I am researching the life of my grandfather and his journey through the New South Wales ‘Protection’ Board era from 1883 to 1940. I stumbled across Reframing Indigenous Biography and was immediately captured by a book summary that acknowledges and seeks to address the belittling of Indigenous lives, the imagining of them absent, and the rationalisation of their deaths, as colonisation moved swiftly through the country. These themes reached into the heart of my research. I knew I needed to read the book. Reframing Indigenous Biography is structured in four parts starting with the Introduction, then Re-imagining Indigenous Biography, Reconstructing Indigenous Lives, and The Biographers' Journeys. The authors have shared their own research throughout the chapters, including the learnings, challenges, and opportunities to help guide future writing and research in this important field. These chapters share insight on Indigenous biography from Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and the United States, demonstrating the relevance of this book and its contents to these geographies, but no doubt to other countries where colonisation has marginalised Indigenous communities and voices. At the end of each of the four parts in the book, life stories relevant to themes of that section are included. Here readers are provided with Indigenous biographies on a range of people. Some biographies show the absence of archival information, and this is the very thing the book is good at, providing alternative thoughts and ideas on addressing silences and gaps in the archive. In Chapter 6, one of the editors, Shino Kinoshi, uses physical description to record an embodied biography of Whadjuk Noongar man Yagan. Through the description of his physicality, one can imagine Yagan's strength and skill and the awe he inspired in people. This approach is especially important in the absence of other documented material or first-hand accounts as Kinoshi highlights (p. 124). The book was unexpected for me in its composition of chapters followed by examples of Indigenous biographies. Yet this structure also provokes deep thought in the writing of Indigenous lives by giving many examples of biographies as well as informative reflection on process and structure. The book asks of those writing Indigenous biography, how do we reclaim the full humanity of Indigenous people in terms of biography? I ponder this same question while trying to write my grandfather's biography. Gaps in the records, loss of information, and the disregard for Indigenous lives require us to reflect, observe, and feel deeply. The volume deepened my awareness of issues to consider, as well as stimulating innovative ways to approach Indigenous biography. The volume concludes with chapters on the unwritten aspects of Indigenous biography. Chapter 10 by Katerina Teaiwa, Nicholas Hoare, and Talei Luscia Mangioni, focuses on women in the Pacific Islands and the lack of Australian Dictionary of Biography (ABD) entries related to Pacific Islanders in 2023. Despite Australia's strong links to these countries a mere 0.23% of the ABD total entries at that time (p. 239) related to these nations. A call to action on this cannot be misinterpreted. Chapter 9, by Michael McDonnell on Native Americans of the Great Lakes (Michigan area), provides incredible insight into how Indigenous groups managed their relationships with Empire for their own community benefit. This Indigenous agency is a side of the story that is often left out of the historical record and is also an important inclusion in this book. Every chapter of the book provides unique, important, and deeply considered insight for writers of Indigenous biography. Reframing Indigenous Biography addresses a gap, not only in the literature on Indigenous biography, but how we actually do Indigenous biography now that a space exists for these lives to be included. Who writes the biography is an important theme raised repeatedly in the volume. It goes beyond the Indigenous or non-indigenous debate about non-Indigenous biographers to address the important sensitivities of Indigenous biographers writing on the lives of other Indigenous people and how we do that with humility and responsibility. Alexis Wright (Chapter 11) and Natalie Harkin (Chapter 12) provide important considerations for Indigenous biographers doing Indigenous biography by highlighting responsibility, honouring the silences, and understanding how the lives of those we write about are not just individual but deeply entwined in community, family, and place. These are all considerations that now encircle my thinking on Indigenous biography. Reading these chapters reaffirmed my awareness that Indigenous lives, when acknowledged in history or in the archives, are largely written about, not by Indigenous people or from an Indigenous worldview. Reframing Indigenous Biography shows how to do exactly that, reframe the past through our own Indigenous context, bringing lived experience to the biographies of our ancestors and other Indigenous lives. A perspective that helps ‘renew configurations of historic identities’ (McDonell, p. 223), because this balances the history books by providing the broader context that shaped Indigenous people's choices and experiences from their own point of view. This book is not just for Indigenous people doing historical research and writing about Indigenous people. It is a must read for any scholar researching and writing about the life of an Indigenous person. It challenges us to think about how we approach this important work authentically, Indigenous or not. It further challenges us to bring previously ignored and suppressed stories to light. Importantly, Reframing Indigenous Biography gives us innovative ways to address and write the gaps and silences that inevitably exist in this work.
Anna Neumann (Fri,) studied this question.