Asia, like Australia, is home to many Indigenous peoples whose Indigenous knowledge research contributions remain largely invisible in their own national contexts and broader global discourses.
Global discourses concerning Indigenous peoples in English remain largely engaged with the so-called CANZUS nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, where definitions of what constitutes an Indigenous people can differ widely from those in Asia. Our own research engagements over the past half-decade, however, have been significantly shaped by the rapid and expansive growth of our Asian partnerships into China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Timor-Leste, and Thailand.
Anglophone discourses on Indigenous knowledge with CANZUS countries contribute greatly to understandings of Indigenous knowledge as a global phenomenon. They nonetheless remain predicated on a selective grouping of nations that historically arose through the British Empire and retain many of its institutional frameworks and encumbrances across the university sector and beyond. The relative absence of Asian voices from these discourses, even among nations that were once part of the British Empire, remains an enduring weakness that scholars in Australia and elsewhere can no longer afford to ignore as our world order, national alliances and global economic pressures continue to shift rapidly in novel directions that were inconceivable a mere generation ago.
Most other nations that share Australia’s UTC+8–11 time-zone range are in Asia. Continuing to overlook the domestic contributions of their many Indigenous peoples to the academy, ostensibly due to immediate language barriers, unnecessarily limits the growth of Indigenous knowledge discourses beyond the CANZUS nations into an international field of enquiry that is genuinely inclusive. This is partly why the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded its own First Nations International Fellowships and Partnerships Grants Program for the first time in 2025, mirroring the University of Melbourne’s own rapid expansion of Indigenous partnerships into Asia through its Indigenous Knowledge Institute since 2020. Rarely do Indigenous research and research training schemes support this kind of international partnership-building and collaboration anywhere in the world.
In this article, we focus on Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan and Timor-Leste, drawing on learnings from our research engagements in those nations, to show how deeper Indigenous-to-Indigenous partnerships between Australia and Asia can contribute markedly to understanding Indigenous knowledge as global phenomenon in the broadest sense. In doing so, we also demonstrate how enhancing the agency of Indigenous people in engaging with the academy can greatly strengthen our overall ability to better understand Indigenous knowledge not only as a global field of research, but also as a vital and valid modality of research in its own right.
Definitional dissonances
Beyond immediate language barriers, the greatest general obstacle to Anglophones in engaging with Indigenous knowledge-holders in Asia is that the very term Indigenous, as commonly used English, is largely one of convenience. It holds many disparate connotations in different national contexts around the world. In Australia, for instance, most legislation since 1981 has referred not to Indigenous peoples at all, but rather to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, recognising that Indigenous peoples of the Torres Strait in Far North Queensland are ethnically Melanesian and thus distinct from Aboriginal peoples across the rest of Australia. The term customary in Australian contexts is also often applied to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws that predate British occupation.
Common English usage of the term Indigenous is similarly nuanced in different Asian jurisdictions and legislation, sometimes leading to confusion and misunderstanding. Indigenous peoples have been explicitly recognised in the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of the Philippines since 1997 and the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law of Taiwan since 2005. Japan, however, has only recognised Ainu people to be Indigenous legally since 2019, while Ryūkyūans and other marginalised groups remain entirely unrecognised.
In Hong Kong, ‘Indigenous inhabitants’ are recognised to be people descended through the male line from a person who was a resident of an ‘established village’ in the British New Territories before the 1898 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory. Their special rights were preserved by the People’s Republic of China under the Hong Kong Basic Law of 1997. People whose ancestors lived on boats in 1898, however, remain excluded. Elsewhere in China, the equality of all nationalities or mínzú (民族) is given protection in law. Yet while 55 minority nationalities or shǎoshù mínzú (少数民族are also recognised in China, they are not legally classified as Indigenous peoples.
In Malaysia, Indigenous peoples are recognised collectively as Orang Asal, meaning Original People, via a disparate suite of legal, statutory and constitutional provisions. They are not, however, explicitly called Indigenous peoples. Other Asian countries that refrain from officially using the term Indigenous are: India, which instead recognises Scheduled Tribes or Adivasi (Ancient Inhabitants); Thailand, which only recently passed an Ethnic Protection Act in 2025; and Indonesia, where masyarakat adat (customary communities) are recognised but are not legally defined. Meanwhile, Timor-Leste is effectively an Indigenous nation that gained independence from Indonesia in 1999.
Whether any of these Asian nations might now be Indigenous ones is debatable to some extent. In Asian contexts, any given community’s retention of customary traditions, in contrast to modern homogenisation, can be perceived from within as a key indicator of its potential Indigenous status. The dominant focus of globalised Anglophone discourses on Indigenous peoples in CANZUS nations further obscures the extensive cultural and linguistic ties that Austronesian peoples in Asian nations retain with Indigenous and/or other Austronesian peoples in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Asian nations nonetheless remain home to myriad local peoples who consider themselves to be Indigenous with reference to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, even though this document refrains from defining what specifically constitutes an Indigenous people. Any recognition of an Indigenous people in alignment with this declaration, then, usually starts with self-identification in response to an array of interwoven factors. These include historical continuity with pre‑settler/colonial societies; distinctive linguistic, spiritual and cultural traditions; enduring connections to traditional territories and environmental resource management practices; and national histories of marginalisation, dispossession and/or discrimination within their traditional territories.
Our own engagements with Indigenous partners in Asia have followed this norm with overall success, even though our usage of the term Indigenous, as we apply it in Australia, has been met with constructive debate by some customary communities for whom Indigeneity is a foreign or unclear concept. Despite these definitional dissonances, our discussions of overarching concerns that customary communities in Asia share with Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere have nonetheless been welcomed, fruitful, and worthwhile.
Knowledge exchanges
Our attempts to build new Indigenous-to-Indigenous exchanges between Australia and Asia since 2020 have been overwhelmingly well received by our Asian partners in Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan and Timor-Leste, including some who rarely collaborate with academics, even within their own nations.
Our engagements with Pinuyumayan, Amis, Atayal, Bunun and Tao communities in Taiwan, for example, revealed that they have closely followed and frequently discussed news about Indigenous policy developments in Australia. Indigenous peoples in Taiwan vividly remember the 2008 Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples as a decisive moment in rallying to manifest their own domestic policy aspirations. Through our collaboration with the Puyuma village in Taitung County, Akawyan Pakawyan, an esteemed Pinuyumayan elder and educator, became the first Asian speaker to deliver the prestigious Narrm Oration at the University of Melbourne in 2023. Her oration showcased her formative role in restoring and maintaining Indigenous languages and cultures throughout Taiwan. Pakawyan was first introduced to Corn by Prof. Yuh-Fen Tseng of National Chiayi University, leading to her transformational keynote address at our formative International Council for Traditional Music Indigenous Study Group Symposium in Taiwan in 2020.
Pakawyan was also the first speaker to present a Narrm Oration fully in her own Indigenous language, or any language other than English, supported by simultaneous audio and subtitled translations into English and Chinese. This timely innovation was repeated in subsequent Narrm Orations presented by the Indigenous Knowledge Institute Fellow, Prof. Yalmay Marika-Yunupiŋu, from Australia in 2024 and the Tsotsil educator, Marisol Culej Culej, from Mexico in 2025.
We found that Indigenous policy developments in Australia have also been a topic of immense interest among our partners in Indonesia. Heightened by intense public debate surrounding the 2024 Indonesia general election, discussions of the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum at the University of Melbourne’s 2023 ‘Australia–Indonesia in Conversation’ conference with Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta resulted in overflowing rooms at conference sessions, as well as Corn’s satellite public lecture with the University of Melbourne’s Dean of Arts, Prof. Jennifer Balint, and the esteemed Australian Aboriginal musician, Robbie Bundle.
Our primary engagements with Indonesia, however, were initially led by the Indigenous Knowledge Institute Fellow, Prof. Brian Djaṉgirrawuy Gumbula-Garawirrtja. As a senior Yolŋu ceremonial leader, he held ancestral songs, dances and designs that recounted his people’s long historical ties with shipping fleets from Makassar in southwest Sulawesi and elsewhere in Asia. Having long celebrated his own family’s descent from known Makassan ancestors, his Indigenous Knowledge Institute fellowship enabled Gumbula-Garawirrtja and his wife, Renelle Gandjitjiwuy Goṉḏarra, to visit their relatives in Makassar for the first time in 2023 through a collaborative research project with Universitas Hasanuddin.
Ensuing exchanges in Indonesia with Universitas Negeri Makassar in 2025 revealed the fuller extent to which Makassan, Bugis, Mandar, Sama and Konjo peoples of southwest Sulawesi carried their own distinct traditions with them on their historical trade voyages to north Australia in ways that Yolŋu people still recognise through enduring shared language, dances, and clothing. The Konjo people of the Kajang district in Bulukumba Regency, for instance, who strongly consider themselves to be Indigenous, enthusiastically shared with us a traditional ceremony that warns against the dangers of gambling on cockfighting. That Konjo ceremony thematically and visually matches ceremonial songs, dances and costuming that Yolŋu people still practice today to recount their extensive history with Makassan sailors before trading ceased in 1907 due to steep South Australian Government tariffs.
In Japan, our partnership with the Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity at Hokkaido University drew significantly on Judd’s leadership as the University of Melbourne’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous). His briefing on the Murmuk Djerring Indigenous Strategy 2023–2027 to Hokkaido University’s President, Prof. Kiyohiro Houkin, was met with keen interest as a potential model for Hokkaido University’s own Ainu engagements.
Our formal and informal discussions in Sapporo were also met with keen interest by representatives of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, led by Koji Yuki (結城幸司), who requested opportunities to share insights with Indigenous knowledge-holders in Australia on pressing research topics, including environmental management, community health, and education policy. These research aspirations will now be supported by a major new seven-year international research grant on Indigenous knowledge to the Centre for Ainu and Indigenous Studies at Hokkaido University from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Involving partners from the University of Melbourne in Australia, Lund University in Sweden and the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon, this is the first JSPS grant to be awarded for an Indigenous topic of any kind.
While Timor-Leste is effectively an Indigenous nation, the concept of research into Indigenous knowledge there is relatively new. Through Prof. Lisa Palmer, a co-leader of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute’s Culture, Land and Heritage Research Theme alongside Judd, we met Timor-Leste’s most prolific Indigenous scholar of Timorese society and cultures, Jose (Josh) Trindade. Trindade became the first international student to enrol in the University of Melbourne’s new PhD – Indigenous Knowledge award degree course in 2023. Through Judd’s own familial connection to the traditional owners of Uluṟu, their Culture, Land and Heritage research team convened a workshop in the nearby outstation of Patji in 2023, where Aṉangu elders of the Muṯitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation hosted Trindade and other prominent knowledge-holders from Timor-Leste.
While no known relationship had previously existed between these communities, their immediate sense of connection and shared concerns as Indigenous peoples were palpable. The Culture, Land and Heritage research team has since supported Muṯitjulu elders and our Timorese partners to visit museums and sacred sites together across Timor-Leste in 2024. Under Trindade’s convenorship, Muṯitjulu elders returned to Dili with PhD – Indigenous Knowledge students from the University of Melbourne to present at the Timor-Leste Studies Association’s 2025 world conference in its first ever themed stream on Indigenous knowledges.
Here, it is relevant to note that the PhD – Indigenous Knowledge award degree course, developed by Corn in his prior role as Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute, is the first of its kind in the world. It is currently being undertaken by students with Indigenous roots in Australia, Timor-Leste, and North America. Our engagements with Indigenous partners in Asia have already provided multiple opportunities for Indigenous and other graduate students from across the University of Melbourne and our partner universities in Taiwan, Indonesia and Japan to engage in fresh global discourses on Indigenous knowledge that significantly complement those established among CANZUS nations. These opportunities have greatly accelerated the research training of these students, as well as their perspectives on shared Indigenous research interests internationally, through participation in a wide array of research presentations and publications spanning Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, Timor-Leste, and Australia.
Reflections and lessons
Australia is positioned in a socio-culturally rich and dynamic region of the world that, when understood through the lens of Indigenous knowledge, shares much in common with our Asian neighbours. The Indigenous Knowledge Institute’s approach shows the value of forging new Indigenous-to-Indigenous partnerships between Australia and Asia. They catalyse fresh global discourses on Indigenous knowledge that significantly complement those established among CANZUS nations and enhance international recognition for Indigenous people in Asian nations, whose contributions to Indigenous knowledge research remain largely invisible, even in their own nations.
Forging stronger bonds between Asia and Australia across all spheres of societal engagement remains a pressing and necessary undertaking for all concerned. Indigenous knowledge research partnerships do more than directly benefit Indigenous people. They also weave rich tapestries of interpersonal connectivity and engagement among people of diverse backgrounds from different nations at all levels of involvement. This, in turn, works constantly to promote better understanding of our shared region’s societal complexities, nuanced international ties, and aspirations for continuing peace and prosperity.
The translational and interpretive efforts of continuing to strengthen and expand Indigenous-to-Indigenous partnerships between Australia and Asia may seem hefty, time-consuming, and costly. They may also seem a distraction from the university sector’s ever-present pressure to conform to Anglophone scholarly norms in pursuit of global higher rankings, which vicariously rewards academics for building and sustaining preferred research partnerships with CANZUS and other Anglophone nations.
If this established model continues unaddressed, the voices of Indigenous people across most of the world will continue to be silenced, whether in English or their own increasingly endangered languages. Yet this considerable power imbalance between the academic Anglosphere and most of the world’s Indigenous peoples need not continue unchecked. Indigenous research and research training schemes that support international partnership-building and collaboration, similarly, need not remain a rarity.
The Indigenous Knowledge Institute’s approach shows how we were able to build and maintain a strong core focus on enabling Indigenous-led research within Australia, while simultaneously forging new Indigenous-to-Indigenous partnerships into Asia that now sustainably attract their own collaborative international research funding from universities and peak bodies across nations. This, in turn, has broadened the horizons of Indigenous and other graduate students from across our partner universities. These partnerships benefit all stakeholders in Australia and Asia, as all researchers among us feel the pull of dominant Anglophone academic publishing models to elevate our own bibliometrics and global university rankings.
The experience of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute also shows that enhancing the agency of Indigenous people in their engagements with the academy can greatly strengthen our overall ability to better understand Indigenous knowledge not only as a global field of research, but also as a vital and valid modality of research in its own right. This is reflected in the Indigenous Knowledge Institute’s many collaborative research outputs, which span all kind of media and formats, including conventional academic writing, oratory in Indigenous languages, and momentous ceremonial performances that were presented and recorded to be shared with the world.
These approaches, steeped in the world’s myriad Indigenous knowledge traditions, can hold lessons for us all and offer alternatives to the established orthodoxy of dominant Anglophone academic models. For those of us in Australian and Asia, the best way for us to manifest such alternatives is to work together in new international partnerships that engage with the fullest breath of Indigenous knowledge expertise across our networks and continue to grow Indigenous knowledge research as an international field of enquiry that is genuinely global in its reach and inclusivity.
Image: Makassans traded many items with Yolŋu people and were famed for their textiles. Credit: Prof. Lisa Palmer.
