First Nations literatures

Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre is an important anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmate poetry, art and storytelling. Now in its twelfth year and tenth volume, over two hundred First Nations authors have shared their stories, songs and critical reflections to a general reading public, not only enlightening ‘outsiders’ about the conditions and contexts of Indigenous incarceration but also significantly contributing to the canon of Indigenous writing.

Essays and reviews written by First Nations peoples are the models and the tools and the terms settler readers/scholars need to consider in approaching First Nations works.

‘Stories of Aboriginal heroism (like that of Yarri and Jacky Jacky) are not new. In fact, our oldest stories tell of characters of high esteem, knowledge, and courage.’

I wanted to collect the best of our spec fic writing together in this basket of like-minded genres, so that the stories could all be read in their proper cultural context, side by side with their siblings.

Your story is one of defiance and ongoing resistance, Ronnie. Every day you drew breath as a Black woman wearing a blue uniform you were resisting. You may have been required to walk in that world, but your bare Black feet never left our world.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

Whether residing in the skull or a book, in the academic paradigm, the head remains the seat of our intellect, and one of the many big struggles when working for a colonial institution is to resist living in the head, and to honour the rest of the mind that lives in the whole body.

When I began
reading how to make a basket
I wanted to find out what I could do
with the text. How would I tend to
the ‘how to’ aspect of its title?

Shapes of Native Nonfiction brings together and solidifies a genealogy of what First Nations creative nonfiction could be through documenting a gathering of lyric essays that push and expand the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the auto/biographical and/or the academic. In doing this, Shapes of Native Nonfiction invites and gives shape to an approach to First Nations nonfiction that demonstrates moving beyond ethnographic and academic methods; one that experiments with form and embarks on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.

In a colony where blatant police brutality against Indigenous people is the norm, where we suffer the continued desecration of sacred land, live within a health and mortality gap, and a government that seeks to undermine sovereignty in all its forms, we need poets that can see all this – and still celebrate the joy, resilience and love of our community.