An Indigenous Australian cultural wealth mentoring model

Critical scholars are increasingly responding to and rejecting dominant institutionalised mentoring models embedded in private, public, and community mentoring practices, particularly within higher education settings. Our findings align with studies highlighting how dominant mentoring models tend to reinforce the accumulation of White cultural capital and fail to address Indigenous mentees’ unique cultural norms and experiences. From a Critical Race and Community Cultural Wealth standpoint, we found mentoring to be a complex, raced space where mob articulate aspirations to develop meaningful academic and professional careers, rich in cultural wealth and identity. Drawing on Indigenous Australian young mob and their mentors’ yarns about impactful mentoring relationships, we propose an Indigenous Cultural Wealth Mentoring Model which honours Indigenous-led, strength-based, kinship mentoring and nurturance approaches. We intend for the findings and model to hold global significance, informing culturally relevant mentoring practices for First Nations youth and communities within relationally similar colonial contexts, with a focus on its application in higher education and vocational learning institutions.