Inter-Indigenous Encounters in Aboriginal Literature

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the inter-Indigenous encounters represented by Aboriginal Australian writers in conversation with critical debates in the field of global Indigenous studies. After contextualizing the internationalism of Aboriginal literature through a commentary on Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Mudrooroo (formerly Colin Johnston), it traces encounters between Aboriginal Australian language groups in Alexis Wright’s fiction, Indigenous peoples of the Pacific and Latin America through the works of Lionel Fogarty, and Dalit poets in India and Celtic ancestors in Ireland through the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann. The author argues that these writers redetermine their position in a decolonizing world by articulating a portable, extendable, and dynamic understanding of rootedness. Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright essays this understanding in her essay, ‘A Journey in Writing Place’, where she describes the world as a ‘sacred place’ where ‘we are all interconnected’, a shared homelands for those separated by geography, cultural paradigms, and historical experience.