Crossed Purposes: the Pintupi and Australia's Indigenous Policy

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Crossed Purposes examines the history of contact and interaction between the Pintupi and the whitefellas and examines the problems inherent in attempts at achieving what white Australia perceives as equality. - Ralph Folds, who has lived with the Pintupi since 1988, draws on voices of two generations of Pintupi to show that for some indigenous groups, social justice as statistically equal outcomes founders on cultural differences. - The policy of equal outcomes is profoundly conservative when applied to very different cultures because it assumes that all people want to live the same way. - Ralph Folds argues that in indigenous policy, we have built a deficit model that sentences both white Australians and indigenous people to a fruitless and frustrating search for the right answers to what must inevitably be the wrong questions. - The right of indigenous people to statistical equality has for a considerable time enjoyed powerful emotive and political appeal. Nevertheless, it is less sustainable in the long term than the recognition of the right groups like the Pintupi to be different and to change, if they choose, at their own pace and in their own direction.

Author Bio

Ralph Folds has worked with indigenous people as an educator for almost twenty years and since 1988 has lived and worked with the Pintupi as Principal of Walungurru Community School at Kintore in the Northern Territory. He is the author of Whitefella School: Education and Aboriginal Resistance (1987).