Words that matter: Yindyamarra, Wiradjuri resilience and the settler-colonial project in Tara June Winch’s The Yield

Abstract

In recent decades, the concept of resilience has gained currency in various scientific disciplines (MacKinnon and Derickson 2012, 254), including the social sciences and humanities, which have also contributed to problematizing and critiquing sometimes reductive perceptions of the concept.*Critical analyses of various cultural narratives within literary scholarship pointed to the complexity and double-edged nature of resilience, echoing recent critiques of resilience as having been co-opted by the neoliberal, late capitalist regime (Bracke 2016, 851) due to its capacity to move away from collective accountability for social injustices by placing emphasis on “individual responsibility, adaptability and preparedness” (Joseph 2013, 40). Such complexity is visible, among other groups of literary narratives, in contemporary Indigenous cultural production.1 On the one hand, resilience is used to evoke the positive connotations of adaptation and persistence, highlighting survival, resistance and continuance of Indigenous peoples and their cultures – in Gerald Vizenor’s terms “survivance”2 – despite settler-colonial policies of extermination and persisting pressure to assimilate. On the other hand, Indigenous narratives also started to communicate a sustained critique of resilience as perpetuating settler-colonial dominance and cultural hegemony – for example, through endorsing or even appropriating selective traditional Indigenous knowledges and principles (particularly those related to ecological awareness and land management) by environmental and eco-critical discourses, while simultaneously denying Indigenous people their political, cultural, and land sovereignty.3 Contemporary Indigenous narratives originating in settler colonies, such as Canada, the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, often tell intricate stories of resistance, reclaiming, and healing, but also stories which simultaneously foreground the precarity, vulnerability, and marginalization of Indigenous lives which are still disempowered in the current settler-colonial project4 and governed by dominant neoliberal regimes. In his introduction to Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Daniel Heath Justice explains that Indigenous stories have the power to “heal the spirit