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This chapter explores economic development and entrepreneurship among Aboriginal¹ people in Canada as a particular instance of Indigenous entrepreneurship and development activity worldwide. In turn, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and the economic development that flows from it, can be considered a particular sub-set of ethnic entrepreneurship. What makes Indigenous entrepreneurship a particular and distinct instance of ethic entrepreneurship is the strong tie between the process and place – the historic lands of the particular Indigenous group involved. With Aboriginal populations there is also often a strong component of “nation-building,” or more correctly re-building. This is in contrast with instances of entrepreneurship associated with ethnic groups that have migrated to new places and are pursuing economic opportunities there in ways that distinguish them from the non-ethnic population.

In partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA), the strengths-based National Empowerment Project (NEP) brought together researchers from across Australia and began to address issues surrounding Aboriginal wellbeing and, in particular, the high rates of Aboriginal deaths by suicide. The NEP utilised participatory action research (PAR) and was concerned with promoting positive cultural, social, and emotional wellbeing (CSEWB) and building capacity and resilience within Aboriginal communities. Throughout the NEP, consultations with 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities led to the development of a CSEWB program. The program seeks to increase self-determination and empowerment, developing participants’ awareness of a variety of issues relevant to wellbeing. This enables participants to gain a greater understanding of the holistic nature of CSEWB and the complex influences on Aboriginal wellbeing at individual, family, and community levels. This chapter is concerned with the development and delivery of the CSEWB program within three community sites in Perth, Western Australia. Shared philosophical approaches of the CSEWB program, between UWA and Aboriginal communities were human rights and social justice, community ownership, community capacity building, a strong focus on resilience, empowerment and partnerships, respect for local knowledge, and the delivery of community consultations. Investigation into the impacts of the program are based in an anti-colonial space, employing Indigenous Standpoint Theory and PAR approaches. This chapter demonstrates the success of the CSEWB program, links this success to the vital importance of Indigenous research ethics, and positions the research within an empowering and capacity-building context.

There is a long history of school failure for Aboriginals¹ in the U.S. educational system. Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy affords opportunities for Aboriginal students to achieve academic success through building upon their cultural heritages and Native ways of knowing. School systems adopting this pedagogy empower Indigenous students to connect with essential knowledge for academic success in today’s world. This enhanced pedagogy creates classrooms of involvement that promote Aboriginal students’ achievement. Preservice teachers employing this pedagogy will experience success with their Indigenous students and learn about Aboriginal communities, lifeways, and values. Mutual respect is engendered as long-perpetuated negative stereotypes of Native Americans are undone. Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy can be tailored to specific populations by incorporating their own Aboriginal knowledge, languages, and practices into teaching praxis.

This chapter explores inclusive approaches to reading instruction for Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children. Drawing from the literature on effective reading instruction, culturally appropriate instructional practices, and the authors’ research on reading interventions in remote communities in Australia we assert that to be inclusive you must provide a learning environment that supports all students to learn. Further, that the approaches used in this learning environment should be evidence-based.

Aboriginal students experience disproportionate academic disadvantage at school. It may be that a capacity to effectively deal with academic setback and challenge (academic buoyancy) can reduce the incidence of academic adversity. To the extent that this is the case, academic buoyancy may also be associated with positive educational intentions. This study explores the role of academic buoyancy in Aboriginal students’ post-school educational intentions.

The survey-based study comprises Aboriginal (N = 350) and non-Aboriginal (N = 592) high school students in Australia.

Academic buoyancy yielded larger effect sizes for Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal students’ educational intentions – particularly in senior high school when educational intentions are most likely to translate into post-school educational behaviour.

Post-school education is one pathway providing access to social opportunity. Any thorough consideration of students’ passage into and through post-school education must first consider the bases of students’ academic plans and, by implication, their decision to pursue further study. Identifying factors such as academic buoyancy in this process provides some specific direction for practice and policy aimed at optimizing Aboriginal students’ academic and non-academic development.

Academic buoyancy is a recently proposed construct in the psycho-educational literature and has not been investigated among Aboriginal student populations. Its role in relation to post-school educational intentions is also a novel empirical contribution for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students alike.

In this chapter we examine cross-cultural mentorship within Alberta’s Future Leaders (AFL) program, an initiative in which mainly non-Aboriginal youth workers and arts mentors mentor Aboriginal youth in Aboriginal communities in Alberta through the use of sport, recreation, and arts for development.

We use an exploratory case study methodology in concert with semi-structured interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and archival research. We use Foucauldian discourse analysis to analyze our results.

We identified two dominant discourses that shape AFL: first, mentorship can help Aboriginal youth to avoid negative life trajectories and, second, youth leadership development is universal. We argue that sport, recreation, and arts for youth development that does not prioritize cultural relevancy and does not attend to issues pertaining to colonialism’s legacy risks, in a Foucauldian sense, disciplining Aboriginal youths in ways that reaffirm colonial relations of power between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

This chapter focuses on sport, recreation, and arts for youth development within a marginalized segment of the Canadian population: Aboriginal youth.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

Generally, theory and research investigating the effectiveness of mentoring has offered little resounding evidence to attest to mentoring programmes being a strategic initiative that make a real difference in reducing the educational inequities many minority students endure. In contrast to this existing research base, the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has often been cited as one of the most successful mentoring initiatives within Australia. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine how AIME may impact on the educational aspirations and school self-concept of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

A series of multi-group analyses were centred around Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling techniques that sought not only to explore the psychometric validity of the measures utilized within this study, but also to identify how the measures may be related after accounting for background variables (e.g. gender, parental education).

The results found that the measures utilized held strong psychometric properties allowing an increased level of confidence in the measures used and the conclusion that may be drawn from their use in analyses. Overall, the results suggested that AIME is an effective tool for increasing not only the educational aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students but also their levels (and utility) of School Self-concept and School Enjoyment.

The implications suggest that not only is AIME an essential tool for closing the educational gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Aboriginal students, but also our understanding of mentoring must be extended well beyond simplistic notions of role-modelling.

This chapter explores the approaches to digital representation of Australian Aboriginal art and visitor engagement in museum exhibition spaces from a digital design perspective. It discusses recent developments in the fields of digital representation of Aboriginal art, immersive exhibition design and visitor engagement. Through a case study of an immersive exhibition on Australian Aboriginal art in the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, this chapter identifies how Aboriginal art can be digitally represented by appropriate immersive technologies ranging from augmented realities [ARs] and virtual realities [VRs] to mixed reality [MRs] and extended reality [XRs] for enhancing visitors’ immersive digital experience. According to the analysis, the digital representation of Aboriginal artworks needs to be conducted practically, cognitively and ontologically based on understanding Australian Aboriginal history and culture. Visitors can engage with Aboriginal art stories meaningfully through immersive exhibitions through this holistic approach.