Quick questions on Indigenous and non-Western history for HSC History Extension

Whose standards judge reliability? Colonisation often destroyed Indigenous records and dismissed Indigenous testimony, so the documentary archive itself is partial and complicit. Recognising Indigenous and non-Western traditions therefore reopens the key questions of who historians are and what counts as evidence, and it connects to ethical debates about ownership of and authority over the past.

Outside Europe, rich traditions of historical writing long predate or developed independently of the Western academy. Classical Chinese historiography, founded by Sima Qian in the Records of the Grand Historian, established conventions of dynastic history, sourcing and moral judgement over two millennia ago. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah, developed a sophisticated theory of the rise and fall of dynasties and is often described as an early sociologist of history. Recognising these traditions shows that the Western model is one historically and culturally specific way of constructing history, not a universal standard.

Use this material to decentre the Western academic model rather than simply to add a non-Western example. The argument is that recognising Indigenous deep-time oral traditions and non-Western historiographies such as Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun exposes the Rankean archive as culturally specific, not universal. That lets you answer the key questions about who historians are, what history is and why approaches change, by showing that the very definition of legitimate history has been contested across cultures.