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Bond, Chelsea, Phillips, Murray, & Osmond, Gary(2015)Crossing lines: Sport history, transformative narratives, and AboriginalAustralia.International Journal of the History of Sport, 32(13), pp. 1531-1545.

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https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia

I. Paddy. Alberts. (snr). am. over. the. moon. with. this. meeting. at. the. Ration. shed. today. also. sharing. our. stories. with. one. another. and. I. like. to. thank. every. body. involved.

Thank. You. Uncle. Paddy. Alberts. Snr.

Uncle Paddy Alberts slipped this note to Murray Phillips and Gary Osmond at the end of an oral-

history workshop that they organized in Cherbourg, Queensland, his home town, in 2010 as part of a

larger, sport history research project. It was a defining moment. His thoughts and feelings, in a

subtle and emotive way, challenged the stereotypical and romanticized image of the lone historian

working away in the archives, creating and writing a well-crafted narrative, and producing a single-

authored monograph for a relatively small readership. While it is true that ‘history is a deeply

individualistic craft’1 and ‘historians by nature are not herd animals’,2 Uncle Paddy’s note pointed to

a broader responsibility. It provided an indication of the importance and power of history-making in

its broadest sense and an insight into the potential to co-create narratives which resonate in, and

are empowering for, Indigenous communities.

Uncle Paddy is an Aboriginal Elder who grew up in Cherbourg, 250 kilometres north-west of

Brisbane, when it was a State Government-controlled Aboriginal mission settlement which was

created and managed under various iterations of the original Aboriginals Protection and Restriction

of the Sale of Opium Act (1897). Under the Act, as many as 50 tribes from around Queensland were

forcibly removed to Cherbourg. The ‘inmates’, as they were referred to by Government authorities,

were placed under the jurisdiction of the Superintendent who controlled their confinement, food

provisions, work details, and wages, and whose permission was required to marry and to raise

children.3 The removal of children from their parents was common in Cherbourg and was a part of

the broader national tragedy that has been subsequently referred to as the Stolen Generations.4

1

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704

Today Cherbourg is a different community, its residents no longer subject to the same forms

of institutionalized racism that characterized race relations in twentieth-century Australia.5 But the

past lives large in Cherbourg. Not only in the telegraphic 'stops' in Uncle Paddy's note, but also in the

memories, story-telling and yarning like those he so enjoyed during the oral history workshop in

2010. Phillips and Osmond's own appreciation and understanding of Indigenous voice has changed

over the years they have been working with their Cherbourg community partners and, more

recently, with Indigenous scholar, Chelsea Bond. This appreciation, and the collaboration between

the three of us, has influenced our approach to Indigenous sport history specifically, and to

Indigenous scholarship more broadly.

In many ways, this paper contributes to the contested space of sport history. The sub-

discipline has engaged with a number of different forms of history making – reconstructionist,

constructionist and deconstructionist – over the last half century.6 These forms of history making are

all framed around unique combinations of methods, epistemologies and ontologies, and their

advocates have fought tenaciously to defend their position as the dominant or emerging paradigm in

sport history.7 Paralleling these paradigm conflicts in terms of passion, commitment and vitriol have

been the ‘History Wars’ that have centred on recent reinterpretations of the history of European

settlement in Australia.8 Sport historians have engaged with the ‘History Wars’ in several ways, but

one specific debate has dominated: who was responsible for the emergence of the most popular

football code in the nation, Australian rules football? One group of scholars recognize the European

contribution, exemplified by Tom Wills, and primarily base their interpretations on Western versions

of reconstructionist history;9 the other group acknowledges an Indigenous contribution, exemplified

by the game of Marn-Grook, and challenges the epistemological premises of reconstructionist

history, aligning more closely with deconstructionist perspectives, to make their case.10 Our

collaborative contribution in this paper is closely aligned to the latter camp as we seek to unsettle

the dominance of the Western, reconstructionist accounts of Indigenous sport history. Here we are

2

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 less concerned with unveiling the ‘true’ account of Australian Aboriginal sporting history, or even a

‘true’ Indigenous representation of events. Rather, we are interested in ‘the many vantage points

through which they can be analysed’11 in order to generate a more inclusive and complete account

of Aboriginal sport history, and in the narrative implications of these for Indigenous and non-

Indigenous Australia.

This paper has two interconnected sections as we seek to represent the different ‘vantage

points’ of the authors. The first section refers to recent publications co-authored by Phillips and

Osmond about the historical and contemporary role of sport at Cherbourg. Each of these

publications – one on the statue of famous Cherbourg cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, and the other on the

sporting collections at the Ration Shed Museum – are reflected upon by the authors and then again

by Bond, who was not involved in the construction of the publications. In these ways, the theme of

the first section of the paper is reflection, and it focusses on the ways the authors were involved in

the history-making process; this theme continues with Bond’s reaction to Phillips and Osmond’s own

assessments of working with Indigenous people and their histories.

The second section of the paper describes the co-construction of Indigenous sport history

through the collaborative endeavours of Phillips, Osmond and Bond. In this section, we build on our

own experiences to plan a new research undertaking, something that is different from their previous

history-making endeavours about sport at Cherbourg. Drawing upon insights from Indigenous

scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Martin Nakata, Lester-Irabinna Rigney and Linda

Tuhiwai-Smith, and several examples in sport history, especially the work of Lawrence Bamblett, we

explain and unpack our approach to co-narrating a unique sporting story from Cherbourg that

transforms the narrative possibilities of race and gender in Australian sport history.12 The focal point

of this story is the marching girls of Cherbourg whose competitive careers were relatively short,

stretching over six years during the middle of the twentieth century, but the legacy for these

women, their daughters and their community has been enduring.

3

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 Part 1: Reflections and reactions

The Eddie Gilbert statue: Osmond and Phillips reflect

In researching and writing our first Cherbourg article, ‘Viewed from all Sides: Statues, sport and

Eddie Gilbert’, about the statue of 1930s Cherbourg cricketer Eddie Gilbert that was unveiled in

Brisbane in 2007, we explicitly recognized the importance of giving voice to local sporting

memories.13 We stressed this in our application for the funding grant that supported our research:

‘By prioritising Aboriginal voices … this project will add another layer of understanding to the

increasingly recognised, nuanced and complex relationship between Aboriginal people and sport’.

Our prioritizing of Cherbourg voices occurred in several ways. At a most basic level, we prepared

information and consent forms for all research participants that not only fulfilled formal ethics

protocols but also ensured participant understanding of our goals as we conducted information

sessions with prospective interviewees. We conducted oral history workshops, facilitated by an

Indigenous trainer, which were well-attended. Together with Aunty Sandra Morgan, the chairperson

of the Ration Shed Museum and president of Cherbourg’s Historical Heritage Precinct Group, and

our community partner in the research project, we conducted several wide-ranging interviews and

gave audio and transcript copies back to the participants and the Ration Shed Museum. Finally, we

recruited a group of Cherbourg community members to visit the Eddie Gilbert statue with us and

participate in a focus group.

Our interest in the statue stemmed from another aim of the project, to investigate sporting

social memory in Cherbourg. We understood social memory as ‘acts, utterances and artefacts’,14 and

we were concerned with interrogating physical manifestations of Cherbourg memory, such as

artworks and the Ration Shed Museum, and in individual memories, feelings and emotions

associated with these. The Eddie Gilbert statue in Brisbane offered an ideal focus for research: it was

4

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 a substantial artefact of social memory, life size and made of bronze, and was located in a prominent

site within a public sporting arena.

We were able to conduct interviews with the sculptor and the sponsoring body to offer a

perspective on the statue’s creation. But most exciting for us, the statue’s representation of a

former Cherbourg inmate, Eddie Gilbert, and the physical proximity of Cherbourg to Brisbane, gave

us an opportunity to seek community feedback. While we had researched and written previously on

statues as social memory, in those articles we had emphasized semiotic readings, artistic renderings,

and mythological cross-currents.15 Overall, we contended that statues hold polysemic meanings,

open to observers’ particular perspectives. Practically, however, we had never been able to test this

with actual audiences, and had lamented the extreme difficulty and rarity of ‘observing, measuring

and recording audience responses to public monuments and statues’.16 With the advantage of grant

funding, we had an opportunity to adopt an audience-response approach with members of the

Cherbourg community.

During the statue visit, we conducted a focus group interview with open-ended questions

and time for a lengthy discussion. The group of 14 comprised Elders and school pupils. We gave

equal weight to all voices, which offered new insights on the statue that sometimes ran counter to

our own preconceptions and the intentions of the artist and sponsoring body, both of which were

prefigured largely by notions of racial discrimination, reparations and social justice. In contrast, the

overwhelming tenor of the Cherbourg response was one of pride. This alternative insight inspired us

to create three ‘vignettes’ in structuring the article. We began with our preconceptions as historians

who contextualized the statue within academic knowledge of colonial-era Australian and

international race relations, Cherbourg’s history as a controlled Aboriginal settlement, and Gilbert’s

documented experiences as a sportsman who experienced both adulation and discrimination. The

second vignette addressed the reparative motivations of the sponsoring body and artist. The third

5

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 vignette, the Cherbourg focus group voices, explored the positive reactions of the visitors and the

richness they added to standard historic evaluations.

On reflection, while we understood the importance of giving voice to Cherbourg stories, we

were equally interested in adding audience responses to a social memory methodology and in

creating an historian-creator-audience nexus to analyze the statue. The fact that the audience in this

case was Indigenous was, in some ways, secondary. That is not to say we devalued the contribution

and counter-stories of the Cherbourg group, or failed to see the special status of this particular

‘audience’ as a group representing the community to which Gilbert belonged. On the contrary, we

recognized our privilege in gaining access to this group, and included their stories and opinions.

Ultimately, however, we saw the interview as equal to the other two vignettes and underestimated

the value of the knowledge conveyed.

It was the anonymous journal reviewers who alerted us to the limitations of our recognition

of Indigenous voices. Both noted that we overlooked Indigenous Australian historians in developing

our own vignette as white, academic historians. In that vignette, wrote one reader, ‘At times their

[Osmond and Phillips’s] words are presented … as representative of Aboriginal voices’ and that

section ‘generalises about Aboriginal points of view without adequate support in the form of quotes

from Aborigines [Aboriginal historians]’. Moreover, this reviewer argued that we failed to recognize

that our Cherbourg participants ‘may be historians in their own right’; that is, as non-academics with

rich, different and underappreciated knowledge of local history grounded not in academia but in

lived, storied or studied experience.

These criticisms facilitated and reshaped our recognition of the importance of including a

more diverse range of voices and extending our analysis. In redrafting the article for publication, we

consulted a number of Indigenous historians and researchers with whose work we had not engaged

initially. These included scholars like Nakata, whose writings enabled us to reframe the statue as ‘a

6

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 “cultural interface” where “multiple and interconnected discourses” contribute to knowledge

creation’.17 Others, like historians Lawrence Bamblett, John Maynard and Daryle Rigney, gave us a

new lens on the value of the comments made by the Cherbourg focus group.18 While those voices

had challenged our own perspectives as historians, and revealed unconsidered (by us) perspectives

on this statue, we had not fully contextualized them as disruptions to the ‘straight-line stories’ of

tragedy and deficit discourses that these historians had identified in much of the writing on

Indigenous pasts.19 Our recognition of the importance of including Indigenous voices in our work

grew as a result, as encapsulated in this new sentence added to the Cherbourg vignette in the final,

published article: ‘Including Indigenous voices… was seen not as a complement [to our and the

artist’s voices] but as a necessity to “add insights from insider perspectives [and] challenge the

dominance of certain narratives” (Bamblett 2011: 16) – in this case the monolithic tragic trope of

much of Aboriginal sport historiography’.20

The Eddie Gilbert statue: Bond reflects

As an Aboriginal health researcher, Aboriginal sporting stories seem like the most obvious place for

empowering narratives of Indigeneity to emerge. Much of my work as a health researcher has been

preoccupied with narratives of death, disease and dysfunction. Yet, as an Aboriginal person growing

up, the one positive stereotype placed upon me was the expectation of ‘innate’, ‘natural’, and

‘freakish’ sporting excellence. Indeed, many of us played sport and exhibited our ‘natural talent’ on

our respective sporting fields, while the feats of more prominent Aboriginal sport stars such as Cathy

Freeman and Yvonne Goolagong were further testament to those imaginings. Regardless of our

social, economic, and historical hardships and disadvantage, the footy oval, netball court, boxing

ring, or athletics track availed themselves to us as sites in which we could be refigured as victors

rather than victims ... or so I thought.

7


Aboriginal sport historian Lawrence Bamblett argues that Aboriginal sporting stories, both in

academic and non-academic literature, are constrained by a discourse of deficit. He suggests that

Aboriginal sporting stories are saturated with grievances of racism, oppression and victimhood,

which while true and at times ‘politically expedient’,21 are in fact disempowering for Aboriginal

people and communities. The deficit discourse, he argues, blinds us to the other true Aboriginal

sporting stories that exist and which are integral to how Aboriginal people give meaning to our social

world. He notes the increasing presence of Indigenous scholars and commentators who have

expanded Aboriginal sporting discourse simply because they had a different story to tell. Even

though these new stories may run the risk of essentialist representations of Indigeneity, Bamblett

asserts that they still offer up ‘a more complex picture’ about ourselves than what we have come to

know about ourselves via Aboriginal sporting discourse.22

It is thus somewhat fitting that this paper starts off with a statue of the renowned Aboriginal

cricketer Eddie Gilbert through the sport historians’ lens of social injustice and racial discrimination.

An archetypal grievance story, the Gilbert story and statue has all the rhetorical ingredients for

colonial mythologizing of Aboriginal sporting life, whereby ‘natural’ sporting triumph is invariably

trumped by tragedy.23 However, in recognizing the voices and memories of Indigenous Australians, a

different side to the story of Gilbert and his statue emerged. The sport historians’ gaze shifted, but

even more importantly, so too did their position in the work they undertook. The refiguring of

Gilbert’s legacy from within his own community enabled and required Osmond and Phillips as sport

historians to refigure their own practice and positioning in relation to Indigenous Australia.

Aboriginal historian Frances Peters-Little attests to the need for historians to engage

Indigenous people:

I find it curious that any text-based historian would consider writing about Aboriginal people

without ever engaging with them. I am at a complete loss to understand why any white

8


historian might suppose himself or herself unmarred and unencumbered by his or her own

white prejudices.24

As sport historians, Osmond and Phillips rejected the framing of Indigenous Australians as mute

objects of curiosity in Australian sporting history, and relinquished the idea that the sport historian

could articulate the only true account of Aboriginal sporting history. Through this engagement they

were able to understand the inadequacy of the ‘straight-line stories’ produced by their discipline as

well as the pervasive ‘white-line stories’ that frame the narrative possibilities for which we as

Indigenous people can articulate ourselves.

Cherbourg’s Ration Shed Museum: Phillips and Osmond reflect

In our second paper ‘Indigenous Sport and Heritage: Cherbourg’s Ration Shed Museum’, we adopted

a different approach from the Eddie Gilbert statue project.25 We continued to follow ethical

protocols by being consultative, respectful of community needs and providing feedback. What we

took from our work on the Eddie Gilbert statue was that our perspectives did not always match

Indigenous perspectives. Nor could we predict Indigenous views based on our knowledge base or

world view, which necessitated the inclusion of Indigenous voices. For these reasons, we specifically

engaged techniques to prioritize Indigenous perspectives. Indigenous voices were derived from oral

interviews, commentary in films, and excerpts from books and biographies. From these sources, we

created bricolages to combine individual opinions and explore meanings in relation to specific topics

– Cherbourg as a settlement and sport as a cultural activity – and testimonies about the buildings of

the Cherbourg Historical Precinct: the Ration Shed building, the Superintendent’s Office and the

Boys’ Dormitory.

Our privileging of Indigenous voices acknowledged what Jackie Huggins referred to as the

‘folds of silence’ created by two centuries of colonization.26 We extended Huggins’s ideas by

9

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 acknowledging another fold, that of gender. We observed that Cherbourg women’s sporting stories

are largely untold, but that there are also very few men who had written, or been prepared to be

interviewed, about their life at Cherbourg.27 We also discussed our role as historians in the process.

We were the storytellers taking snippets from sources, organizing them in some sort of order (to

create a ‘stained glass’ window rather than ‘smashed’ glass),28 and creating a narrative that provided

an understanding of the meanings associated with the key topics. In an attempt to foreground our

role in the process of storytelling and the constructed nature of our bricolages, we initially styled

each selected contribution from interviewees and authors with a different font typeface. This

technique was accepted by the editor as an appropriate strategy to problematize the bricolages, but

ultimately rejected by the publishing house. Our opportunity to be reflective, to move the historian

in from the sidelines, and to highlight each individual Indigenous voice that was meshed into each

bricolage, never made it to print.

While it was frustrating not to be able to emphasize the constructed nature of the bricolages

through font changes, the opinions we highlighted clearly showed the diverse meanings and feelings

associated with their history within the community. The buildings of the Cherbourg Historical

Precinct evoked the traumatic emotions of grief, fear and shame that depicted the experiences of

many people in this settlement. What was interesting and challenging for us was the role of sport in

this context. We take a critical stance on sport that recognizes its positive dimensions, but

simultaneously acknowledges sport’s Janus face: its ability to discriminate, exploit, perpetuate

inequities, and reinforce power dynamics. Cherbourg’s story epitomized sport’s Janus face. Sport

was used to exclude, punish and oppress Cherbourg’s sportspeople, yet it was also an incredibly

important aspect of community life acting as a form of amusement, resistance, celebration and,

most importantly, as a catalyst for community identity for over 50 clans who had been forcibly

removed to Cherbourg.29 The sport exhibitions specifically emphasized positive experiences and

emotions, unlike other displays which explored painful aspects of life at Cherbourg. In this sense, the

10

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 role of sport as a powerful tool of institutionalized racism remained as a backdrop to memories of

sporting achievements and opportunities as symbols of pride, resilience and hope.

The second major strategy adopted in this paper was the inclusion of Aunty Sandra Morgan

as a co-author. Aunty Sandra is a central figure in the creation and maintenance of the Ration Shed

Museum. She was one of the pioneering women who generated the idea of a historical precinct at

Cherbourg with the Ration Shed, the Superintendent’s Office and the Boys’ Dormitory as focal

points. Together with her sister, Aunty Lesley Williams, Aunty Sandra rescued, moved and renovated

a derelict Ration Shed to create Cherbourg’s historical precinct in 2004. More than the initiator of

the Ration Shed Museum, Aunty Sandra is grant application writer and fund raiser, curator of some

very moving exhibitions, co-author of historical works and collaborator on numerous films on the

history of Cherbourg, organizer of an army of volunteers who contribute to the museum in a variety

of capacities, and an Elder with the responsibility of hosting tourists who visit the museum.

Aunty Sandra was also our chief contact at Cherbourg. Over the years, she has helped us

organize workshops, assisted in identifying appropriate people for interviews, conducted interviews,

and aided in locating important historical material. In terms of this paper, Aunty Sandra clarified

specific issues about the development of the Ration Shed Museum and provided access to films

biographies and historical sources about Cherbourg. For these reasons, we invited Aunty Sandra to

be a co-author of the paper, which she accepted. From our perspective we were honoured that she

respected our work, our understanding of Cherbourg and our representation of the Ration Shed

Museum. It is fair to note, however, that we were unsure about precisely how to collaborate with

Aunty Sandra in terms of the article. We found the paper challenging to write as it merged

deconstructionist history, new museology, critical heritage and cultural geography, and only after

creating a draft that we thought would meet the intellectual criteria for the commissioning academic

journal did we think it was appropriate to send it off to Aunty Sandra for her opinion. We gained her

approval, but there was no feedback or commentary. Perhaps in our desire to create an

11

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 intellectually rigorous paper and trying to impress reviewers, we had snuffed out our collaborator’s

potential contribution. In essence, trying to meet the discursive traditions of the field and failing to

engage knowledge production beyond our specific and exclusive Western perspective had

disempowered Indigenous perspectives. Rather than engaging our Indigenous collaborator, we had

silenced her.

12

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 Cherbourg’s Ration Shed Museum: Bond reflects

According to Aboriginal scholar Karen Martin, Aboriginal people were always the ‘objects of curiosity

and subjects of research, to be seen but not asked, heard, or respected’.30 In describing her own

relationship with anthropologists as a Traditional Owner, she observed that the ‘strength of my

Aboriginal knowledge and heritage has not always been recognized by others, particularly

researchers’,31 and that her ‘knowledge and experiences were measured against predetermined

categories of culture to which it was deemed I could prove no new or convincing examples’.32

Martin is not alone in this encounter; the regulation of Aboriginal knowledge via Western knowledge

systems has been recognized and contested by a number of Indigenous Australian scholars.33

However, the regulation of Aboriginal knowledge cannot be remedied simply by including Aboriginal

perspectives, voices and consultation.34 Lester-Irabinna Rigney argues, ‘unless Western knowledge

orthodoxies are interrogated, the basis of their power will continue to reproduce the colonised as a

fixed reality, including the subtext of Indigenous “intellectual nullius”’.35

Sport historians, too, act as regulators of Indigenous knowledges, silencing and oppressing

Indigenous peoples and communities, regardless of how altruistic or benevolent they are. Thus the

sport historian, to cross lines, must adopt a transformative methodology. Here, Indigenous people

and communities are not just informants but also experts and co-narrators in the research

endeavour, as was the case with the co-authorship arrangement between Phillips, Osmond and

Morgan and the Indigenous-facilitated community workshops. The lines between the researcher and

the researched inevitably become blurred as the research becomes a co-constructed story. It can

never be anything more than a co-construction because irrespective of how inclusive of Indigenous

voices the process is, Western knowledge systems and structures still govern the relationship and

production of knowledge.

13


The tensions of practice in engaging Indigenous knowledge and perspectives are evident in

the work undertaken by Phillips and Osmond. We observe the process of co-authoring a publication

and note that it might not be all that straightforward, collaborative or inclusive. Yet, one might argue

that a publication output is not the only mechanism for demonstrating effective engagement. Aunty

Sandra Morgan’s long and productive involvement in Cherbourg historical preservation, yielding a

museum precinct, books, films and other ‘outputs’, is evidence of this. Furthermore, because

Aboriginal collaborators might not articulate themselves in the same way that an academic sport

historian might does not mean that they are necessarily dissatisfied with, or excluded from, the

process. Uncle Paddy Alberts’s note, cited at the start of this paper, offers testimony to this and

offers a different experience of engagement with Western-trained researchers from what Martin

encountered. While Martin was silenced, Uncle Paddy Alberts was not; he remained silent in the

workshop, but his note (cited in the Introduction) was testimony to a different type of engagement.

Engagement with Indigenous knowledges is not about quantity of Indigenous voices in the text

produced, but rather is about the quality of the engagement with Indigenous peoples. For Phillips

and Osmond, the authoritative account is replaced with a deeper critical self-reflection upon their

work, interrogation of their own processes and a forging of deeper relationships with Indigenous

Australians and with Indigenous knowledges, memories and meanings.

Part 2: Transforming the narrative

Marching Girls: Bond, Phillips and Osmond

Our research and reflection on the Eddie Gilbert statue and the representation of sport in the Ration

Shed Museum revealed new narratives and new perspectives on old stories but, perhaps more

importantly, the research process also revealed the power and utility of stories for Indigenous

Australians. In the work on the Ration Shed Museum we observed a resistance to the deficit

14

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 discourse critiqued by Bamblett, and the statue research exposed local, Cherbourg meanings around

Gilbert. While hardship and adversity featured in Indigenous memories and accounts, it did not

necessarily frame those narratives. To a Western researcher familiar with the travails of inmate life

at Cherbourg, or aware of Gilbert’s life story, this might seem strange, but you only have to look at

how Indigenous people talk about ‘story’ to understand why these particular pasts are not storied as

overwhelmingly negative. According to Sylvia Scott, ‘our stories are our survival’, while Aunty Sandra

Morgan attests ‘our history is our healing’.36 Australian history may not be all that empowering for

Indigenous Australia, but we can see that, for Indigenous people, history-telling is redemptive,

personally and politically. Tuhiwai-Smith says ‘reclaiming history is a critical and essential part of

decolonisation’ and many Indigenous historians no doubt are spurred on by the desire to redress the

silencing of Indigenous voices and experiences.37 Indeed, former Cherbourg inmate, Aunty Ruth

Hegarty, explains her autobiography as ‘our truth as we lived it’, and laments that many of her fellow

dormitory girls ‘have died before they heard their story told’.38

Sport history, for Indigenous people, can be personally redemptive as a site of agency where

tragedy is narrated as triumph and folds of silence can be unfurled. This agency has been captured

both in the research process and the outputs of this work of exploring Indigenous expressions of

sport history in Cherbourg. Michael Jackson argues that narratives enable us to get a sense of

ourselves as active participants in a world that ‘for a moment seemed to discount, demean, and

disempower us’.39 It is not surprising that sport history might serve a different narrative purpose for

Indigenous peoples than for the white sport historian. We recognize that different sports stories

might repeatedly be collected, collated, remembered and retold, not because they differ in terms of

an inherent truth or accuracy of events, but rather because of their capability to produce more

accurate truths about Aboriginal Australia; truths that are empowering rather than demoralizing. We

note that both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians engage in the editorializing of stories in

order to produce narrative truths of themselves. Through our own collaboration, we are more

15

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 interested in transforming the narrative possibilities for Indigenous Australians and sport historians,

rather than contesting their accuracy.

Like Mary Gergen, we are cautious not to overstate the transformative possibilities of

narratives and recognize that they are ‘expressions of hierarchical social arrangements’.40 To

evidence this, Gergen observes the practice of casting women in supportive roles in the Western

narrative while men are cast as heroes. She contends that it is not because heroines do not exist, but

simply because their stories have not been recorded and disseminated. Certainly in terms of

Australian sport history narratives, ‘the gender of Indigenous bodies as with all racialised bodies

does matter’.41 We note that Aboriginal women feature heavily in sport history discourse, far less

often as sporting heroes (with rare exception, such as Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Cathy Freeman

and Nova Peris), and instead as history keepers, organizers and spectators. Lawrence Bamblett

highlights the important role of women within his own community but in the context of the

Aboriginal sport history narrative he produces in his recent text, Aboriginal women seem typecast as

historians, activists, and advocates.42 While Bamblett notes that Aboriginal men and women might

tell sports stories differently, the index of Aboriginal sportspeople mentioned in his book tells us

little about Aboriginal women as sportspeople or as sporting heroes more specifically.43 Bamblett

references Aboriginal track star Cathy Freeman, not in terms of her athletic ability but instead the

act of carrying the Australian Aboriginal flag on her Commonwealth Games victory lap in 1994. As

symbolically powerful and seminal as that action was (and her subsequent actions at the Sydney

Olympic Games in 2000 with her torch-lighting role, her gold-medal win in the 400 metres and her

victory lap),44 its emphasis at the expense of her long and impressive athletic record arguably elides

her sporting prowess.

We note that the ‘straight-line stories’ of Australian sport history are both racialized and

gendered, underestimating and silencing Aboriginal women’s agency and ability. In Cherbourg,

while our research revealed to us that Aboriginal women were not always standing on the sidelines

16

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 as spectators or storytellers, we observed that women’s sporting history was overshadowed by

men’s achievements. The records of men like Eddie Gilbert and Frank Fisher have received national

attention, but athletic women who have succeeded at a state, national and international level have

been largely overlooked in public discourse.45 Barbara Boney (the first Aboriginal woman to win an

international medal in karate), Andrea Collins (basketballer and Queensland Indigenous Sports

Legends Hall of Famer), Genette Simpson (1990s international shotputter), and Irene Simpson

(Australian Indigenous Basketball Squad player) are not well-known names outside Cherbourg.46 The

local female rugby league team, the Hornettes, was the subject of a recent televised documentary

film,47 but otherwise there has been little attention given to women’s sporting achievements. In

Cherbourg itself, however, women’s sporting stories are celebrated, and while this includes

commemorations to women like Boney, Collins, Simpson and Simpson in the Ration Shed Museum,

the stories extend well beyond this to include woodchoppers and, more prominently, marching girls.

Stories of the Cherbourg marching girls were particularly resonant and powerful to Phillips

and Osmond, repeated throughout our many visits over the past several years. Cherbourg was active

in this national phenomenon from 1957 to 1962, at one stage fielding four teams, and many of the

girls who participated are now community Elders based locally or far-flung across Australia. These

women communicate regularly, and many meet at Cherbourg annual reunions where they reminisce

about their sporting pasts as marching girls. When a sport exhibition – ‘Play the Ball’ – was mounted

at the Ration Shed Museum in 2014, some of these women assembled a large collection of

photographs and the local sewing group reimagined the uniforms they wore for display.48 As

researchers, we were asked to help gather articles and photographs from inter-state newspapers

about some of the teams’ major achievements. These evoked powerful memories for the local

women, who were keen to share them with us. As a result, the three of us plan to undertake our

next research project around the Cherbourg marching girls, capturing the stories told by them and

about them.

17


At the outset of our connection to Cherbourg, some four years ago, Phillips and Osmond

would not have chosen to focus on the marching girls, largely because they seemed to represent a

marginal chapter in the community’s sport history. We did not realize then that they had placed

highly in national competition in 1959, or that a group of marching girls had been invited to

participate in the prestigious Moomba Parade in distant Melbourne in 1962, but even if we had

known this the marginal status of this sporting activity and the short time-frame of their heyday

relative to the enduring Cherbourg powerhouse sports of boxing, cricket, and rugby league would

likely have deterred us. Marching girls have received little attention in sport history, let alone

Aboriginal sport history.49 Without doubt, our own race and gender also influenced the scope of our

initial enquiries. So what changed for us?

What changed was our growing appreciation of Indigenous voice and stories and the new

narrative possibilities of Indigeneity. When listening, we heard stories about Gilbert, Fisher,

celebrated boxers and legendary football teams. When truly listening, we heard equally popular

stories, also powerfully rendered, about women, about a beloved blind rugby coach, and about

other individuals and teams whose names may not be known beyond the community but whose

memories are very much alive within Cherbourg. These stories have not been recorded and told by

academic historians, but their story-tellers, the people of Cherbourg, are effectively local historians

whose memories and stories are poignant, powerful and relevant to their own lives and to how they

make sense of their lives. And it is not only the stories themselves that are important, but also the

ways they are told and the emotions that are expressed, ranging from pride to humour to

wistfulness to sadness. These stories, hidden to the outside world but alive within the community, or

at least significant facets of the community, clearly challenge the deficit discourse and tragic tropes

of much of Indigenous sport history.

The Cherbourg marching girls offer an opportunity to investigate a unique sporting story via

a collaborative research approach. On the one hand, it will bring Aboriginal women in ‘off the

18

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 sidelines’ and place them front and centre of local sporting history (literally and figuratively), both

documenting and legitimizing their story for locals and disseminating it more broadly. On the other

hand, it offers an opportunity to dissect and understand the meaning behind the appealing,

alliterative but not altogether transparent slogans: ‘our stories are our survival’ and ‘our history is

our healing’. Through what mechanisms do stories help heal? Is it the story-telling itself, an element

of catharsis, or the emotions involved?

Our challenge in tackling this new project will be our approach and in allowing the story-

telling to influence the history produced. Through the Eddie Gilbert statue we came to recognize the

significance of Indigenous voices in offering alternative perspectives and insights to Western

knowledge. In the Ration Shed Museum paper we more thoroughly embraced Indigenous voices.

This new project offers an opportunity for empowerment, both for the women involved and for us

as researchers.

For this project we will use a different methodology to what the sport historian would

typically use. We will adopt an Indigenist research tool of ‘yarning’, which ‘shift(s) the way we

research’ and ‘suit(s) Aboriginal liberation struggles for broader empowerment, self-determination,

self-management and sovereignty’.50 Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu describe yarning in the

context of research as where ‘both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places

and topics of interest relevant to the research study’.51 Yarning as a research tool necessitates an

intimate relationship between the researcher and researched; a dialogical encounter with

Indigenous people as fellow-historians rather than a detached, solitary, methodical collection or

recording of facts or events. Rather than interrogate, measure or extract Indigenous

knowledge/experiences, yarning is a two-way approach that builds on the notion of reciprocal

knowledge exchange between the researcher and the researched. Yarning as a research

methodology also recognizes the storied ways in which Indigenous people

communicate. Indigenous people often talk through and with stories, which ‘is a feature of

19

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 Indigenous societies where oral traditions were the main form of transmitting and sharing

knowledge with individuals and between groups’.52 This transformative research practice will enable

us to capture the events and meanings of the Cherbourg marching girls’ stories as narrated by them.

And through this, the narrative possibilities about Aboriginal women in Australian sporting discourse

will be transformed. Aboriginal women will be neither silenced nor sidelined as historians or

sporting heroes within Australian sport history.

Conclusion

Working in Indigenous history requires historians to shed their isolated work practices and embrace

collaboration. Not only collaboration in terms of co-authoring written papers, as we have done with

Aunty Sandra Morgan and are doing in this forum as two sport historians who are working with

Bond, an Aboriginal health researcher, but collaboration in terms of being willing and open to co-

narration with the participants in the story. These histories are co-constructed endeavours that

position Indigenous knowledge and understanding at the centre of the story-telling, even if Western

systems and structures govern the production of knowledge. Collaborating in terms of authorship

and story-telling requires a paradigm shift in what counts as worthwhile sport history. While stories

about Indigenous successes and triumphs against the odds in mainstream sport, like Eddie Gilbert’s

tale, still have their place; more localized, community-based histories that are central to meaning-

making for Indigenous people, like the marching girls of Cherbourg, take on a higher priority. In

these contexts, we are able to move beyond the deficit discourse that has defined Indigenous

Australian sport history to recognize the agency of Indigenous people produced through, and in,

Indigenous people’s sport history narratives. For Indigenous people, the ability to narrate one’s own

story is redemptive in itself, however the production of stories which reveal narratives of hope,

pride, determination and strength of Indigenous people both on and off the sporting field is truly

transformative, for Indigenous people and sport historians.

20

Chelsea Bond, Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives and Aboriginal Australia”. The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 7 May 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1038704 Notes

1 Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past’, The Journal

of American History 93, no. 1 (2006), 117.

2 Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow: Pearson, 2003), 93. 3 Thom Blake, A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (Brisbane: University of

Queensland Press, 2001). The term ‘inmate’ was used by Queensland Directors of Native

Affairs to refer to settlement residents: see, for example, letter from the Director of Native

Affairs to Settlement Superintendents, 14 April 1959, reproduced in: Ration Shed Museum

Book Committee, On the Banks of the Barambah: A History of Cherbourg from the Ration

Shed Museum (Murgon, QLD: Ration Shed Museum, 2013), 48. Blake also uses the term to

refer to the reality that Aboriginal people at Cherbourg were incarcerated.

4 The term ‘Stolen Generation’ was coined and introduced by Peter Read, The Stolen Generations:

The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 to 1969 (Sydney: New South

Wales Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs & Aboriginal Children's Research, 1982).

5 Blake, A Dumping Ground; Ration Shed Museum Book Committee, On the Banks of the Barambah.

6 Murray G. Phillips, ed., Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis (New York: SUNY,

2006).

7 Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History (London: Routledge, 2005); Richard

Pringle and Murray G. Phillips, eds, Examining Sport Histories: Power, Paradigms, and

Reflexivity (Morgantown, WV: FIT, 2013).

8 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,

2004); Anna Clark, History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom (Sydney: New South,

2008).

9 Gillian Hibbins, ‘A Seductive Myth’, in James Weston, ed., The Australian Game of Football Since

1858 (Melbourne: Geoff Slattery Publishing, 2008), 45.

21


10 Chris Hallinan and Barry Judd. ‘Duelling Paradigms: Australian Aborigines, Marn-Grook and

Football Histories’, Sport in Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 975-86; Barry Judd, On the Boundary

Line: Colonial Identity in Football (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008); Barry

Judd, ‘The Question of Indigenous Origins and the Uneven Playing Field: Outside the

Boundary of the Dominant Paradigm’, Sport in Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1,026-33.

11 Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies

Press, 2008),

212.

12 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory: A

Methodological Tool’, Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 78 (2013): 331-47; Martin Nakata,

‘The Cultural Interface’, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 36, Supplement (2007):

7-14; Lester-Irabinna Rigney, ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in

Science: Framing Indigenous Research Towards Indigenous Australian Intellectual

Sovereignty’, Kaurna Higher Education Journal 7 (2001): 1-13; Linda Tuhiwai-Smith,

Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books,

2012). For sport history examples, see: John Bale and Mike Cronin, eds, Sport and

Postcolonialism (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Lawrence Bamblett, Our Stories are our Survival

(Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013); Daryle Rigney, ‘Sport, Indigenous Australians and

Invader Dreaming: A Critique’, in John Bale and Mike Cronin, eds, Sport and Postcolonialism

(Oxford: Berg, 2003): 45-56.

13 Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips, ‘Viewed from All Sides: Statues, Sport and Eddie Gilbert’,

Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1 (2014): 16-32.

14 Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), 9.

15 Gary Osmond, Murray G. Phillips, and Mark O'Neill. ‘“Putting up Your Dukes”: Statues, Social

Memory and Duke Paoa Kahanamoku’, International Journal of the History of Sport 23, no. 1

22


(2006): 82-103; Gary Osmond, ‘Shaping Lives: Statues as Biography’, Sporting Traditions 27,

no. 2 (November 2010): 101-11.

16 Osmond, ‘Shaping Lives’, 106. See also Murray G. Phillips, Mark E. O'Neill, and Gary Osmond,

‘Broadening Horizons in Sport History: Films, Photographs, and Monuments’, Journal of

Sport History 34, no. 2 (2007): 271-93.

17 Osmond and Phillips, ‘Viewed from All Sides’, 17 (citing Nakata, ‘The Cultural Interface’, 9).

18 See, for example: Bamblett, Our Stories are our Survival; John Maynard, Aboriginal Stars of the

Turf: Jockeys of Australian Racing History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003); Rigney,

‘Sport, Indigenous Australians and Invader Dreaming: A Critique’.

19 Lawrence Bamblett, ‘Straight-Line Stories: Representations and Indigenous Australian Identities in

Sports Discourses’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (2011), 17.

20 Osmond and Phillips, ‘Viewed from All Sides’, 24. Emphasis added.

21 Bamblett, Our Stories are our Survival, 34.

22 Ibid.

23 Mike Colman and Ken Edwards, Eddie Gilbert: The True Story of an Aboriginal Cricketing Legend

(Sydney: ABC Books, 2002).

24 Frances Peters-Little, ‘Introduction’, in Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, and John Docker, eds,

Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU E Press and

Aboriginal History Incorporated, 2010), 4.

25 Murray G., Phillips, Gary Osmond, and Sandra Morgan. ‘Indigenous Sport and Heritage:

Cherbourg’s Ration Shed Museum’, Journal of Heritage Tourism 9, no. 3 (2014): 212-27.

26 Rita Huggins, and Jackie Huggins, Aunty Rita (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994), 4.

27 Exceptions include Albert Holt, Forcibly Removed (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2001); Ruth

Hegarty, Jack's Story: The Life and Times of a Cherbourg Dormitory Boy (Taigum, QLD:

23


Yubuna Munya, 2011). See also Domo Boys, directed by Mark Newman. Maleny, QLD: Zebra

Crossing Pictures, 2013.

28 Christopher Wibberley, ‘Getting to Grips with Bricolage: A Personal Account’, The Qualitative

Report, 17 art. 50 (2012), 6.

29 Ration Shed Museum Book Committee, On the Banks of the Barambah, 14.

30 Karen Martin, ‘Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for

Indigenous and Indigenist Re-search’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 76 (2009), 205.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘When the

Object Speaks, A Postcolonial Encounter: Anthropological Representations and Aboriginal

Women’s Self-Presentations’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 19, no. 3

(1998): 275-89; Rigney, ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in Science’.

34 Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines, 212.

35 Rigney, ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in Science’, 10. Emphasis in the

original.

36 Sylvia Scott, ‘Our Stories are our Survival’, in Older Women’s Network NSW, ed., Steppin’ out and

Speakin’ up (Sydney: Older Women’s Network NSW, 2003), 127. Bamblett quotes Scott and

uses this quotation for his book title, citing Scott as ‘S. Ingram’: Bamblett, Our Stories are our

Survival, 49; Morgan, personal correspondence with authors, 2014.

37 Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 31; Bamblett, Our Stories are our Survival; Huggins

and Huggins, Aunty Rita; Peters-Little, ‘Introduction’.

38 Ruth Hegarty, Is that you, Ruthie? (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2003), 141, 43.

39 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 15-16.

24


40 Mary Gergen, ‘Once Upon a Time: A Narratologist’s Tale’, in Colette Daiute and Cynthia Lightfoot,

eds. Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society (Thousand Oaks,

CA: SAGE, 2004), 270.

41 Moreton-Robinson, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’, 339.

42 Bamblett, Our Stories are our Survival. 43 Emma Young, ‘Review of Our Stories are Our Survival, by Lawrence Bamblett’, Oceania 84, no. 1

(March 2014), 102.

44 Toni Bruce and Emma Wensing, ‘“She's Not One of Us”: Cathy Freeman and the Place of Aboriginal

People in Australian National Culture’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (2009): 90-100.

45 Coleman and Edwards, Eddie Gilbert; Paul Connolly, ‘The forgotten story of…Frank Fisher’,

Guardian, 19 September 2013,

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2013/sep/19/forgotton-story-frank-fisher

(accessed 20 October 2014).

46 None of these women has been inducted into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sports Hall

of Fame. For Collins, see Colin Tatz, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport (Sydney: University of

New South Wales Press, 1995), 287, 290-91.

47 NITV, Sisters in League, TV documentary, 2014.

48 South Burnett Times, ‘Girls March into History’, South Burnett Times, 19 June 2014,

http://southburnett.com.au/news2/2014/06/girls-march-into-history/ (accessed 10

September 2014).

49 For a rare exception, see: Charlotte Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in

Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960 (Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams

Books, 2011).

25

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2013/sep/19/forgotton-story-frank-fisher

http://southburnett.com.au/news2/2014/06/girls-march-into-history/


50 Bronwyn L. Fredericks, Karen Adams, Summer May Finlay, Gillian Fletcher, Simone Andy, Lyn

Briggs, Lisa Briggs, and Robert Hall, ‘Engaging the Practice of Yarning in Action Research’,

Action Learning and Action Research Journal 17, no. 2 (2011), 16.

51 Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu, ‘Yarning About Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous

Research’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 3, no. 1 (2010), 38.

52 Ibid.

26

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