Collecting the Data

Of course, the participants’ vision of what an Indigenous education is – and mine when I started – was influenced by a non-Indigenous, general understanding of Indigeneity and particularly by the idea of ‘traditional’ Indigeneity as the main standard to which one should conform.³

The third and final criterion was that the participants should not have known about their Indigenous heritage during their childhoods, or, if they had, not have identified as Indigenous then. This criterion is linked to the other two: through these participants’

experiences, I wanted to study the evolution of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians during and after the reconciliation era. But it is the point of view of Australians whose childhood had been spent in the ‘mainstream’ part of society, and who would therefore be outsiders to Indigenous culture, that I was most interested in.

In studying how the participants viewed their Indigenous heritage, I hoped to understand if and how the way Indigenous people were perceived by non-Indigenous Australians was evolving. I thought it important for the participants not to have been raised Indigenous to analyse how learning about their Indigenous heritage while having grown up ‘white’ would affect them, and to see what their reactions could tell me about the way Indigenous people are perceived in today’s Australia. I was also particularly interested in the participants’ in-between status, the effects of which, I believed, could be more deeply felt since the participants had not known about their heritage for a number of years. I wondered how the participants would position themselves after having “strictly be[en] white” as Adam, one of the participants, said, and having been exposed mostly to non-Indigenous representations of Indigenous people, but now discovering that Indigeneity is a part of their heritage and a potential part of their identity.

1.1.2.2 Collecting the Data

Finding participants for this research project was not an easy task, which explains the relatively small number of people interviewed in the end (eleven).

3 The notion of ‘traditional’ Indigeneity and its predominance are analysed in chapter 7.

Chapter 1

The first difficulty was of a geographical nature since I have had to divide my time between France and Australia and since, apart from one participant living in Paris, all others resided in Australia.

As I explained in 1.1.1, the second difficulty lay in the criteria I chose to select the participants. I wanted to speak to people who were starting to approach their Indigenous heritage, and who would not have identified yet, or not long before the interview.

Consequently, I expected these people would still be dealing with this knowledge and be in the process of defining what it meant to them. They would not be Indigenous people embedded in their communities. This is the reason why the participants were not easily found. For example, I left copies of the flyer at the Redfern⁴ Community Centre or at the Sydney Eora College for Aboriginal Studies, which did not bring any results. From this, I concluded that people visiting the Community Centre or attending this college would mostly be Indigenous people who already identified as such and were comfortable with their identification.

There were few places where I could approach potential participants who were probably not too certain themselves about where to go and who to turn to in order to engage with Indigenous people and culture. Some of the places where I could have recruited participants were the Indigenous centres in universities. As it turned out, several participants mentioned these centres as spaces where they felt comfortable identifying, or simply asking questions about their heritage.

When I started advertising my project, there was no longer a specific room for the University of Sydney Koori Centre. I therefore posted advertisement around campus. I went to, or sent flyers to, several universities around Sydney including Macquarie University, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the University of Technology of Sydney (UTS) or the University of Western Sydney (UWS). However, I did not receive any replies from students going to these centres.

4 Redfern is a suburb of Sydney known for its high rate of Indigenous inhabitants.

Part I

Another recruiting tool I used was the placement of advertisements in The Koori Mail, a national Indigenous newspaper. Although I assumed that the readership would probably not correspond to the people I wanted to talk to – being, once again, more clearly identified Indigenous people – I received two replies from Miriam and Adina.

I found two other participants through the website of the Australian TV channel SBS. At the time when I started looking for participants, an Insight⁵ program had been devoted to the questions of the rising number of identifications as Indigenous, and to the issue of which criteria can be used to define Indigeneity. The program⁶ dealt with many of the themes I will study in this thesis such as skin colour, legitimacy, part-identifications, certificates of Aboriginality, or financial benefits. It sparked a lot of comments on the website. Among these were those of Casey and Megan who I managed to contact through Facebook, and later interviewed.

Adam was another participant I found through the internet. Adam’s story featured in an article from the Sydney Morning Herald, published ten years earlier, about the rise of identifications among Indigenous people with a fair skin. In this article, Adam explained that although he looked white, he fully embraced his Indigenous heritage, along with his French, Scottish and other backgrounds, and Australian identity. He agreed to meet me to correct some of the mistakes present in the article, and to tell me how he had dealt with his Indigenous heritage in the years preceding and following the article.

Michelle was the only participant whom I interviewed in France. I had posted my research project on the forum of the Australian Expats Meetup Group in Paris and received her reply.

The rest of the participants were either Australians I knew personally and who had previously hinted at their Indigenous backgrounds in conversations we had (Josh and Kate), or people who were contacted by Australian friends of mine after I created a

5 SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) is a radio, online and television network founded in 1975 to provide multicultural and multilingual programs. Insight is a current affairs TV program.

6 Full transcript of the program available here: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/tvepisode/aboriginal-or-not

Chapter 1

Facebook page asking for help in finding participants. This is how I met Andrew, Ben and Vanessa. It turned out that word of mouth was the best way to find participants since several of them, as I explained, were still processing the meaning of their Indigenous heritage and therefore unlikely to identify openly. Several participants would only confide in their close friends or family members. I was able to interview Josh and Kate because I knew them personally. Josh specifically mentioned this to me: “It definitely helped you in that, if I didn’t know you already, I would not have participated.” In the same way, an Australian friend came to tell me that one of his high school friends had recently discovered that he had an Indigenous background. Ben had grown up with little interest or knowledge in Indigenous culture and originally refused to talk to me about the way he felt about this heritage. He finally agreed to answer my questions via emails.

Although I would have been interested in meeting more people like Ben who are not interested in researching their Indigenous heritage or in identifying, this proved difficult.I think it is a possibility that it could be tricky for someone to acknowledge their lack of interest in their Indigenous heritage, if asked directly, as this is a sensitive topic which can be subject to political correctness. The other reason for the absence of such stories is of course that someone who is not interested in his/her Indigenous heritage is very unlikely to want to discuss it at length with a researcher.