Public debate on literacy in remote Indigenous Australia emphasises a narrative of failure. The discussion commonly focuses on the low literacy and numeracy benchmarks achieved in remote Indigenous schools. Little attention has been paid to the short history of literacy in isolated Indigenous societies, the shift from oral to literate traditions…

Discusses the conflict between local knowledges and global knowledges in the specific case of indigenous literacy in northwestern Brazil, where global knowledges are represented by the ideological theories of literacy and utilitarian models of writing, and local knowledges are represented by the multimodal texts produced by the Kashinawa…

Describes the O'odham language and oral tradition of the Tohono O'odham Indians of southern Arizona, relating it to the development of O'odham children's English literacy. Oral tradition and school literacy constitute opposite ends of a literacy continuum, in which English literacy is often isolated from and in conflict with O'odham literacy. (10…