yaama gayrr ngaya djidjidan, yinarr yuwaalaraay muruwari. hello, my name is jedison wells, i am a Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari woman, therapist and researcher and i am travelling back through historical records of Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari language because i'm not convinced that what our Ancestors said is what is actually recorded. A summary of the project is below, and if you're interested in how I came to be the person tending this research, please click here

In Australia 2017, the New South Wales Government enacted the Aboriginal Languages Act, proclaiming the right of its First Nations peoples to control the growth and nurturing of languages. But from what form are we now nurturing? While it is celebratory that our data warriors have made known the damage of colonised research on our languages, the availability of unsubstantiated findings continue to be delivered as truth.

This study invites a re-journeying for Yuwaalaraay with Ancestors and wyiaybaa (stranger) through historical language resources from the vantage points: AS IT WAS KNOWN; AS IT WAS TOLD; AS IT IS KNOWN; AS IT WILL BE TOLD to unveil possible political, social, personal and experiential constructions previously unseen.

SEEING NORMAL AND ACTIVATING OTHER ARRANGEMENTS FOR DIFFERENT .. THICKER DESCRIPTIONS COME ALIVE This project will explore the original language collections by working with a collaborative framework Yaamanda yanay barriyaygu? (Will you come to the window). Titled Barriyay for short, the framework views texts from four vantage points in time and being. Utilising constructivist approaches informed by Narrative Practice, Standpoint Theory, and Indigenous Knowledge Methods, the framework aims to keep open a dialogue about how data might be revised, disappear, or otherwise be reconfigured by prioritising in-place relations o f research work and keeping active the social practices of kin that keeps knowledge what it is. In bringing Barriyay into use within this project, I will work with other Yuwaalaraay speakers in revisiting records of our language in historical texts , participants do not speak for their Ancestors but contribute alongside them making visible their social, material, and semantic configurations that reveal and propose different requirements for authorisation and continuation of stories. It is an an emergent empirical analysis supported by Aboriginal Yarning, a form of knowledge making in a collective trust where people lean on multiple senses, stories, histories and individual particularities to connect to and build upon collective traditions. Working in this way I explore means by which…

one of the methods is yaamanda yanay barriyaygu, i call it barriyay for short. the approach invites people to journey through a story from several vantage points: AS IT WAS KNOWN, AS IT WAS TOLD, AS IT IS KNOWN, and AS IT WILL BE TOLD to take back the power and be the one who determines how a story will be told going forward.

barriyay developed from my initial readings of colonial texts. i was frustrated in the limiting messages that they gave and wanted to understand the many influences and intentions that were at play at the time barriyay means window in Yuwaalaraay and i named this ‘place of viewing’ with language to remind myself of the multiple authorities necessary to understand a story ,i.e. no one view can give a full picture and each view informs the complete picture. i see it as a window because i don’t want to rewrite a story, or make up a story or forget about one part of a story. i want to see the whole view and all the reasons why it became that way. when we know how something is constructed, we can then deconstruct it. barriyay will be the guide to help deconstruct the texts in this study, so our so our energy is pulled away from defeating the colonial conclusion [that’s already done] and be pushed towards making known what our Ancestors were actually saying, what other institutions of knowledge were at play, what needs were filled by our Ancestors sharing the information and what story we tell going forward? The project asks yaamanda yanay barriyaygu (will you come to the window), the window is a method called barriyay that I developed as a counsellor to support people and communities in revisiting historical trauma. In this study, the trauma to be revisited is the ignored and misinterpreted voices of our Ancestors when they shared language in historical wanda research. what have i done what am i doing right now I express my identity with words and story telling which spills over into my work as a narrative counsellor where I give voice to people's stories that have not been told. In other words, their purpose and reason doesn't make sense so i'm working with Charles Darwin University as a PHD student to look a little closer

this phd was born out of my reading the historical collections and not having it meet up with what i actually knew. My country was telling me lies .. why only Yuwaalaraay, why not Muruwari too .. I have every intention of doing the same with Muruwari, but don't quite have the fluency in the language. I would have preferred to focus on both languages

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Now, I can’t remember what the first story ever told to me was, but I can tell you that I have never had any trouble in understanding English or reading through the lines of a Narrative to unravel the power that a good story can yield. What that meant was that when I was first exposed to learning Yuwaalaraay, through the kindness and passion of people sharing on youtube and community pages, English and all of its rules were already burnt into my framework. Not only in the form of syntax and phenomes but also in the historical interpretation of early Aboriginal Australia. Sometimes I almost had to fight through semantics to locate alternative positive Aboriginal themes. So to connect more deeply to my Ancestors language, I started seeking out historically early records of Yuwaalaraay believing them to be less exposed to Colonial assumptions than current versions (are you rolling your eyes right now!). For instance, in Ridley’s 1873 account of discussing constellations with the Yuwaalaraay, he records Maliyan-ga as an eagle in flight. As Maliyan-ga still means an eagle in flight, at first glance it seemed his recording was more factual than subjective.

One book I became very interested in was THE EUAHLAYI TRIBE By K Langloh Parker written in 1905. It grabbed my attention because the Author, at the time of publication, was not regarded as having used the proper anthropological methods so she was seen as almost co-researching with my Ancestors, them sharing language and culture and her documenting it for others to know. I say almost because we have no idea if people truly volunteered their data or were coerced in some way. I began this book with great excitement but after several chapters, the myriad of usual influences came into play. That is the power of labelling and the plight that Colonialism had in store for what was then termed "the Aborigine".

This research was born out of my reading the historical collections and not having it meet up with what i actually knew. My country was telling me lies

Though the research question begins with ARE ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS POSSIBLE, I am also interested in what happens when this request is brought, i.e. analyse historical conclusions, to us the Yuwaalaraay people with our history and capacity. It will strengthen Indigenous individual and community pride through contributing to historical interpretation, and recognise the diversity in Australian Indigenous language and geographic groups. " I am accountable, not like Mitchell - to the framework of acceptable knowledge collection of the time. Not like Oates - incorporating and acknowledging respective practices. But like fellow Yuwaalaraay, who have held the knowledge up against the light and saw different kinds of knowers and practices of knowing that were mutually present, and never acknowledged.

there are stories to tell, there are stories to hear, there are stories to be deconstructed and where necessary, reinterpreted through a decolonising lens with the aid of our Ancestors

for more information on the project, including examples of how the yarns might go, the deconstruction would go, click FIND OUT MORE

There are influences so ingrained in our humanity, so powerful that it is almost impossible to see them. and that power has a lot to do with language and dissemination. historical methods of collection and dissemination of the Yuwaalaraay language using Narrative and Aboriginal yarning practices False reporting in research is intentional and for gain. Whether in the form of fabrication, falsification or plagiarism, the intent is personal gain. Exploitive research practices