“We are born mentors … It’s in our DNA”: exploring Indigenous Australian kinship mentoring practices

Through an Indigenist research theoretical lens, this paper explores Indigenous Australian mentee and mentor epistemological and ontological accounts of kinship mentoring. In this article, kinship mentoring refers to the culturally mediated experiential, custodial, and communitarian-based mentoring that participants describe as innate to Indigenous ways of being, knowing, doing, and nurturing kin. While participants explain how kinship mentoring practices have been culturally ingrained in Indigenous communities for generations, our review of scholarship shows that this approach to mentorship is relatively absent from broader mentoring literature. By centring Indigenous scholarship focussed on mob experiences in mentorship, nurturance, and participant insights, this paper explores the intentional nature of Indigenous approaches to kinship mentoring, wherein lessons and knowledge are deliberately imparted through experientially honed internal schemas. This study recognises that kinship mentoring approaches are vital to Indigenous Australian cultural continuity and aspirational achievement and provides recommendations for preserving and perpetuating sovereign mentoring practices.