To Sound the Drum: A Dialogue on Value and Change in Relation to First Nations Music and Research in the Academy

A raft of complex and dynamic barriers to the participation and inclusion of First Peoples and Indigenous knowledges and practices in the academy exists. Not least of these barriers are assumptions about authority and ownership in relation to knowledge, that inform teaching and research. This chapter, co-authored by an Indigenous academic and multi-disciplinary artist and ethnomusicologist of settler/non-Indigenous ancestry, interrogates the contemporary academy and a vision that is inclusive of First Peoples and Indigenous knowledge systems through a reflective dialogue on individual and collaborative experiences of teaching and research related to Indigenous music. Through a reflection on axiological differences that come to bear in teaching and research related to Indigenous music, and on projects stemming from one author’s family practice of biganga (possum skin cloak) making, the authors consider the provocation: ‘what does it take to sound the drum?’, referring to the biganga (possum skin cloak) percussion instrument that has been used historically in much of south- eastern Australia and is undergoing a current process of reclamation. Through this dialogue and reflection, conventional notions of quality and value that are persistent in both teaching/learning and research in the contemporary university are addressed and expanded upon, and the question of what methodological and systemic change is required to centre Indigenous knowledges and people in the work of the university is considered.