Waya Yindyamarra: A Wiradjuri Songspiral Methodology for Indigenous Poetic Inquiry

Abstract

The decolonisation and Indigenisation of research continue to shape global methodological conversations. In Australian contexts, Wiradjuri-led methodologies are emerging as relational, Country-based approaches that honour responsibilities to kin, Ancestors, and place. This article introduces Waya Yindyamarra, a Wiradjuri songspiral methodology developed through poetic inquiry, visual storying, and digital yarning with Aboriginal boarding school graduates. Rooted in yindyamarra (to act with respect, care, and responsibility) this methodology ties together Indigenous methods such as photoyarn, found poetry, and dialogical exchange to centre Indigenous voice and uphold story sovereignty. Three key methodological contributions are proposed. First, the method affirms poetic and visual forms as legitimate modes of Indigenous knowledge-making, reflecting the everyday storytelling practices of Aboriginal youth. Second, it reimagines the research process as a songspiral, drawing on Gay’wu Group of Women’s theory to emphasise cyclical, layered, and embodied knowledge through kin and Country. Third, Waya Yindyamarra offers a culturally determined research framework that supports researcher reflexivity, intergenerational honouring, and methodological sovereignty. Developed through an ARC-funded study on the outcomes of Indigenous boarding school graduates, the methodology contributes to Indigenous qualitative scholarship by demonstrating how Wiradjuri ways of knowing, being, and doing guide research with rigour, accountability, and creative relationality. I share this publication, to add to the literature regarding new and emerging Indigenous Australian methodologies that move expand yarning practices, and to present Waya Yindyamarra methodology in action.

Indigenous Poetic Inquiry: Global and Local Development

Indigenous peoples globally are increasingly drawing on the power of poems and poetic inquiry within research with Indigenous participants, as a way to share stories and work in ways that uphold Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing including song, poetic prose, storytelling and art. One Indigenous poetic inquiry method that informed aspects of the methodology in this paper is outlined in Growing Stronger Together: Exploring Indigenous Caregivers’ Lived Experiences Through Poetic Inquiry (Holder et al., 2024). Drawing on diverse poetic forms including data poems, found poems, interpretive poetry, and research experience poems, their interdisciplinary team of five women: three identifying as Native American (two also as Mexican American), one Asian, and one white, began with a thematic analysis of 53 pages of deidentified interview transcripts. Through collaborative digital whiteboard discussions and iterative editing, the team developed a series of poems in a round-robin style. Informed by Glesne’s (1997) work on data poems and Davis’ (2023) process for poetic data analysis, the researchers constructed the poems using verbatim lines from participant interviews, a practice they felt best conveyed the impact of the program through the participants’ own voices (Davis, 2023). They write:

Poetic inquiry can help program developers, funders, policymakers, and communities to better understand the unique experiences of Indigenous families… Applying relationality as a framework to guide poetic inquiry allowed the researchers to authentically present the caregivers’ experience through poems. The poems were a meaningful way to allow the reader to engage with the caregivers’ lived experiences and the historical forces that have implications on their lives today, such as the U.S. government’s forced removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools that broke down traditionally prescribed parenting and familial roles (p. 9).

Notably, Holder et al. (2024) reflect that because poetic inquiry was not part of their original research design, they did not share the poems with participants for feedback. They suggest that future researchers using poetic inquiry should adopt the method intentionally from the outset of a study, allowing for participant involvement in the poetic process to enhance clarity and shared meaning (p. 10). This directly impacted the inclusion of sharing the author-poems back with participants in Waya Yindyamarra.

As an Aboriginal researcher I build upon and continue to be informed by work shared with me by other Indigenous boarding school scholars, and, fellow poetic inquiry scholars from in the Australian context. Cooms and Saunders (2024) and I worked on a project using Aboriginal methods of yarning and photoyarn (Rogers et al., 2023) and during this project, shared yarns over a meal about poetic inquiry with Indigenous boarding school students, as well as more broadly in Indigenous research. We reminisced on Saunders early Indigenous poetic inquiry work (Saunders et al., 2016) best described by their phrase Niya Noogalla Nulla, intentionally used to honour Ancestors, Country, and the reader, establishing a relational space within the text. Saunders et al. (2016) describe their poetic method, grounded in poetic inquiry, Aboriginal storytelling, yarning and storywork, as “I see You” which at once recognises the interaction between the reader/audience, and the co-authors, who shape the poem/story. Saunders and I yarned about Indigenous poetic inquiry development in Australia, including the work of Fredericks et al. (2017) (and the collaborative development of poems written and performed by Indigenous researchers in the Health Node of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN)) and our own research using poetic inquiry methods (Rogers, 2016; Rogers & Sisquoc, 2020) including found poetry, data poetry and vox participare, as well as First Nation’s women’s perspectives on the role of poetic inquiry in decolonising research (Cooms & Saunders, 2024). I found the following poem, described as arising “from a yarn about why we, as First Nations peoples in Australia, bother to write poetry in the academy” (Cooms & Saunders, 2024, p. 15) illuminating, in my creation of Waya Yindyamarra:

… But why are we here?

In the space that hates poetry,

In the space that shudders at different?

This is the path,

Laid by our mothers and fathers,

For our children’s children

To disrupt what is known,

To agitate the status quo

To create space

...a new normal...

somewhere in between (p. 15-16).

Poetry is well-documented in its ability within arts-based research, to work across many ways of knowing/being/doing through creating, embodiment, feelings, intuition and even spirit, making it highly complementary to Indigenous research. At the core of arts-based research is the concept of relationality, the process of being together, and collective understanding and meaning-making between two or more individuals (Conrad & Beck, 2015). It was these previous experiences, yarns, learnings and readings that led me to consider poetic inquiry, and a new way of working with poetry, for my current research project, looking at the outcomes of Indigenous boarding school graduates in Australia.

Waya Yindyamarra Methodology

Reflection by the Author

As a Wiradjuri researcher, I am guided by yindyamarra: to move with respect, care, and slowness. But yindyamarra also teaches responsiveness: to adapt our methods to the ways young people share story today. What if we listened not just through words, but through movement, image, silences, spaces, and rhythm? What if the research was envisaged as a spiral, gathering meaning as it moved through time, memory, and method? Table 1.

Table 1.

Waya Yindyamarra Methodology

Dhaganhu ngurambang Stand in right relationship to Country	Research begins by situating oneself in relation to ngurambang (country), not as backdrop or object of study, but as a living, breathing co-participant. We must ask, “where is your country?” one must locate themselves through kinship with place, as either belonging to or respectfully hosted by country. This positioning affirms country as epistemological, ontological, and axiological, holding knowledge, being, and ethics within its landscapes, waterways, winds, and sentient life. Research grounded in aboriginal ways of knowing is embedded in songlines, law/lore, memory, language, and cultural protocol. Responsibility to elders, ancestors, and future generations is upheld through the ethic of yindyamarra, a practice of deep respect, gentle walking, and careful holding of story and knowledge throughout the research journey - Begin by identifying and sharing your relationship to country, whether as first peoples or as a respectful guest - Ground the research in cultural protocols, songlines, language, and the responsibilities to elders and ancestors - Commit to walking with yindyamarra: With deep respect, carefulness, and responsibility to place and community
Wudhabarbidyabu gulbalaabu Listen and hear	Central to indigenous research is the sustained practice of winhangarra- a wiradjuri term for deep, patient listening. Listening is not merely auditory; it is relational and spiritual. It requires time without demand, presence without imposition, and trust that is earned through reciprocity and consistency. Relationships with community, elders, and cultural custodians are not transactional. They are sacred, living relationalities that precede, infuse, and outlast the research process. One must be prepared to return, to sit again, to listen anew: knowing that permission to ask comes through demonstrated care and cultural accountability - Practise winhangarra (deep listening) with patience, presence, and without rushing to extract knowledge - Spend time building trust with community, elders, and cultural mentors before asking questions - Listen beyond words—through gesture, silence, country, and relational cues over time
Dharra-waluny Bring research stories “inside” yourself	Indigenous research is not abstracted from life; it lives within it. Knowledge is held in the body, moved through practice, and activated through ceremony. We learn through weaving, walking, dancing, singing, and through the everyday rhythms of being on and with country. Research is a lived experience: Enacted through our senses, our spirits, and our collective movements across seasons. It is taught by elders, learned in community, and remembered in bone and breath. We must “swallow” stories, not in a way of keeping or making them die, but to keep them safe, in the was a house takes in and keeps its occupants - Learn by doing: Engage in embodied practices such as weaving, dancing, yarning, singing, collage, painting to bring research stories inside the body - Allow stories and knowledges to be known within the body: feel and think about them emotionally, physically, spiritually - Create in shared spaces of research including ceremony and community gatherings
Balumbambal winhangadurinya Ancestral ways	Analysis within indigenous methodologies does not extract or dissect. It listens, it weaves. We come to understand through storying: a Methodology rooted in oral traditions, ancestral truths, and lived narrative. Songlines, poetic forms, and visual languages such as art, carving, or gesture are not creative outputs alone, they are analytical frames. They carry encoded knowledges across generations, guiding us in making meaning through country, kinship, and spirit. Let story, songs or poems be both method and outcome. Let analysis be accountable to those who gifted you stories - Draw on research methods that align with aboriginal ancestral knowledge systems: Storying, art, and land-based teachings - Use indigenous forms: Oral narrative, poetry, symbol, movement, as valid and rigorous analytical tools - Follow elders guidance and interpret experiences through a cultural lens that is always shaped by country and community
Gari yala dhuluyarra Speak the truth	Sharing must honour the truth of the stories that have been shared. Truth must be spoken in ways that reflect cultural integrity, whether through poetry, visual storytelling, movement, or digital forms that carry echoes of ancestral practices - Share findings using culturally appropriate forms: Including when using digital mediums - Honour the voices and truths of participants without reshaping them to fit western academic frames - Use storytelling to communicate lived experiences with integrity, clarity, and respect for cultural meaning
Duguwaybuwawanha Return and give back	Research participants are not data sources; they are knowledge holders. Their voices must be returned with clarity, care, and consent. The return of knowledge is not a final act, it is a continuation of relational obligation. Research must find form in gifts: Artworks, booklets, recordings, or community gatherings that ensure usefulness, accessibility, and respectful return to the people and places who shaped the work - Return knowledge to the community in accessible forms: Booklets, yarns, audio, art, or cultural tools - Ensure research outcomes is useful and meaningful to those who shared their stories and time and their families and broader communities - Acknowledge community contributions and maintain relationships beyond the completion of the project
Guyabanha ngiyaginya Rest and renew	As country burns and regrows, so too do we. Indigenous research honours cycles of emergence, resistance, stillness, and renewal. Rupture, exhaustion, and uncertainty are not failures; they are part of the process Radical rest is a cultural practice, necessary for reflection, restoration, and the dreaming of new knowledge. Within this space of stillness, we hold open the possibility for future questions, for emerging scholars, and for the next shoots of understanding to rise, rooted in country, carried forward by community - Build rest, reflection, and retreat into the research process, recognising its emotional and spiritual aspects that take time to process - Accept periods of stillness, disruption, or exhaustion as part of the natural research cycle - Create time and space for dreaming, regeneration, and imagining future questions or directions

Thus emerged Waya Yindyamarra, a methodology that in my current research project, ties together yarning, poetry and visual dialogue. It builds on earlier methods including photoyarn (Rogers, 2016) but expands to include the visual modes such as collage, to reflect the visual ways Aboriginal youth and young adults communicate. The basis of Waya Yindyamarra is Participant-voiced poems, also referred to as vox participare (using direct quotes from participants, re-presented by the researcher, sometimes called found poetry, where poems are composed solely from primary research data such as interviews and conversations, crafted into poetic forms by the researcher/s (van Luyn et al., 2016). Waya Yindyamarra, as a hybrid of Western poetic research methods, Waya Yindyamarra is best described as emerging from a Wiradjuri tradition of layered, cyclical storying. Knowledge is held in Country, kin, and memory. Our stories do not move in lines; they spiral. And so, too, must our methodologies. As such, the method draws on direct quotes and researcher re-presentations of this data in poetic form, but the ways in which this process is directed, are grounded in Wiradjuri values, axiology, epistemology and ontology.

Understandings Gained Through the Process

Expanding Storying Through Contemporary Practice

While yarning remains foundational, many Aboriginal youth today communicate through digital and visual means. Photos, mobile apps, and poetic fragments formed part of how participants expressed identity, memory, and emotion. These were not incidental but central to their storytelling. Waya Yindyamarra validates these forms and calls for their inclusion in Indigenous research. The use of collage, to include many images, overlaid by words, including Indigenous found poetry, images, and objects, allowed for multilayered, spiralling understandings that draw out the participant-based poetry that re-presents raw participant data. The collage stands alone as well as alongside the poems, to give the viewer multiple ways of understanding the yarns shared, and the meanings drawn from the research relationship and process.

A Place-Based Epistemology for the Digital Age

Even through screens, Country was present. Participants spoke of home through landscape images, remembered fences, red dust, and distant kitchens. The method honours this by drawing on songspiral theory to acknowledge place as layered, returned to, and composed through metaphor, memory, and breath. While screens have moving image, the use of collage is incorporated to make it moveable, printable, shareable and while a “moment in time”, allows greater visual conversation to occur than words alone. This is a reflection of Country: it is not only seen, it is heard, and felt.

Methodology as Sovereignty, Identity, and Resistance

The use of poetry alongside visual composition centres Indigenous authorship and interpretation. This process affirms cultural sovereignty and offers a relational, rigorous, and culturally grounded alternative to conventional analysis. The method upholds the right of Indigenous peoples to define research on their own terms. While the researcher created the visual representation of the outcomes/major themes in this research, it could be created by the participants themselves in future research.

Waya Yindyamarra contributes to Indigenous methodological scholarship by offering a research approach that is ethically grounded, culturally responsive, and creatively rigorous. Knowledge here is composed, not simply collected. Through visual and poetic methods, participants and researcher move together in storying that resists categorisation, affirms presence, and embodies sovereignty. Creative processes, including collage using both participant words, and images and objects that reflect the research findings, allow a process of thematic analysis on a deeper level as the researcher creates the collage, considering each textual or visual element that is included on the collage, and where.

Examples and Discussion

To demonstrate Waya Yindyamarra in action I share below one poem constructed from the words of Indigenous boarding school graduates/participants, and the associated collage that I created as researcher to explore the major themes that emerged. This project explores the experiences of Indigenous boarding school graduates, who had finished school, to understand how they saw their experiences, and to yarn about the impact boarding school had on their lives post-graduation in their own voices.

Between the Dust and Dial-Up

I was thirteen... or fourteen

sent away

to a school I didn’t choose.

The dust changed.

White… not red.

That’s how I knew I wasn’t home.

Boarding came fast. I had to change quick.

pack your things,

get on the plane.

“You’re going to this school now.”

Everything was cold,

rules, rooms, routine.

I didn’t really know anything.

I just remember

I didn’t want to go.

There were 90 boys…

but 25 of us.

It depended where you looked.

Broncos games, Kup Murri,

study sessions,

library tables,

everyone sitting in groups.

“You’re Indigenous? You sit there.”

Sometimes it was just…

Feeling invisible.

Sometimes it was

too much attention.

Same uniforms,

different lives.

Not everyone knew

how we grew up.

No one asked.

Zoom cut out.

Wi-Fi dropped.

Small screen,

prepaid data,

no one explained that.

One minute in class,

the next…gone.

“Disengaged, they said.

Some of us

started skipping school,

breaking out

just to feel in control.

Getting caught.

Getting sent home.    But we learned how to survive.

I had to re-learn

how to speak

like myself.

Not too White.

Not too Black.

Just... different.     Just me.

Now I know

how far the world s t r e t c h e s

Now I know

what I want to pass on.

I titled this collage “Who Belongs, Who Thrives” and it operates as a visual embodiment of Waya Yindyamarra. You can see the use of participant quotes, found imagery, natural materials (such as gum leaves), photographs (including my son and Great-Grandfather) which are combined to exemplify a songspiral approach to storying that is non-linear, multilayered, and emotionally resonant. This research is not separate from me, rather, this collage was my first reflection on the stories I was hearing from Indigenous boarding school graduates, as a mother of children attending and who have graduated from Indigenous boarding programs and, the mother of a son who will in the future, attend boarding. I included my Great-Grandfather, because he represents the worst of what can happen when children are taken from their homes in the name of education, religion and ‘opportunity’ including schools, missions, reserves and ‘homes’ that mark Australian history during the period termed the Stolen Generations. I formed a spiral of gum leaves, over patterns reminiscent of Wiradjuri geometric patterning, and continued to layer words and images with meanings that incorporate memory, Country, and reflection, as well as direct quotes from boarding graduates/participants in the project. Fragments of text are embedded within this landscape of found images and text. These elements mimic the fragmented, interrupted, and nonlinear nature of many Aboriginal boarding students’ experiences, visually echoing the disruptions, relocations, and cultural negotiations participants spoke of in yarns with me. Statements such as “Nobody knows my story” and “community that surrounds” appear alongside references to colonialism, racism, and school decision-making, inviting the viewer into the terrain of identity, belonging, and survival that emerged in the yarns shared Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1.

Waya Yindyamarra Methodology. Just as Gugaa (Goanna) Tracks Through Country, Doubling Back and Pausing Often, so Too Must we as Researchers. This Methodology is not a Linear Journey, it is a Spiralling Journey. Each Step Happens in a Different Order Each Time, Sometimes Multiple Times. Waya Calls on Us to Spiral Through our Research Journey.

Figure 2.

Researcher Collage

I consider the collage both a method and a finding. It materialises the participant-voiced poetry into a visual form, with each layer and placement carefully selected to reflect the themes arising from the data: displacement, adaptation, resistance, and relational belonging. The use of tactile elements like natural fibres and textured paper not only situates the work within Country but also reflects the felt, embodied nature of participants’ narratives. The layering of quotes, colours, and media demonstrates how knowledge spirals, echoing Gay’wu Group of Women’s (2019) theory of returning to the same story place, again and again, with deeper understanding. Importantly, this visual work does not seek to “represent” participants in a fixed sense, but rather opens a dialogic space for ongoing interpretation. As a visual extension of the poem Between the Dust and Dial-Up, the collage offers another modality through which Indigenous voice, experience, and sovereignty are affirmed. It stands as an artefact of Indigenous methodological integrity, storying not only with words but through material, placement, and relation. This artefact could be used as a starting point, a prompt for further yarns with participants, or in dissemination, reflecting the spiralling nature of Waya Yindyamarra.