This is the final of three reflections written as a set, for more start here. The prompt was “Take a moment to identify a place near you that you associate with the concepts of human rights/ social justice or the resistance movement.”
Acton Peninsula © AIATSIS 2020
For this piece of writing, I have chosen the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) as a physical and virtual place. Though AIATSIS is not a single 'place', as an organisation it provides a decentralised resource that exposes knowledge would have otherwise been unseen. AIATSIS provided one of my first windows into first nations knowledge, giving me a touchpoint when investigating indigenous affairs, acts of social justice, and most frequently when using their map to understand on which pre-colonial country I stand. All of which is knowledge that has been actively suppressed throughout early colonisation and lost by attrition.
Through their physical locations, provide a place for archiving, research and dissemination of Aboriginal artifacts, history and knowledge. One such location I will look at is the AIATSIS building located in Acton, Canberra. The building was designed by ARM and expressed that AIATSIS "sought a building that would represent the ongoing nature of Indigenous culture, and AIATSIS’s role as a sophisticated learning institution" (ARM Accessed 2020) Architecturally, it makes reference to the ‘Villa Savoy’, a famous building that stands as an expression of modernist excess, absent of people. This version was envisioned as a reflection of its european counterpart, whilst AIATSIS stood not for a history of exclusion and poverty, but rather a building to host people and knowledge.
This building is important both as a place to perform archiving of indigenous artifacts and recordings of intangible heritage, but also as the ‘Family history Unit’. This service combats the gaps caused by the racist practice of separating families such as those of ‘the stolen generation’. During their interview Jenny Coe Munro states the separation of children from their families is “one of the tools of genocide. It's been used around the world by the British colonisers...we cannot teach our culture to the children if they're not there.”
Though the services AIATSIS provides is by no means a substitute to growing up in one's culture, it can provide a much needed reconnection and provide a way to access indigenous knowledge that may be otherwise lost. Joe Shirwood Spring in their interview remarks when he has children that “they have the opportunity to be more Indigenous than I am”, due to the greater exposure and accessibility to indigenous practice and presence of indigenous knowledge cultural bodies such as AIATSIS provides.