Due to widespread geographical and cultural displacement, Australian Aboriginal people have experienced the destruction of their identity. This identity is traditionally closely linked to the land and the people, so that Aborigines feel an intense longing to rediscover their roots and reclaim their identity. In order to do this, they need to individually reconstruct their past, for instance by writing down their life stories. Thus Aboriginal women like Ruby Langford Ginibi have embarked on a process of reconnecting with their roots through the medium of autobiography. In discussing three of these autobiographies, this book examines the role of autobiographical narrative in the process of Australian Aboriginal women reclaiming their identity.

A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. These elders relate stories about their own lives, the experiences of girls and women of their childhood communities, and customs related to pregnancy, birth, post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women’s roles in managing death. Through these teachings, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women’s identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.

This book is an ambitious and wide-ranging social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous peoples of New Spain, from the Spanish conquest through the first half of the eighteenth century. In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.

Subaltern Women's Narratives brings together intersectional feminist scholarship from the Humanities and Social Sciences and explores subaltern women’s narratives of resistance and subversion. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection focuses on fictional texts, archival records, and ethnographic research to explore the lived experiences of subaltern women in different marginalised communities across a wide geographical landscape, as they negotiate their way through modes of labour and activism. Thematically grouped, the focus of this book is two-fold: to look at the lived experiences of subaltern women as they negotiate their lives in a world of political flux and conflicts; and to examine subaltern women’s dissenting practices as recorded in texts and archives. This collection will push the boundaries of scholarship on decolonial and postcolonial feminism and subaltern studies, reading women’s subversive practices especially in the themes of epistemology and embodiment. This book is aimed primarily at scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates working in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies. It will appeal to both historians and scholars of nineteenth century and contemporary literature. Specifically scholars working on subaltern theory, feminist theory, indigenous cultures, anticolonial resistance, and the Global South will find this book particularly relevant.

Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability "neoliberal multicriminalism" and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation. With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

My Place begins with Sally Morgan tracing the experiences of her own life, growing up in suburban Perth in the fifties and sixties. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge, hidden knowledge is uncovered, and a fascinating story unfolds - a mystery of identity, complete with clues and suggested solutions. Sally Morgan's My Place is a deeply moving account of a search for truth, into which a whole family is gradually drawn; finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminate the lives of late eighteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century Aboriginal women, who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West. Some essays focus on individual women - a trader, a performer, a non-human woman - while others examine cohorts of women - wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing also on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories.

Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Indigenous Women's Writing, Storytelling, and Law -- Chapter One: Gendering the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) and Ceremony (1977) -- Chapter Two: The Legal Silencing of Indigenous Women: Racine v. Woods (1983) and In Search of April Raintree (1983) -- Chapter Three: Colonial Governmentality and GenderViolence: State of Minnesota v. Zay Zah (1977) and The Antelope Wife (1998) -- Chapter Four: Land Claims, Identity Claims: Manypenny v. United States (1991) and Last Standing Woman (1997) -- Conclusion: For an Indigenous-Feminist Literary Criticism -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Can the specific concerns of Indigenous women be addressed by mainstream feminism? Indigenous Women and Feminism proposes that a dynamic new line of inquiry – Indigenous feminism – is necessary to truly engage with the crucial issues of cultural identity, nationalism, and decolonization particular to Indigenous contexts. Through the lenses of politics, activism, and culture, this wide-ranging collection crosses disciplinary, national, academic, and activist boundaries to explore deeply the unique political and social positions of Indigenous women. A vital and sophisticated discussion, these timely essays will change the way we think about modern feminism and Indigenous women.