Every time she picks up a paintbrush Chloe Sumner has one goal in mind – to share her culture with the next generation.
Through her business ‘Barka Arts’, the talented 29-year-old has found a new, practical way to teach Newcastle youngsters about Australia’s First Nations Peoples.
Chloe has created a range of classroom resources allowing young learners to have their first taste of Indigenous culture.
The learning tools include peg dolls, flash cards, story stones, baby dolls, and Aboriginal doll houses.
As an experienced early childhood educator, Chloe says toys are a natural way to introduce cultural acceptance.
“I want to authentically embed Aboriginal culture into daycares and schools,” she said.
“To educate other educators, so that our younger generations are raised with more awareness of Aboriginal culture and more of an acceptance.
“I think there are many educators who want to teach our culture but are worried they might be disrespectful to Aboriginal people or tokenistic.
“They don’t want to just paint an Aboriginal flag with kids, they want to embed the culture into their programs and into their lives, that’s why I try to create resources that daycare centres would already use as their products.”
Chloe is a proud young Indigenous woman from Barkindji and Maliangappa mobs, western NSW, Gamilaroi, northern NSW and Biripi in eastern NSW.
Her business, Barka Arts, is named after the river nearby the land from which her mob originates.
“The Barka River is the Indigenous name for the Darling River, near where my family is from,” Chloe says.
Raised in Newcastle, Chloe is a Hunter School of the Performing Arts graduate and is currently studying Aboriginal Studies at TAFE NSW.
Having experienced racism herself in her younger years, the mother-of-two is passionate about educating the ignorant.
“The early learning years are so important,” she said.
“That’s why it’s so important to teach Aboriginal culture early on, that way kids might be able to challenge their parents’ thinking as well.
“If people were more educated they’d be more open-minded I think.
“Knowledge is power.”
Chloe says belonging to a culture that is more than 65,000 years old comes with responsibilities.
“A lot of our culture has been lost over the years,” Chloe says.
“It’s very hard to get that back.
“I need to keep passing our culture down to the next generations to make a change.”
Aside from classroom resources, Chloe also creates unique art pieces, all of which can be found online at Barka Arts as well as her Facebook page and Facebook marketplace.
