First Nations women in an Australian boarding school: A sociolinguistic ethnography

Abstract

This ethnographic account—the first stage of a variationist sociolinguistic study with First Nations youth in Australia—explores the stylistic practices of First Nations women at a boarding school in Western Australia. It shows how drawing on semiotic signs of racialized bodies, anti-mainstream practices, and orientations to language use, borders create a joint identity as an act of resistance. In displaying subtle distinctions at different levels of symbolic practice, students signal differentiation and give shape to fluid peer groups, or Constellations of Practice. Yet, ultimately, their stylistic practices point to a shared project: the articulation of Aboriginal identity in a settler-colonial context and, more specifically, within a white-led boarding school environment where enduring regimes of whiteness persist.