Worimi/Biripi scholar and doctoral researcher Samara Hand is challenging the way education systems in Australia and Canada shape knowledge, identity, and power. Her research uncovers how schooling has historically been used to erase Indigenous cultures, a practice she defines as educational genocide.
A Childhood of Mismatched Narratives
Growing up in Australia in the late 1990s, Samara was taught a sanitized version of history. “The narrative I learned was that Captain Cook arrived, met Indigenous people, and eventually they all died out from disease and starvation,” she recalls.
But Samara is herself an Indigenous woman from Awabakal Country in New South Wales. The disconnect between what she was taught and the lived experiences of her family sparked questions that would later shape her academic path.
Defining Educational Genocide
Now a visiting doctoral student in the University of Manitoba’s sociology and criminology department, Samara explores how education systems have been used to assimilate Indigenous peoples and dismantle their knowledge systems.
She draws parallels between Australia’s and Canada’s residential school systems, both designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children by severing cultural and familial ties. Survivors’ testimonies document physical, emotional, and psychological abuse , the impact of which continues through generations.
Policy, Law, and the Assimilative Impulse
Samara’s research focuses on education law and policy in both countries, asking whether modern policies still carry assimilative effects, just in more subtle ways.
“There’s effort to include Indigenous content, but it’s often filtered through western frameworks,” she explains. While inclusion sounds like progress, it can unintentionally disembody Indigenous knowledge by forcing it to fit into existing academic structures.
Indigenous Knowledge as Foundation
Rather than tacking Indigenous perspectives onto pre-existing curricula, Samara believes the system should start from Indigenous knowledge itself. “What would a curriculum look like if it was entirely grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing?” she asks.
Her work argues for a fundamental rethinking of education, not just to incorporate Indigenous views, but to center them in building truly inclusive systems. After two years in Canada, Samara has returned to Australia to continue her research and begin teaching at the University of New South Wales. Her mission remains clear: to challenge and reimagine educational systems that have historically excluded and continue to marginalize Indigenous voices.