yaamanda yanay barriyaygu?
if you have a password for the barriyay research group, please click the link below. If you are wanting to read up about what the research is all about, please keep reading below
click for barriyay
if you have a password for the barriyay research group, please click the link below. If you are wanting to read up about what the research is all about, please keep reading below
click for barriyayyaama gayrr ngaya djidjidan, yinarr Yuwaalaraay Muruwari. hello, my name is jedison wells, i am a Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari woman, therapist and phd student. thankyou for wanting to know more about the project. if listening is more your thing, click here to open an audio of this page it might take around ten minutes to read and at the end it would be of great benefit to me if you shared your thoughts, even if you don’t want to participate directly. also even though I am both Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari, the language of this study is Yuwaalaraay, because I am not yet fluent in Muruwuri. I would have preferred to focus on both languages
this 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 whitefella1 research
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i started to learn Yuwaalaraay and Muruwuri from early colonial books like the euahlayi tribe by k. langloh parker, written around 1905 and recordings collected by janet mathews and corinne williams from around the 1960s to the 1980s. as i didn’t live on country, learning options were limited until dubbo tafe began online classes run by elders Aunty Beth and Uncle John. these yarns gave me a new understanding of the purpose and reason [words Uncle John would never let us forget] of language and each word within it. after the courses finished, i started two facebook groups, dhubaanmala to keep in touch with other speakers, and tinnenburra-baa to increase Hooper / Johnston connection across the borders. these relationships reinforced Uncle John’s wisdom and i realised that in the past, i had been learning how to say Yuwaalaraay, but not how to tell it.when I went back to the books I started with, this new “telling” had me seeing stories different to the whitefellas published interpretation. for example, some Authors had moulded our knowledge into a colonised view, like Barlow in the passage below, where our Ancestors appear to not have the capacity to count rather than the truth of having no need for it
research methods and ways of recording history are much more inclusive in this century with cultural knowledge holders having more control in clarification and publication. for language research, it means our culture and purpose are recognised as part of the words, and the words are recognised as part of the culture and purpose. much of this came about because of the courage of past Indigenous researchers who not only acknowledged the absence of our voice but created new methods to ensure it would be heard. while that change is itself a cause for celebration, for me it is important that it is not left at thatall unclarified historical research3 impacts future studies because it constricts the view of the past. our new knowledge holders, our emerging elders, who now have wider access to the world and less access to community and elder confirmation will find these Ancestoral voices when looking up historical records but they will hear them within the limitations of how they were first collected
professionally, i am a narrative therapist working with clients, to breakdown historical truths that were imposed by others. people like parents, teachers, government, religion etc who had the power of definition in a particular circumstance. i find that when people seek healing, they come clutching a story that they and others may only have considered from a select viewpoint. i combine these skills with my experiences of yarning and other Aboriginal2 ways to expand those viewpoints. one of the methods is yaamanda yanay barriyaygu, i call it barriyay for short. the approach invites clients 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 the 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 timebarriyay 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