Karen Hughes
I find working in the field of Indigenous studies life-sustaining because this is a vocation in which it is possible to be an agent for change: students are transformed when they begin to understand the complexity behind the history and politics they have not been taught at school. I have worked with Indigenous people for long periods of my life, where elders have been my teachers and shown me ways of thinking differently, and it is this understanding I try to convey in my research and my teaching. An important challenge for me is to continue to build and maintain strong two-way relationships between communities and the academy, to ‘get the academy into the community and the community into the academy’: real on the ground two way processes of teaching, learning and research. I am primarily a historian but I draw heavily on anthropology (‘history’s anthropology’, as Greg Dening would say) as well as cultural studies and women’s studies, believing profoundly that cross-disciplinary approaches can best illuminate the complex entanglements of colonial/postcolonial histories. It is exhilarating to sometimes find in the most marginalised of histories, transformative moments where through individual or group agency cross-cultural relationships were characterised by more positive experiences, laying embedded pathways that can be built on today. I think it important also to engage with the way Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous cultural production are understood, received and taught in international contexts, for example in the Australian Studies curricula of European universities.
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Ngarrindjeri families in south-eastern Australia and Qu’Appelle Valley Métis families in Saskatchewan, Canada, investigated in this article. Both groups share similar histories in marginalised settings – ‘one mile camps’ in Australia and ‘Road Allowance’ communities in Canada. The archives created by generations of Indigenous photographers are both familiar and unique. They depict smiling groups posed in front of cars and homes, although the backdrops are very different to the middle-class and suburban settings typical of vernacular photography more widely. Photographic archives in these communities are comparatively sparse, and thus more precious.
Importantly, we see the matriarchs who anchored large, extended families, and evidence of their Indigenous knowledges and the survival skills that provided for them. Working with these photographs in deep engagement with communities and their long-held knowledge reanimates these images in contemporary contexts to facilitate the reclaiming of land, connection
and family. We argue that such images represent unparalleled forms of truth-telling, offering a nuanced visual history unavailable from other sources.
Tubbs reportage accurately points to the significance of marriage, intimacy and the family as a key site of political struggle. Indeed policing intimacy, coupled with immigration restriction, was central to purveying white citizenship across Australia and the United States, both settler-colonial nations with distinctive, intersecting schemes of racial governance, which collided in Australia during World War II. As Ann McGrath has recently noted intermarriage, was for each country, ‘a hidden plotline in [the desire for anchoring] settler sovereignty’. The narrative of White Australia in relation to both Aboriginal peoples and non-northern European migrants impacted how Australian families formed, as in a different context ‘Jim Crow’ segregation policies and antimiscegenation laws shaped American family formation and life, especially in US southern states.
With an interest in enlarging understanding of Aboriginal women’s enabling roles across a number of cultural frontiers to account for broader contexts of power and social relations, I explore the multilayered impacts of relationships that Aboriginal women forged with allied servicemen on the WWII domestic front in Western Australia. Focusing on their lived experiences, working from oral history sources combined with reading the archives along and against the grain, I illuminate a larger picture of Indigenous resistance to intrusive state intervention and human rights violations, and locate these women’s stories within a transnational frame of mid-twentieth-century social and political change. The women’s stories afford new insight into one of Australia’s and the United States’ most deeply hidden and neglected histories of war. While I discuss only a few women here, mostly from Western Australia, this is part of a wider national project and the subject of a forthcoming book, that promises further insights. This history works alongside other important histories of the military service of Indigenous Australians, African Americans and Native Americans, to counter the dominance of white masculinist experiences on the civilian home front, and in combat.
Ngarrindjeri families in south-eastern Australia and Qu’Appelle Valley Métis families in Saskatchewan, Canada, investigated in this article. Both groups share similar histories in marginalised settings – ‘one mile camps’ in Australia and ‘Road Allowance’ communities in Canada. The archives created by generations of Indigenous photographers are both familiar and unique. They depict smiling groups posed in front of cars and homes, although the backdrops are very different to the middle-class and suburban settings typical of vernacular photography more widely. Photographic archives in these communities are comparatively sparse, and thus more precious.
Importantly, we see the matriarchs who anchored large, extended families, and evidence of their Indigenous knowledges and the survival skills that provided for them. Working with these photographs in deep engagement with communities and their long-held knowledge reanimates these images in contemporary contexts to facilitate the reclaiming of land, connection
and family. We argue that such images represent unparalleled forms of truth-telling, offering a nuanced visual history unavailable from other sources.
Tubbs reportage accurately points to the significance of marriage, intimacy and the family as a key site of political struggle. Indeed policing intimacy, coupled with immigration restriction, was central to purveying white citizenship across Australia and the United States, both settler-colonial nations with distinctive, intersecting schemes of racial governance, which collided in Australia during World War II. As Ann McGrath has recently noted intermarriage, was for each country, ‘a hidden plotline in [the desire for anchoring] settler sovereignty’. The narrative of White Australia in relation to both Aboriginal peoples and non-northern European migrants impacted how Australian families formed, as in a different context ‘Jim Crow’ segregation policies and antimiscegenation laws shaped American family formation and life, especially in US southern states.
With an interest in enlarging understanding of Aboriginal women’s enabling roles across a number of cultural frontiers to account for broader contexts of power and social relations, I explore the multilayered impacts of relationships that Aboriginal women forged with allied servicemen on the WWII domestic front in Western Australia. Focusing on their lived experiences, working from oral history sources combined with reading the archives along and against the grain, I illuminate a larger picture of Indigenous resistance to intrusive state intervention and human rights violations, and locate these women’s stories within a transnational frame of mid-twentieth-century social and political change. The women’s stories afford new insight into one of Australia’s and the United States’ most deeply hidden and neglected histories of war. While I discuss only a few women here, mostly from Western Australia, this is part of a wider national project and the subject of a forthcoming book, that promises further insights. This history works alongside other important histories of the military service of Indigenous Australians, African Americans and Native Americans, to counter the dominance of white masculinist experiences on the civilian home front, and in combat.
Ngapartji, Ngapartji. In Turn, in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia; In the Eye of the Beholder: What Six Nineteenth-Century Women Tell Us About Indigenous Authority and Identity in
Journal of Australian Studies
Volume 39, Issue 4, 2015
DOI:
10.1080/14443058.2015.1080139
Cornelis Martin Renesa
pages 567-570
Published online: 07 Dec 2015
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/zCeVmwEuU6x74yPV4EcZ/full