 Hi, I'm Kate Senior and I'm the co-director of the Purae Global Indigenous History Centre. And today I'm talking to James Ballangari and James is going to talk about yarning. And we're going to start with just the basics about yarning. What is a yarn? So a yarn essentially is collaborative dialogue. You know, it's having two people who are connecting on something, sharing on something, and then being able to convert that toward the direction where you can make sense and understanding of a certain topic. Yarning, it's quite different to other types of data collection. I was going to ask you, how is that different from an interview? Yeah, so an interview typically, you know, there's a list of questions and the interviewer is quite passive. They'll ask the questions and then receive the information. With a yarn, there is no title of an interviewer. You know, they're just as part of the yarn as the participant is. You know, it's collaboration and it's not a verbatim question. You have to cater the question to the people involved in the yarn. You have to be a lot more accessible in your wording. So you might not use formal wording. You might use what we call layman's terms or everyday speak and terminology. And it's one of those things where the person facilitating has to first share a part of themselves, which allows the space and the potential for the participants to share a part of themselves. Yeah, and is it that aspect? I think there must be more aspects, but it's more than a conversation too, isn't it? Yeah, it's more than a conversation. A conversation kind of has a much clearer purpose and direction. Your yarn can go anywhere and that's why to facilitate a yarn, it's definitely an art form. Yeah. So what are the key skills of a facilitator of a yarn? What skills do you need to have? I think you have to be able to be personable. You have to be able to socialise and be vulnerable and be open to that. Yeah, so a lot of people would be quite nervous about being vulnerable, like putting themselves into that sort of position. It's really tricky. Honestly, it's really tricky. We're so used to putting on that professional hat and the very kind of formal ways that we speak and we conduct ourselves, but when we actually do that in a yarn, it has the opposite effect. It gets you further away from the outcomes that you're hoping to achieve. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I suppose listening is a key skill of a facilitator too. Yeah, definitely. I mean, and it's active listening and it's making sense and understanding of what's going on. So you get different forms of communication. It's about understanding the cultural nuances of indigenous people who are part of the yarn. And that takes a long time. And what you find when people are first learning how to yarn, especially in the research space, is they will hear something and they'll have a direct assumption of what it is, but they might be pretty far off because it's all around context. It's all around those cultural nuances and understandings. Yeah, and often people do forget to listen when they're doing this sort of interaction. They're so focused on getting the information, they're forgetting to listen. So that's a really important skill. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is with the yarn, it doesn't fit the Western structures of time. You know, a lot of Western structures of time is by the clock, by the minute, by the hour, by the second. And to do a yarn properly, you have to go what we call, you know, we call curry time here in New South Wales, Victoria, some people call it Murray time. It's actually a lot more similar to other cultures, like I've been to Hawaii and native Hawaiians called Hawaiian time. We used to have Northern Territory time. Yeah, I've met a few friends from Africa, they call it African time. Yeah. You know, it's the understanding that things happen when they happen and when they happen when they're supposed to happen. Yeah. And we're not bound by the hands of the clock. Yeah, yeah. And it takes a lot of getting used to for people who are not used to that. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I suggest to anybody, if you're making time for a yarn, whatever time you've set aside that you think you would normally take to do it, almost double it. Yeah, yeah. Because you have to have a period beforehand to get to know each other and to connect on different things. Yeah, that's really important. And that's a sort of really good lead into what I was going to ask you about next, which was, you know, how do you set up a yarn? What do you need to think about when you're establishing this? It's really difficult because, again, it's the taking of that professional hat off. It's about connection. It's not about connection on the professional level. It's not about knowing somebody has an acquaintance. It's a lot of connecting on a personal level, connecting on a social level and truly understanding who the person is that you're yawning with. But also making sure that the first thing you do is show them who you are. So they truly understand your intentions and your intentions are pure. Your intentions are authentic. And that there is a relationship already established before you even approach them to yarn. Yeah, so a lot of the work is in the initiation stages rather than the yarn itself. Exactly, exactly. The yarn is essentially, I wouldn't like to say the spiritual peak because it's a continuation of a journey and a relationship that kind of never ends. If your relationship with the participants end after the yarn, then it was never authentic in the first place. Yeah, good to know. And what do you do with the information from a yawning session? What's the, how do you analyze it? So it sounds quite complex. It is quite complex, especially when indigenizing research practices is quite new. So it's actually an exploratory process at the moment, and it's being led by a lot of great indigenous researchers. Even then, we have the challenge of how do we create the space within the system to take off our professional heart and put on our community heart and then be able to bring who we are and who we've grown up to become in community. How do we bring that into the research space? One thing that I've found is that you can't assume, you can't assume the findings and the outcomes prior to the analyzing. And you have to find a way that when you're looking at say transcripts, that the transcripts aren't just words on a paper. They carry the essence and they carry the energy of the yarn at the time. So if you find yourself very sluggish and like, oh, paperwork, then you're probably not in the right state to analyze these transcripts effectively to get the essence and the true understanding of what the participants are saying. Any of you looking to draw out all the voices in that process? Well, it depends on what you're trying to achieve and your ethics processes, because some topics and some voices are very sensitive and some things should not be shared and some things should be kept in the confidentiality of the project. But also, when you speak about indigenous knowledges, in a lot of senses, indigenous knowledges are sacred. And they're not supposed to be shared with everybody. That's another set of skills for facilitator is to keep that yarn sort of contained, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. And make sure that what is shared is appropriate to be shared. Yeah, and it's a real challenge because a lot of times in western understands of knowledge, it's knowledge is for everybody, knowledge is to be shared. Whereas with indigenous understates of knowledge, as I said, knowledge is sacred. And you have certain knowledge holders, knowledge keepers who have the right to share knowledge if they choose to. And at the right time. At the right time. But also to say to somebody, this is for you and you cannot share this. So it's about respecting those understandings of knowledges and that if you're using young methodology and if you're intentionally pure and authentic, that regardless of whether you think the outcome is going to be better, the rights, the understandings, the knowledges and the sacred philosophies of the aboriginal people come first. Yeah, great. And just a final question. Is it possible for non-indigenous people to be involved in yarning? I believe so. It takes a lot of time. As I said, it's cultural understanding of nuances. And can non-indigenous people learn through that process as well? Do you think it could be a learning tool? Yeah, honestly, it can be in the past. I didn't believe so until a friend of mine was speaking about the use of indigenous teaching methods by non-indigenous people. And I realized that it's a process and we have to allow that process to happen. But we have to do this best we can to mitigate any negative effects that we may be unaware of. I mean, we are very much still in the start of indigenizing research practices. So non-indigenous colleagues have a lot of growth and a lot of learning and they have to come along to that journey with us. And it's quite difficult and it's not going to be smooth. And it's going to be bumpy and there's going to be ups and downs and rough patches and some mistakes are going to be made. But that's how we get better. We can't jump from the start to the finish line. And we have to make sure that this journey and this process is led by indigenous researchers. Yeah, absolutely. And it's guided by indigenous researchers and that's indigenous researchers who are deeply embedded in their community, their culture and their understanding of what it is to be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Fantastic. Thank you so much, James. That sounds like the beginning of an amazing story in a sense. This yarn that just keeps on going on and will inform research practice here at the university but everywhere. Thank you. You're welcome.