Our Symposium is back!
Holders of Our Knowledge and Keepers of Our Stories Symposium
Dates: Tue 7 – Wed 8 July 2026
Venue: Pilgrim Uniting Church, Adelaide
Join us in person for an inspiring two days where we celebrate the wisdom and stories that shape our communities. This symposium is all about the sharing and transmission of ancient wisdom, spirit, law, culture and language founded in our cosmology and philosophy. Don’t miss out on deep conversations and meaningful connections!
Meet our Keynote Speakers
Professor Dr Anne Pattel-Gray
Aboriginal Matriarchs: Holders of Knowledge and Keepers of Stories
Over the generations, we have had the privilege of learning from our tribal matriarchs-our great grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers, elders, and senior law women. These Aboriginal Matriarchs taught us our culture, stories, laws, songs, dances, and kinship systems, and instilled in each and every one of us our cultural values and morals, which are the core of our integrity. We shall hear of her story and what she endured.
Rev. Professor Dr. Nasili Vaka’uta
Moana Keepers, Story Carriers: Indigenous Pacific Ways of Holding Knowledge and Life
This paper reflects on Indigenous Pacific/Oceanic understandings of knowledge as relational, embodied, ancestral, and spiritually grounded. Within Pacific worlds, knowledge is not treated as an abstract possession or individual achievement, but as a sacred trust held in genealogy, land, sea, language, ritual, memory, and community. Stories are among the primary means by which this knowledge is carried. They transmit identity, preserve ancestral wisdom, shape moral imagination, and sustain right relationships between people, creation, and the divine. In this sense, stories are not merely cultural artefacts but living theological texts through which communities discern meaning, responsibility, and hope.
From an Indigenous Pacific theological perspective, to be keepers of knowledge and holders of stories is to participate in the ongoing work of remembering, interpreting, and renewing life. Storytelling becomes a mode of theological reflection through which Pacific communities negotiate belonging, resist colonial erasure, and affirm the presence of God within their histories, struggles, and aspirations. In contexts marked by displacement, ecological precarity, and continuing colonial pressures, Indigenous stories remain vital sites of resilience, critique, and transformation.
This presentation argues that Pacific epistemologies and storytelling practices offer more than local cultural insight; they provide a profound theological resource for rethinking knowledge, community, and flourishing in Oceania and beyond. To attend to Pacific stories is therefore to attend to the ways Indigenous peoples hold together memory, faith, land, and future as an interconnected sacred whole.
Rev Canon Dr Garry Deverell
Theological Conversation on Country
There are few more life-affirming practises than theological conversation, which this brief presentation will define as a careful listening, speaking and responsibility towards communion in God on Aboriginal country. Carefulness means that the partners to the conversation, Indigenous people and settlers, whilst deeply respectful of each other’s particularity and alterity nevertheless strive towards finding common ground. Listening requires that we still our internal scripts and filters to make room for those who suffer the most, for the cry of the earth and of Indigenous people, who, in Australia are analogous to the suffering Christ. Speaking means speaking the truth in love. For Aboriginal people, this calls us to find courage to speak our truth even when it is dangerous to do so. Settlers, for their part, are called to consider whether their words are always already embedded in supremacist narratives which place themselves and their power at the centre. Here speaking might take the form of lament and repentance. It might also take the form of a commitment to never again speak or write except in dialogue with country and its people. Responsibility towards communion with God means that theologians, whether settler or Indigenous, assume from the beginning that we are embedded in reciprocal, vowed, and covenantal relationships with each other, with country, and with God. These relationships call us to be accountable for the way we live and the way we write, to be accountable to each other, but ultimately to the life of the divine which flows through country and Christ, both.
Naomi Wolfe
Because Country is Method: Reframing Christology, Axiology, and Hermeneutics in Decolonising Theological Education in Australia.
This paper outlines a decolonising framework for theological education that recentres Indigenous knowledges and reconfigures the grounds of theological method. It argues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander epistemologies are not extra to Christian theology but constitute rigorous, generative knowledge systems that both complement and critically interrogate and deconstruct dominant Eurocentric paradigms. Moving beyond deficit-based constructions, this paper foregrounds Country as a primary locus of theological meaning articulated as Christological, axiological, and hermeneutical.
As Christology, Country discloses a relational and embodied understanding of divine presence, disrupting abstracted and dislocated accounts of Christ which EuroChristianity claims as orthodoxy. As axiology, it reorders value through kinship, reciprocity, and responsibility, challenging extractive forms and individualised ethical frameworks. As hermeneutic, Country offers interpretive practices that are grounded in story, place, and continuity, reshaping how biblical texts are read, taught, and lived.
This paper suggests that such a reorientation necessitates more than pedagogical inclusion; it requires structural dismantling and transformation within theological institutions, including curriculum design, authority structures, and modes of assessment. By centring Indigenous knowledge systems as both complementary and contestational, theological education can move toward a more accountable, plural, and contextually grounded praxis. This work positions decolonisation not as an optional extra, but as essential to the integrity and future of theological scholarship and formation in Australia.
Assoc. Prof Fanang Lum Lahpai
Creation Stories in Dialogue: Engaging Biblical and Local Ancestral Narratives on Gender Identity and Suffering in the Myanmar Ethnic Christian Context
This presentation brings biblical and indigenous creation narratives into conversation as they are lived and understood among Myanmar’s ethnic Christians. Focusing on the Kachin people, it engages creation narratives from Genesis, Wisdom, Psalms, and Isaiah alongside ancestral accounts, recognizing that interpretation is never neutral. By reappropriating and reinterpreting these accounts, this study invites ethnic Christians to reconsider how foundational narratives shape understandings of gender, suffering, and justice in their own communities. Comparative and close reading methods are employed to highlight both common ground and difference, aiming to foster dialogue that is attentive to context and complexity. Ultimately, this presentation seeks not only to broaden theological understanding but to encourage a more liberative and inclusive vision of Christian identity, one that is responsive to the realities of suffering, the call for gender equality, and the wisdom embedded in both biblical and ancestral traditions.
Dr Chang-Hua Lin
On God’s Name: a Historical Analysis on How Taiwan Indigenous People Naming God
How tribal people naming God is a significant theological issue. During 400 years of Taiwan church history showed two paradigms of naming God. The first one is used western term to denote God, for example Deus or Alid, the second paradigm is used tribal highest deity’s name to denote Christian God, both endeavours implies crucial theological implications. My keynote will focus on this historical phenomena to analysis these two paradigms’ advantage or challenge and its hint on tribal theology.
Professor Hukato N Shohe
Küthsükime- An Indigenous Methodological Starting Point
One of the characteristics of the Sumi life is the notion of relationship between God, creation and humanity on one hand and the idea that our understanding of things around us is based on the relationship we share with the world around us. Keeping this in mind, this work explores the idea of Kuthsukime, a Sumi dialect, which has similarity with the English concept of Relationality.
While the term Relationality of the English usage would make this exploration, it is also important why the term Kuthsukime is indispensable and the term Relationality inadequate in discussing the Sumi understanding of God and the world around us. Firstly, Relationality as a philosophical and theological term carries the abstract idea of the relationality of the universe with the concept being the starting point. Whilst the notion of Kuthsukime always is grounded on the concrete living context out of which our understanding of the world emerges.
Secondly, Kuthsukime is a compound word Küthsü- meaning related and Kime meaning joined, a relationship that implies joinedness and relatedness. Hence, a relation that is not only related but joined- we as a part and parcel of this world are not only related by our beliefs and history but that we are somehow joined to the fate of this world.
The intentional use of the Sumi term Küthsükime also has political reason. The notion that only the western terms and ideas has long invariable oppressed and ignored (consciously or unconsciously) the smaller and weaker people groups- their ideas and languages as primitive and bereft of depth. Here, the usage of the Sumi term brings to the fore that shortcomings are not limited to any language group but is inherent in every language as languages are but tools the emerges out of the socio-cultural setting of each people group, and different languages can supplant one another in enlarging ideas and expounding knowledge. I am aware of limitations of Küthsükime and would certainly not claim it as the best or the most appropriate term, but hold on to the idea that it is the best and the most appropriate term to convey the ideas and meanings of the Sumi people.
Hence, this work intentionally uses the Sumi term Küthsükime to explore the Sumi understanding and idea- as theological tool for understanding, expounding, engaging and interacting with friends and fellow indigenous – ideas and insights.