Challenging Indigenous Marriage from Within: Memories of the Tiwis Martina and the figure of Malinche

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    Abstract

    This chapter readdresses and realigns Indigenous womens transgressive challenges to marriage by displacing the activities of the colonizer and centering the activities of an individual Tiwi woman, who instigated marriage reform to benefit Tiwi women. The Catholic mission, on the Tiwi Islands off the north coast of Australia, established in 1911, became famous for its so-called Bishop with 150 wives. The mission was part of the early twentieth-century push to protect, Christianize, and civilize Indigenous people in remote parts of Australia. The first missionary, Francis Xavier Gsell, began to buy wives, beginning with a girl he named Martina, to prevent their forced marriage into polygamous unions. Missionaries perceived their actions as saving Tiwi women. This chapter challenges this imperialist and racialized assumption by examining Tiwi womens accounts of their foremother. When the story is translated into the cultural categories and priorities of Tiwi people, it is clear the Tiwi understand Martinas actions as achieving important social and marriage reforms for their community. Martinas actions and efforts were aimed at and for her own people, especially women. Displacing colonizers from the center of the narrative and foregrounding First Nations peoples memories and cultures unravels representations crafted by colonizers of the lives of other first Indigenous women: the Malinche or first women memorialized in the Americas.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationEngendering Transnational Transgressions: From the Intimate to the Global
    EditorsEileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Barbara Molony
    Place of PublicationNew York
    PublisherRoutledge, Taylor & Francis Group
    Pages98-114
    Volume1
    Edition1
    ISBN (Print)9780367505721
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

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