Abstract
In colonised territories all over the world, place-based identity has been interrupted by invading displacement cultures. Indigenous identities have become more complex in response to and because of racist and genocidal government policies that have displaced Indigenous peoples. This paper is a personal account of the identity journey of the author, that demonstrates how macrocosmic colonial themes of racism, protectionism, truth suppression, settler control of Indigenous relationships, and Indigenous resistance and survivance responses can play out through an individual’s journey. The brown skinned author started life being told that she was (a white) Australian; she was told of her father’s Aboriginality in her 20s, only to learn at age 50 of her mother’s affair and that her biological father is Māori. The author’s journey demonstrates the way in which Indigenous identities in the colonial era are context driven, and subject to affect by infinite relational variables such as who has the power to control narrative, and other colonial interventions that occur when a displacement culture invades place-based cultures.
Highlights
In 2019, while on Cadigal-Wangal Country (Known as Inner West Sydney), after months of waiting for my DNA results, they arrived
Ancestral DNA test company marketing suggests that a major market for DNA testing is people who are looking into their family history for an ethnicity estimate, whatever that means for them
In colonised territories all over the world, place-based identity has been interrupted by invading displacement cultures
Summary
In 2019, while on Cadigal-Wangal Country (Known as Inner West Sydney), after months of waiting for my DNA results, they arrived. Ancestral DNA test company marketing suggests that a major market for DNA testing is people who are looking into their family history for an ethnicity estimate, whatever that means for them. Dad and I took a DNA paternity test that confirmed this. I submitted the sample and waited for my results When they arrived, I took my laptop out into the sunshine and trees, and pressed the results link. “I’m not white!” I enthusiastically yelled to my partner. As a child in the 1970s at my paternal grandmother’s house in Western Sydney, I heard my grandmother and Aunty talk of my grandfather’s supposed Aboriginality. One day stands out in my memory, when local Aboriginal people who were walking past my grandmother’s house had claimed to my Aunty that we were cousins. We did not forge connections with those people, but the conversations I heard had significance for me because of the mystery of my physical features that were darker than everyone else in my family
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