Queering Ideas of Indigeneity: Response in Repose: Challenging, Engaging and Ignoring Centralising Ontologies, Responsibilities, Deflections and Erasures

This presentation and accompanying soundtext video work ponders the responsibility of Aboriginal queers to find or argue our own place within an external understanding of Indigeneity. If we have this responsibility, then what corresponding responsibility does ours or the broader community have in understanding who we are? And who are we? Do we face the same homogenisation of our experiences that we encounter in the pan-indigenising of our communities? Or can we act as individuals and cohorts to demonstrate diversity and flag difference as a robust act of sovereignty? Must we blend - and yet make visible and discrete - each aspect of our multifarious identities in order for us to be comprehended? Both the paper and soundtext video work further worry these expectations, and they do so in repose, from a comfortable, centralising ontology and reflection assisted by the application of a framework that requires understanding to be accomplished by those who find us challenging.