DOI: 9789004400795_008 SANDY O’SULLIVAN 8. PRACTICE FUTURES FOR INDIGENOUS AGENCY Our Gaps, Our Leaps For many First Nations’ 1 communities, self-determination and community-led approaches are crucial to building capacity, enhancing agency and in maintaining control over our future. In writing this chapter I support the principle that it is an essential resetting of Indigenous Peoples role as “subjects” of research, that we ensure that – as academic writers – we do not distance ourselves from our own subjectivity, by tacitly aligning with our communities (Wiradjuri, named nations) and meta-communities (Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nations) by adopting “our” and “we” to describe effect, in place of “they” and “them”. As a major site of colonial invasion, Australia has struggled with goals and actions aimed at supporting Indigenous aspirations and agency (Nakata, 2010; Pascoe, 2016). The most sympathetic reading of the colonial project would be that its goal was to ensure that assimilation and dominance was complete with the colonised (people) only being sustained if we followed the colonial path of least resistance. As with other First Nations’ Peoples the policies that enacted colonisation have led to successive generations of poorer social determinants for our peoples, than for our non-Indigenous counterparts (Fforde et al., 2013; Pascoe, 2018). In 2007, the Council of Australian Governments committed to “closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage”, with yearly reporting provided by the Australian Government (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2008). A 10-year anniversary assessment of the policy was released by the Australian Human Rights Commission, a key agency in proposing the initiative, and one that has carriage of the ongoing Close the Gap campaign. The main criticism, beyond the failure to meet set targets, was that the government policy responses lacked any meaningful evaluation, suggesting that the measures represented a “failure of accountability and good governance by the Federal Government” (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2018, p. 8). The report also offered a criticism that parity is measured only within a deficit space, and government efforts were “…heavily skewed toward the costs of reacting to the outcomes of disadvantage rather than investments to reduce or overcome disadvantage” (ibid, p. 8). The difficulty with the deficit space located in the policies around Closing the Gap is that in measuring only parity, these measures cannot speak to aspiration, and that the markers as equivalence cannot measure excellence and do not accommodate intentional difference (Moore, 2012). While the gap reflects disadvantage and dispossession within the colonial project and an urgency remains to ensure that education, health and social disadvantage are addressed, there are a For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV