Feminist Research Ethics and First Nations Women’s Life Narratives: A Conversation

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a reflection on conducting historical research relating to First Nations women’s lives and cross-cultural relationships in ways that are ethical and informed by feminist sensibilities. In dialogic mode, the authors work through issues and insights that have arisen in the process of researching the life story of Arrernte woman Minnie Undelya Apma, who was abducted as a child from her parents in Central Australia in 1920 by anthropologist Herbert Basedow and his wife Olive (Nell). The process of collaborative research between Kath and Victoria ignited a relationship of mutual understanding and empathy that yielded further enquiries. Fundamentally the process created a space for us to talk and think about the many ways we approach and understand the remarkable history of Minnie Apma’s life, that includes how that story is told and by whom. We argue that there are meaningful ways for First Nations and Second Peoples researchers of First Nations’ women’s life narratives to work together, that will not only improve historical scholarship, but also help to build respectful relationships that counteract inequality and ongoing disempowerment of First Nations people in our society.

KEYWORDS:

• Life narrative
• women’s history
• First Nations
• Indigenous history
• family history
• collaborative research
• archival research
• ethics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kath Apma Travis Penangke is a proud Imarnte woman of the Arrernte people of Central Australia and sovereign to this continent. Throughout this paper we will be using the term First Nations People or First Peoples when referring to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia. We will use Second Nations people as it relates to anyone who is not First Nations to Australia.

2 There have been several histories written concerning the Basedow family and Herbert Basedow himself, including one family history authored by a Basedow descendant. However none of these former histories were written in consultation with the descendants of either of the two First Nations girls he abducted.

3 There are some gendered comparisons that could be drawn between the Basedows and my great-grandmother in terms of their complicity in the removal of First Nations girls for domestic labor coupled with their rather contradictory advocacy at times for Aboriginal rights, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this present paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kath Apma Penangke Travis

Kath Apma Penangke Travis is a postgraduate and research student and Lisa Bellear Indigenous Research Scholar at Victoria University. Kath has spent many years examining her ancestral family history and her research seeks to explore ways in which archival stories can be re-claimed, re-authored and re-patriated by First Peoples to address individual, family and community identity and intergenerational healing.

Victoria Haskins

Victoria Haskins is Professor of History and co-Director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre at the University of Newcastle. Since basing her first book on the story of the life of her great-grandmother, a white activist for Aboriginal citizenship rights in the 1930s, she has published extensively on gender, domestic labor, and cross-cultural relationships in settler colonial and imperial histories.