Complexities of Displaced Indigenous Identities: A Fifty Year Journey Home, to Two Homes

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.