ABSTRACT
Although some have expressed understandable distaste at the thought of non-Indigenous people defining their Indigeneity (Huggins 2003, 60), such defining (whether official or popular) unavoidably involves both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in "a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation" (Langton 1993, 33). It is also clear that the fluid and contextual nature of Indigenous identity over time and place is not particular to either Australia or the Indigenous context. There are innumerable types of human identity that vary across many aspects of experience, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, class, physicality, language, religion and profession, to name only a few. All these identities are complex, multi-faceted socio-historical constructs which are established through public acts of self-representation, private accountings of oneself or through the experience of being named by others (Jenkins 1994), including by prevailing discourses. Although I will focus here on racial identities, it is important to remember that "we do not experience the world only as Indigenous or non-Indigenous" ( Cowlishaw 2004b , 70–71) but also through many other facets of our identity that we adopt and/or that are ascribed to us by others.
