginative, sensory play activities, and at every session, are offered a cooked meal and fresh fruit.

Efforts have been made to formally assess the value and effectiveness of Indi Kindi in terms of its impact on the educational development, health and wellbeing of individual children; and on the community by providing opportunities for the employment of Indigenous staff and so on. However, philanthropists and government funding agencies rarely consider the value of programs such as Indi Kindi for more broadly addressing coloniality and its continuing structures of violence. This paper argues that Indi Kindi needs to be understood as a “pathway to decolonisation” in that it fosters decolonial practices “that disturb structural legacies of domination”.