Indigenous early career researchers: creating pearls in the academy.

This paper provides a snapshot of Indigenous Early Career Researchers in Australia derived from demographic information collected in the first stage of the 'Developing Indigenous Early Career Researchers' project. Analysis of the data to date has evidenced much diversity across this cohort. However, one commonality across all Indigenous Early Career Researchers was a commitment to the value and validity of Indigenous Ways of Knowing in the higher education sector. With the use of Tribal Critical Race Theory this paper explores the ways in which Indigenous Early Career Researchers disrupt Western-based academies and schools of thought and proposes that Indigenous Early Carer Researchers grow 'pearls' of experience and knowledge within the higher education sector that are essential to the development of a richer academy and stronger Indigenous communities.

Raising an Indigenous academic community: a strength-based approach to Indigenous early career mentoring in higher education.

This paper reports on Indigenous early career researchers' experiences of mentoring in Australian higher education, with data drawn from a longitudinal qualitative study. Interviews were conducted with 30 Indigenous participants. A consistent theme in the findings and contemporary critical literature has been a reaction against institutionalised and hierarchical cloning and investment models of mentoring that reinforce the accumulation of White cultural capital, in favour of strength-based relational models tailored to build Indigenous cultural wealth in parallel with career development. We write from an equity-based standpoint addressing mentoring as a complex and raced space where individual Indigenous ECRs articulate a desire and will to develop a successful and meaningful career, rich in cultural wealth and with their identity intact. It is our intent that these findings will also have global significance and support the more sustainable and ethical career development of First Nation early career academics in relationally like colonised contexts.