Respecting Protocols for Representing Aboriginal Cultures (2014)

This essay undertakes a detailed discussion of how respecting protocols for representing Indigenous cultures supports the interests of Indigenous communities and producers of stories with Indigenous content. To highlight the importance of Indigenous protocols I review the prominence and reception of Aboriginal stories in Australian film and literature and discuss how protocol guidelines can prevent problematic representations. I demonstrate how protocols influenced writing Calypso Summer (2014), a novel exploring issues relating to my cultural group, the Nukunu, to illustrate the challenges encountered and benefits gained from employing Indigenous representation protocols.The key ideas discussed in this paper are that observation of Indigenous protocols serves to maintain Aboriginal culture which underpins the protection of the environment and relations between individuals and communities. Representations of Aboriginal culture that are developed without observation of Indigenous protocols are more likely to misrepresent Aboriginal people and communities and undermine opportunities for the sharing of knowledge and strengthening of Aboriginal communities and their relationships with others. I show how Aboriginal people are taking the lead in representing our cultures, observing protocols in the development of artistic works and communicating protocols in order to protect the interests of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal producers of work that features Indigenous content and the communities such works relate to.Aboriginal Cultures: Engagement and RepresentationIn recent decades works of poetry, autobiography and fiction by Aboriginal people have gained national and international recognition. The success of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poetry from the 1960s demonstrated early interest in Aboriginal writing that has since considerably grown. According to Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss, '[w]hen [Noonuccal's] poetry collection We Are Going was first published in 1964 it began a new phase in communication and relations between black and white Australia. It met with great sympathy and understanding on the part of the white community, running through seven editions, which is remarkable for any book of poetry in Australia at any time before or since,' (Heiss, 'Black Poetics' 180). Oodgeroo's success led the way for generations of Aboriginal writers. Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), for instance, was 'one of the most successful Australian autobiographies ever published ... an immediate bestseller, receiving numerous awards and extensive critical attention' (Heiss and Minter, 115). These widespread successes point to Heiss and Peter Minter's affirmation in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature that 'the resurgence of Aboriginal writing in recent years has taken place during a widespread and vigorous renewal in Aboriginal culture. In the visual arts, performance, film, photography and music, Aboriginal practitioners and their critical communities produce highly significant works that speak to audiences around the world' (7). More recently, this resurgence is evinced by the far-reaching success of works such as Doris Pilkington's autobiography Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996), and novels by authors such as Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, who have both won Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award for Carpentaria (2007) and That Deadman Dance (2011) respectively.Congruently, the increasing prominence of Aboriginal literature has also seen a greater emphasis on Aboriginal themes and content in celebrated works by non-Indigenous authors. Prizewinning books such as Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005), Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004), Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet (1993), among many others, demonstrate a renewed and sophisticated interest in the life and history of Aboriginal Australia. Grenville's The Secret River reveals the emergence of a positive and constructive approach by a non-Indigenous author to Aboriginal content. …