I feel a moral obligation to other community blackfellas, who our awards and grants are designed for – who our elders had in mind when they fought for these gifts – to pick these issues apart, to speak on matters of identity and belonging from my own considerable and well-examined lived experience. I urge others think about identity as belonging – not as choice, but as lived in and embodied. Not made up in the mind.
I was brought up with cultural responsibilities and I take cultural protocol seriously, as a community person and as an Aboriginal researcher. Unlike some Aboriginal writers and artists, I know that it’s not right to make money off someone else’s struggles, or to stories you have no connection to. I know how to seek permission for research, and with this comes the knowledge of when permission is needed and when it is not. This was not one of those times.
Published in Rabbit 29: Lineages, December 2019.
Mykaela Saunders 