Confirmation of Aboriginality (2024) is a woven sculpture crafted from raffia, depicting three guns arranged in a triangular formation, each pointing outward. The guns are styled after the time period covering the frontier wars, and the operation of the Native Police. The woven guns symbolize the three criteria required in the Confirmation of Aboriginality process: being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander descent, identifying as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and being accepted a such by your community.

Choosing to weave the guns from raffia takes away their ability to physically harm, and instead suggests the psychological harm that can arise from Aboriginal people being forced to police each other. The guns have become a cultural weapon, a form of lateral violence that Aboriginal people are forced to commit on each other, enforced by the colonial state. This three-part test has become a process by which Aboriginal people police each other’s culture, identity, and lineage – often in pursuit of access to opportunities or funding that remain scarce. For members of the Stolen Generation, their descendants, or those who have lost ties with their community, this process can be especially painful, often resulting in the denial of their right to publicly identify as Aboriginal, and their loss of access to culturally appropriate healthcare. This policing of each other’s identity within our communities continues the cycle of patriarchal control that has policed Aboriginal identity for generations.

The outward-pointing guns in this piece represent a proposed shift in direction, urging a reconsideration of this process, and a stop lateral violence within our communities. It asks that we instead direct our attention to the state—the origin and enforcer of colonial violence, the beneficiary of the history of colonial violence, and now of the commodification of Aboriginal culture.

 The work challenges the idea that we must fight for scarce resources – instead, we must address the structures that profit from Aboriginal culture without redistributing those benefits. Through this piece, I advocate for an end to this lateral policing and call for accountability from the institutions and colonial structures that perpetuate the exploitation and division of Aboriginal people.

Handwoven from raffia in Naarm.