Publishing Indigenous stories and championing Indigenous women has always been important to the press. Below are some books we recommend you read …
Decolonizing feminism always prioritizes the collective liberation of Indigenous and other women and names patriarchy as the central component of women’s oppression.
In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory.
Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women.
Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology.
This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.
APRIL 2023 | ISBN 9781925950649 | Paperback | 257 pages
RE-RELEASED WITH A NEW PREFACE
Offering an exciting ride into how the world could be, this book is the one we have been waiting for. Feminists have long been saying we could do life differently, here is the local and global exploration of what needs to change, what must go and how together we can make a new reality. A visionary book with a focus on local and global politics and social movements, Wild Politics presents a powerful critique of global western culture. Susan Hawthorne unpicks the structures of power and knowledge, law and international trade rules, as well as probing issues that intimately affect our daily lives. Wild Politics concludes with a compelling vision for a world inspired by biodiversity.
JUNE 2022 | 9781925950687 | Paperback | 140 x 216 mm | 484 pp
Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet?
In this enlightening yet devastating book, Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity and incisiveness on how patriarchy is wreaking destruction on the planet and on communities. The twin mantras of globalisation and growth expounded by the neoliberalism that has hijacked the planet are revealed in all their shabby deception.
Backed by meticulous research, the author shows how so-called advances in technology are, like a Trojan horse, used to mask sinister political agendas that sacrifice the common good for the shallow profiteering of corporations and mega-rich individuals.
The biotechnologists see the lure of cure, rising share prices and profits.
She details how women, lesbians, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and the very earth itself are being damaged by the crisis of patriarchy that is sucking everyone into its vortex. Importantly, this precise and insightful volume also shows what is needed to get ourselves out of this spiral of destruction: a radical feminist approach with compassion and empathy at its core.
Shame is an emotion of the powerless because they cannot change the rules.
The book shows a way out of the vortex: it is now up to the collective imagination and action of people everywhere to take up the challenges Susan Hawthorne shows are needed.
This is a vital book for a world in crisis and should be read by everyone who cares about our future.
NOVEMBER 2020 | ISBN 9781925950168 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 196 pages
Biddy Wavehill Yamawurr, Felicity Meakins, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Violet Wadrill
Gurindji country is located in the southern Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gurindji people became well known in the 1960s and 1970s due to their influence on Australian politics and the Indigenous land rights movement. They were instrumental in gaining equal wages for Aboriginal cattle station employees and they were also the first Aboriginal group to recover control of their traditional lands.
In Karu, Gurindji women describe their child-rearing practices. Some have a spiritual basis, while others are highly practical in nature, such as the use of bush medicines. Many Gurindji ways of raising children contrast with non-Indigenous practices because they are deeply embedded in an understanding of country and family connections. This book celebrates children growing up Gurindji and honours those Gurindji mothers, grandmothers, assistant teachers and health workers who dedicate their lives to making that possible.
2019 | ISBN 9781925581836 | Paperback | 210 x 297 mm | 96 pp | Four colour + QR codes
In Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin Diane Bell invites her readers into the complex and contested world of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia; teases out the meanings and misreadings of the written sources; traces changes and continuities in oral accounts; challenges assumptions about what Ngarrindjeri women know, how they know it, and how outsiders may know what is to be known. Wurruwarrin: knowing and believing.
In 1995, a South Australian Royal Commission found Ngarrindjeri women to have “fabricated” their beliefs to stop the building of a bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. By 2001, in federal court, the women were vindicated as truth-tellers. In 2009, the site was registered, but scars remain of that shameful moment.
In the Preface to the New Edition, Diane Bell looks to the world that “will be”, where talented, committed Ngarrindjeri leaders are building the infrastructure for future generations of the Ngarrindjeri nation and challenging the very foundation of the State of South Australia.
The Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 and its evocation of an inclusive “us” has propelled the Ngarrindjeri on the path to “practical reconciliation”. But progress has been uneven. Petty politics, procrastinations and prevarications stand in the way of its realisation.
Diane Bell writes as an insider who is clear about the bases of her engagement with her Ngarrindjeri friends and colleagues. The story will continue to unfold and Diane Bell will be there. There is unfinished business.
Awards
Winner, NSW Premier’s Gleebook Award for Cultural and Literary Criticism
Finalist, The Age Book of the Year
Finalist, Queensland Premier’s History Award
Finalist, Gold Medal of the Australian Literary Society
Finalist, Kiriyama Award
2014 | 9781742199184 | Paperback | 234 x 152 mm | 730 pp
eBook Available
For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK
with Marlene Derlet
Invisible Women of Prehistory is a revolutionary book that challenges our preconceptions about the past.
We often think of history as a linear development in which we are steadily moving out of a violent and patriarchal past to a more equitable and peaceful future. While we have no shortage of wars – and the incidence of violence against women is alarmingly high – we are told that humans have never lived in such peaceful times. We continually hear that our predecessors were violent but also that patriarchy is inevitable and universal. But what if none of this were true? What if we were descended from peaceful societies in which women were respected and equal to men? Would this inspire us to seek new ways of organizing our lives and of interpreting the present?
Based on many years of research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster and linguist Marlene Derlet take on the world. They argue that three million years of peace, a period when women’s status in society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war during which men have come to hold power over women.
They challenge the academic resistance to these ideas and re-examine both the archaeological work of Marjia Gimbutas and recent research into the prehistories of Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas, Australia, South-East Asia and Oceania.
2013 | ISBN 9781876756918 | Paperback | 240 x 170 mm | 404 pp | LOW STOCK - ALSO AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS
When the Ngarrindjeri women of South Australia asked Diane Bell if she would work with them in the running of some workshops to develop a booklet about culture and governance, none of them realised quite where it would take them. This book is the result. It has developed from a booklet to a book that outlines their visions for the future. A future in which their culture is respected, their stories heard, their laws carried out.
2008 | ISBN 9781876756697 | Paperback | 248 x 176 mm | 145 pp
Mapping inter-cultural relationships as they are played out in a remote Aboriginal settlement in Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert, this book challenges White Australians to reconsider their relationship with Indigenous peoples. Unpacking White cultural practices, it explores the extraordinary difficulties which Indigenous women face when they attempt to maintain and pass their cultural knowledge, customs and skills on to their children and youth. From 1999 to 2001, Zohl dé Ishtar lived and worked intimately with a group of thirteen women elders to establish a vibrant intergenerational cultural knowledge transmission program: the Kapululangu Women's Law and Culture Centre. Through this profound experience Zohl identified 'Living Culture', the cultural energy which is created when individuals live their culture to its fullest expression enabling them to transform their worlds even when to do so seems impossible. Her profound radical feminist analysis of the socio-cultural context surrounding this Indigenous women's initiative challenges White attitudes and behaviours and offers a deeper comprehension to those who aspire to be involved in collaborative projects with Indigenous peoples. A lyrical and passionate book.
2005 | ISBN 9781742199795 | Paperback | 220 x 140 mm | 425 pp
eBook Available
For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK
Modewarre is the Indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the Indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common). It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756505 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 120 pp
What do Halloween, Atlantis, Subaru, the American Presidential elections, the Petticoat Lane markets in London, the ship Titanic and atlases all have in common? Each can be traced to the legends of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. Poets, priests, prophets, shamans, storytellers, artists, singers and historians throughout time have all gazed into the night skies and come under their spell.
Inspiring and captivating diverse civilisations, this star cluster has left an indelible mark on the human psyche. Munya Andrews, a Bardi woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, examines the myths and legends of the Pleiades from Indigenous and ancient cultures around the world. Designated at M45 on astronomy charts and maps, the nine visible stars are named after the Seven Sisters from Ancient Greek mythology, and their parents, Atlas and Pleione.
Around the world, people looked to the skies to tell them when to sow and harvest their crops, and when the rains would come. The ‘sailing stars’ have guided explorers and endless migrations of people. In Old Europe, among the Ainu of Japan and in Indigenous Australia the Pleiades were associated with water and birds. They become Oceanids, Ice Maidens, Water Girls and the Subaru. The Parthenon in Athens, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and the Mayan Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, are all said to be aligned with the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades will amaze and awe you, and above all will remind you that all of humanity shares the night skies.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756451 | Paperback | 217 x 138 mm | 368 pp
eBook Available
For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK
‘I was running a workshop in the Kimberleys, and in the circle a woman began to speak from a place of deep pain and despair. She described herself as bad, dirty, ugly, words she had taken into herself from childhood experiences of abuse. I lent forward and sang her a song. “How could anyone ever tell you, you are anything less than beautiful ...” While sitting with her, as the words settled into her soul, another woman said to the circle: you are recreating song lines — from trauma trails. I was honoured by this description of my work.’
Providing a startling answer to the questions of how to solve the problems of generational trauma, Trauma Trails moves beyond the rhetoric of victimhood, and provides inspiration for anyone concerned about Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities today. Beginning with issues of colonial dispossession, Judy Atkinson also sensitively deals with trauma caused by abuse, alcoholism and drug dependency.
Then, through the use of a culturally appropriate research approach called Dadirri: listening to one another, Judy presents and analyses the stories of a number of Indigenous people. From her analysis of these “stories of pain, stories of healing”, she is able to point both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers in the direction of change and healing.
2002 | ISBN 9781876756222 | Paperback | 217 x 140 mm | 324 pp
BESTSELLER
Women are rarely mentioned in the literature as owners of country in their own right or as decision-making individuals; they appear as wives and mothers, their relationship to the jukurrpa always mediated through another. Yet I believe women enjoyed direct access to the jukurrpa from which flowed into rights and responsibilities in land, a power base as independent economic producers and a high degree of control over their own lives in marriage, residence, economic production, reproduction and sexuality. Living in the community, developing friendships that have spanned decades, award-winning author Diane Bell shines a light on the importance of women's role in Australian Aboriginal desert culture.
As maintainers of land, ritual and culture, Indigenous women of central Australia share the patterns of their lives in this remarkable and enduring book. Daughters of the Dreaming (first published in 1983) is an outstanding study of Aboriginal women's lives, and a fine precursor to her award-winning Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin.
2002 | ISBN 9781876756154 | Paperback | 230 x 150 mm | 242 pp
This is a powerful feminist critique of the Western concept of development, which has brought profound changes to the lives of women in the South over the last thirty years. It is also an attempt to rediscover and rehabilitate traditional indigenous knowledge as an important basis for empowering women and re-establishing the foundation of reciprocity in the North-South dialogue. Sinith Sittirak looks at the wreckage "progress" has wreaked on the lives of Thai sex workers and of Indigenous peoples globally and contrasts this a portrait - in words and pictures - of her own ‘undeveloped’ mother: gardener, agriculturalist, cook, entertainer, tool and toy inventor and maker, traditional doctor, resources manager, energy conservationists, food scientist, home economist, sustainable developer, ecologist and environmentalist. In exploring the possibilities for an appropriate development path, Sinith Sittirak applies the framework of a political economy of development which acknowledges the politics of identity and difference. Central to her framework is the recognition that development is part of that universalizing process which imposes sameness by speaking for or naming the Other by excluding difference.
2001 | ISBN 9781876756000 | Paperback | 218 x 137 mm | 153 pp
When Doris Kartinyeri was a month old, her mother died. The family gathered to mourn their loss and welcome the new baby home. But Doris never arrived to live with her family - she was stolen from the hospital and placed in Colebrook Home, where she stayed for the next fourteen years. The legacy of being a member of the Stolen Generations continued for Doris as she was placed in white homes as a virtual slave, struggled through relationships and suffered with anxiety and mental illness.
2000 | ISBN 9781875559954 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 140 pp
Jacqueline Rule
He’s in a new home, turning his bag upside down, emptying the contents onto the rug in the middle of the room. It was there, he knows he packed it, the framed picture of his mum, he saw it inside his bag in the social worker’s car. In the picture, she sits. In her rocking chair, their chair, a small pillow tucked behind her, jutting out behind her elbow. Little Cat is on the shelf behind the chair, a row of his books, the window slightly open. Sun pouring through, the photo slightly overexposed.
Faith and Evelyn are close friends, neighbours, and single mothers of Luke and of Mitch – and both bear the scars of the trauma of colonisation and the Stolen Generations. When Faith dies unexpectedly, Luke’s childhood in Sydney is severed into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ and a chain of catastrophic events is unleashed that will alter the course of his life.
Navigating the upheaval of a broken foster system (that serves as a pipeline to poverty and incarceration in ‘juvie’), The Leaves is a bittersweet meditation on motherhood and loss, on the power of female friendship, and the role of the state in perpetuating violence.
Luke’s journey exposes the aftermath of colonisation, as the nature of punishment, historical trauma and healing are examined. In doing so, the novel reveals the cruelty and futility of the youth detention system, and the violence of the law itself.
Through the pursuit of unattainable justice for Luke, The Leaves raises larger questions about a society that is yet to take responsibility for its own historical crimes.
MAY 2024 | ISBN 9781922964021 | Paperback | 176 pages | 140 x 216 mm