A yarning Place in Narrative Histories

This article considers the utilisation of yarning as a feasible method of conducting research among Aboriginal Peoples across Australia. Yarning reflects a formal process of sharing knowledges that is reliant upon relationships, expected outcomes, responsibility and accountability between the participants, country and culture, a process that is valued by many other Indigenous nations. Indigenous research should reflect the authority and foundations of Indigenous knowledge systems and yarning as a methodology can permit this. It is one formal strategy of negotiation and information sharing able to be utilised to form partnerships with Aboriginal communities in order to develop culturally safe and just research. In this article the author first explores current research definitions, uses and roles of yarning. From this the author argues that yarning is undervalued and underutilised as a potentially rich source of data collection. Second, the author discusses how yarning can be used in research design development, application and data collection. Last, the author uses her research in the history of education to demonstrate the effectiveness of yarning in historical narratives, in particular her study of an Aboriginal community's journey towards Aboriginal student integration in Collarenebri, a small, remote and rural town, in northern New South Wales (NSW). The author shows how the local Aboriginal community lobbied successfully for their children to be transferred from a segregated Annex to the main school during the mid 1940s to the early 1950s. Utilising yarning as a research methodology added depth and relevance for participants, their local communities and the narrative paradigm that informs it.