Paper short abstract:

This paper explains how the dynamics of the pan-Indigenous identity movement enabled the Hope Vale mission elite to re-orient themselves and retain their social position in the wake of the 'Aboriginal renaissance' from the 1970s.

Paper long abstract:

In early 1970s, Fiona Terwiel-Powell observed the early signs of an "Aboriginal renaissance" in the Hope Vale mission on the south east of Cape York (1976: 322). Travelling activists and young Guugu Yimidhirr people returning from southern cities were bringing "modern thinking" into the once-isolated Lutheran settlement, including the idea that Indigenous Australians should take pride in their difference from the settler-colonial majority (322). The light-skinned mission elite were sceptical of this new approach, Terwiel-Powell noted, because this group derived their high status from their presumed physical and cultural proximity to the European ideal of respectability. The mission elite worried that an Aboriginal cultural renaissance would upend the established hierarchy; promoting the marginalised dark-skinned families who were said to "live to blackfellows" or "camp", and leaving them "marginal to both cultures" (Terwiel-Powell: 308).

This paper will argue that two features of the pan-Indigenous identity movement have ensured that the Guugu Yimidhirr elites' fears have not come into fruition. Firstly, people of varying degrees of decent were given an equal claim to this new identity; and secondly, the movement was organised around sanitised and re-traditionalised representations of Aboriginality. These dynamics have enabled the entrepreneurial descendants of Guugu Yimidhirr elite to reclaim and benefit from their Indigenous identity, without renouncing the standards of respectability instilled in them by their parents.