Indigenous Identity as Country: The “Ing” within Connecting, Caring, and Belonging

Jo Anne Rey

doi:10.3390/genealogy5020048

Abstract

Within the Australian Indigenous community, it is often said that Aboriginality is a verb. It is a “doing” word, not a noun. As such, identifying actively is at the heart of being Australian Aboriginal. Doing identification, rather than owning a label of identification, is critical to understanding the relationality that underpins Indigenous identity. It is the ‘Ing’ of relationality which acts as an interconnected web of presences (including people), places, and practices. When this web is ancestral, it marks our belonging. For Dharug, this is our “Country”, our Dharug Ngurra. It is physical and metaphysical. It is also known as most of the Sydney basin, Australia. The agency that connects us, strengthens our caring, and generates our belonging helps us co-become as a Country. This paper engages the author’s “Ing” as Ngurra through her connections to three sites, their presences, places and practices, that activate her belonging to/with the Dharug community: Brown’s Waterhole, Blacktown Native Institution, and Yallomundee. Using undergraduate teaching experiences and a current post-doctoral research project for specific context, questions around the ‘Ing’ of being Indigenous as Country-in-the-city are raised, while the significance of changing relationships for custodial caring in a climate challenging reality are discussed.

Highlights

Renowned ecologist, David Suzuki (1997, p. 8) provided some pertinent commentary that frames the place of this paper in the body of literature on Indigenous identity, community, and Country: Just as the key to a species’ survival in the natural world is its ability to adapt to local habitats, so the key to human survival will probably be the local community
Within Australian Indigenous community, it is often said that Aboriginality is a verb
In essence, involves moving towards storying, sharing, respect and reciprocity. It is only storying from traditional owners of Dharug Ngurra who can bring an authentic voice to the literature because they have the continuing connections to presences, places and peoples of that Country

Summary

Introduce-“Ing”

Renowned ecologist, David Suzuki (1997, p. 8) provided some pertinent commentary that frames the place of this paper in the body of literature on Indigenous identity, community, and Country: Just as the key to a species’ survival in the natural world is its ability to adapt to local habitats, so the key to human survival will probably be the local community. This paper engages the author’s “Ing” as Ngurra through her connections to three sites, their presences, places, and practices, that activate her belonging to/with the Dharug community: Brown’s Waterhole, Blacktown Native Institution, and Yellomundee. These experiences are supported by Dharug community members, who provide their own perspectives on each of the themes, as developed through their own learning journeys, their places of connection, their activism in caring, and their own ways of teaching and sharing through cultural practices. Concerning the BNI site and Brown’s Waterhole, my family storying involves my great, great grandmother, Ann Randall, who was institutionalized by her ‘mother’, Fanny (Brook and Kohen 1991), first as a little 6-year-old in the Female Orphans School at Parramatta in 1822 This was at the time First Fleet, African American convict John Randall senior disappears from the written records.

Be-“Ing”: Re-weaving of Ngurra

Yellomundee—Storying

Yellomundee

Blacktown

Image: Image

Conclude-Ing