AustLit

'This article brings together two Indigenous scholars who have come to better know their Indigenous history as they story it alongside their work as historians and academics. We find that the historical landscape changes when family history is better understood: time and space become embodied, history becomes personal. Sámi scholar May-Britt Öhman speaks of singing to the hillside in a ‘Sound of Music’ style, and then feeling forced to break out of song and into yoik.1Similarly, Aboriginal Australian scholar Frances Wyld writes about her connection to land and family history, including a visit to desert Australia where she no longer saw a world of silos, but of solace. Through embodiment comes a new identity, shared and understood. As scholars understanding the power-laden binaries of colonised and coloniser, writing at the intersection of personal and public using ego-histoires, we find shared methodologies to tell stories of the self inhabiting lands of fire and ice. Applying ego-histoire, we argue for a new version of history as academic discipline: a discipline which includes the Indigenous peoples’ embodied vision and experiences; a history discipline which challenges the coloniser’s current Hi-Story, within which Indigenous peoples are made the other, the exotic, primitive and invisible ‘vanishing race’; a history which empowers and strengthens ourselves as scholars and at the same time provides our students (Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous) with a history which takes into account Indigenous peoples visions, experiences and stories.'  (Introduction)