and my truest Sister Girl, Ngaire (2022)
'“I was fed on a diet of lies and invisibility about the true history of this country from a very young age,” recalls Jackie Huggins. In the new edition of her prescient 1998 book Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation, Dr Huggins writes history through kinship, storying Aboriginal women’s survival, agony and strength. This healing, Blak feminist book sounds the collective truth and strength of Aboriginal women’s voices into the chambers of a violent history that has tried to silence them.' (Introduction)
Inscribing Difference and Resistance : Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America
Czech Republic
:
Masaryk University Press
,
2017
17204263
2017
multi chapter work
criticism
'The study examines the ways in which Indigenous women’s non-fiction published in the 1990s contributed to theoretical articulations of Indigenous feminism and to a historiographic counter-discourse which has intervened into the dominant narratives of nation-building in settler colonies. Personal non-fiction and life writing by Native American authors Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Lee Walters (USA), by First Nations authors Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling (Canada), and by Aboriginal authors Jackie Huggins and Doris Pilkington Garimara (Australia) are analyzed in detail to demonstrate how a hybrid writing style, combining scholarly criticism with auto/biography and fictionalized storytelling, is used to inscribe Indigenous women’s cultural difference, subjugated knowledges, transgenerational trauma from colonization, and resistance to forced assimilation.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In the 1960s Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then Kath Walker) hit the literary limelight as Australia’s first published ‘Aboriginal poet’ and since then Aboriginal writers have used their work as a form of self-definition and to defend our rights to our identity. Many authors are inspired by the need to redress historical government definitions of Aboriginality, to reclaim pride in First Nation status, to explain the diversity of Aboriginal experience, and to demonstrate the realities and complexities of ‘being Aboriginal’ in the 21st century.'
Source: Author's introduction.
