Challenges and responses to UNDRIP in Australian and Japanese Indigenous education

Following on from Chapter 2, in this chapter, we examine the time since Australia and Japan have endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The UNDRIP represented a circuit break in the imperial and colonial narratives in both nations, asserting the rights of Indigenous Peoples to educate their children according to their own needs and aspirations rather than education being imposed on them from imperial and colonising powers into the future. This has meant that education systems in pluricultural, postcolonial democracies worldwide are grappling with the incommensurability of the UNDRIP with the imperial and colonial legacies embedded within education systems. This chapter examines the impact of UNDRIP on these imperial and colonial approaches to the education for Indigenous children in Australia and Japan in terms of policy, pedagogical and curriculum changes that affect formal schooling and teacher education in both countries.