Our identity
Identity is tied to the cultures that a person is raised in, and how they identify with that culture. Everyone has a cultural identity.
One of the biggest myths about Aboriginality is that if you have white skin you can't be Indigenous - you've got to be black to be 'a real' Aboriginal - or that Aboriginality is attributed to the degree of ancestry, such as "she is 1/8th Aboriginal" or a varying combination of "white-bits and black-bits". These perceptions are highly offensive to Indigenous Australians and must be understood as products of colonial thinking. Ideas of genetics and culture are often mistakenly collapsed together so that if someone's skin is lighter, they are thought to have lost that equivalent of Aboriginal culture.
Young Murri's Mind
|
"As an Aborigine, I inhabit an Aboriginal body, and not a combination of features which may or may not cancel each other. Whatever language I speak, I speak an Aboriginal language, because a lot of Aboriginal people I know speak like me. How I speak, act and how I look are outcomes of a colonial history and not a particular combination of traits from either side of the frontier." Ian Anderson, ‘black-bit, white-bit’ in M. Grossman (ed.) Blacklines p. 51 "The obsession with distinctions between the offensively named 'full-bloods' and 'hybrids' or 'real' and 'inauthentic' Aborigines, continues to be imposed on us today. There would be few urban Aboriginal people who have not been labelled as culturally bereft, 'fake' or 'part Aborigine' and then expected to authenticate their Aboriginality in terms of percentages of blood or clichéd 'traditional' experiences." Mick Dodson, ‘The end in the beginning’ in Blacklines p. 28 "Like myself, many would believe that the power and control have always been in the hands of Europeans to make feeble and pathetic attempts to construct Aboriginality without our knowledge or consent." Jackie Huggins, ‘always was, always will be’ in Blacklines p. 61 "I have actually been asked by white university lecturers and researchers and students whether I can really claim to be a Torres Strait Islander. After all, how long has it been since I lived there? Can you see my point? If I don't behave, if I don't embrace and hold myself true to the representations of what constitutes a cultural Islander, then I must in truth not be one … Of course I identify as an Islander." Martin Nakata, ‘Better’ in Blacklines p.143 (All quotes here are inserted from Reconcile.org web site) |
Further information:
Previous Next