I'm not sure if non-Indigenous academics working in Indigenous spaces realise the extent to which disagreements and challenges regarding identity and authority (cultural and scholarly) occupy the time and emotional energy of Indigenous scholars. You have to be very resilient.
When localised community specifications of identity, membership, status etc. enter global transIndigenous networks they bring with them challenges and expectations. Our histories of colonisation and our struggles towards self-determination are distinct and cannot be generalised.
There's so much benefit in those transIndigenous connections (I use Chadwick Allen's terminology) when they're done well - preserving our localised frameworks, languages, methodologies etc. But we need to avoid homogenising very complex and multifaceted ways of being Indigenous.
And as I think about these problems, and the many other specific challenges that we as Indigenous scholars face, I really just have to conclude that as much as being a white person studying Indigenous cultures is unpopular right now, like at least your positionality is clear.
If you fuck up it'll be because you're a bad researcher and you weren't respecting the parameters set by Indigenous people regarding the study of their communities. But you won't have your identity torn down and attacked, you won't be viewed as a coconut or the native police.
When white scholars fail, they fail on their own merits. When we fail, we fail because we were too colonised, or not colonised enough to perform those structures. When we fail we let down our elders our communities our ancestors. The stakes are so much higher.
I don't only have to worry about being a successful scholar, I have to worry about being a successful blackfella. I have to practice caution and restraint and resist colourism or allowing myself to be tokenised because I'm viewed as palatable (sufficiently colonised).
I have massively struggled with finishing my PhD because of the amount of emotional energy I have to expend on these challenges and anxieties which white scholars don't face. It is exhausting. I don't have time to write and look after myself and my family.
I know people think I get handed opportunities because I'm that palatable kind of Aboriginal and that I can get away with mediocre work because of it. But that kind of perception is really ignorant to the volatility with which Indigenous research spaces are regulated.
Much of the volatility in Indigenous scholarly spaces is lateral violence stemming from the ongoing structure and legacies of colonialism, but it is also true that the university structure is designed to exploit and exclude the marginalised Other and it's brutal for those Others.
I'm exhausted by my own frustration at this. It isn't fair that we have to be so cautious, so perfectly cultural, so colonially good that we can beat the colonial game. It's not fair that we don't get time to research because we're carrying the weight of other people's ignorance.
Recently my collaborator @jonathandunk called me in on this. In many aspects of my life I was exhausting myself with this frustration because I expected things to be fair and refused to accept an unfair reality. He grew up in shit circumstances and knows life isn't fair.
But I still feel, regardless, that fairness is what we should be aspiring to here. That has to be the end goal. Fairness and justice. What's the point if that's not where the institution and its researchers are going.
This isn't a buildup to some grand announcement - like that I'm going to stop building a poetic career off shit talking probably well-meaning but culturally ignorant Australian poets (because I'm never going to stop that), it's just musing. I am so tired all of the time by this.
But I remind myself that I do have it lucky, although not always in the ways in which it's assumed. I can be angry at these systems but I always have the option of leaving and going back to retail and staying at home in my community with my family and being okay. Others can't.
