Yarning about Sport: Indigenous Research Methodologies and Transformative Historical Narratives

Abstract

Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taking many forms for different purposes, common features of yarning include un-structured or semi-structured research interviews and discussion, flexible time schedules and Indigenous facilitation. Yarning is valued as a culturally appropriate and safe research conversational methodology that has the potential to yield findings and conclusions that are not always possible via traditional archive-based research. In this paper, we introduce a case study of yarning used specifically in a sport history research project in Australia. The focus is on a group of teenage girls from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland who competed in marching in the 1950s and 1960s and offer a rare example of female Indigenous participation in organized sport during the oppressive ‘protection era’. Urged to ‘tell our story’ by surviving marchers, who are now community elders, we approached this research methodologically in two ways: archival-based research and yarning. The results from these two approaches were vastly different, and highlight the value of this oral history methodology in producing rich insight and counter-narratives to those available from traditional empirical sources.