AustLit

'The study examines the ways in which Indigenous women’s non-fiction published in the 1990s contributed to theoretical articulations of Indigenous feminism and to a historiographic counter-discourse which has intervened into the dominant narratives of nation-building in settler colonies. Personal non-fiction and life writing by Native American authors Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Lee Walters (USA), by First Nations authors Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling (Canada), and by Aboriginal authors Jackie Huggins and Doris Pilkington Garimara (Australia) are analyzed in detail to demonstrate how a hybrid writing style, combining scholarly criticism with auto/biography and fictionalized storytelling, is used to inscribe Indigenous women’s cultural difference, subjugated knowledges, transgenerational trauma from colonization, and resistance to forced assimilation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In the 1960s Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then Kath Walker) hit the literary limelight as Australia’s first published ‘Aboriginal poet’ and since then Aboriginal writers have used their work as a form of self-definition and to defend our rights to our identity. Many authors are inspired by the need to redress historical government definitions of Aboriginality, to reclaim pride in First Nation status, to explain the diversity of Aboriginal experience, and to demonstrate the realities and complexities of ‘being Aboriginal’ in the 21st century.'

Source: Author's introduction.