Decolonial memory activism: grandmothers against removals, After the Apology, and the struggle for self-determination

Around the world, mothers and grandmothers have seeded movements to remember atrocities and demand redress, justice, and accountability. One such movement, Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR), initiated by First Nations women in Australia, is a paradigm of decolonial memory activism. In their campaigns protesting ongoing removals of Indigenous children from their communities, GMAR strategically mobilizes the memory of the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations, holding it up as a failed moral promise rather than a celebrated national memory. Amplifying the significance of memory in the GMAR movement, a documentary film, After the Apology, links GMAR’s activism in the post-apology era to the memory of the struggle for justice for Stolen Generations in the 1990s. Both the GMAR movement and After the Apology merit the attention of memory scholars for their decolonial approaches to memory and activism, and their advocacy for Indigenous self-determination. Self-determination rarely features as a subject of inquiry in the field of memory studies, or in studies of memory activism, but is fundamental to Indigenous aspirations for a better future. Drawing on insights from memory studies, critical Indigenous studies, and feminist scholarship, I explore GMAR’s mobilization of “sorry” and “Stolen Generations” as traumatic memes, and the film’s remembrance of and advocacy for self-determination. To draw out the significance of this movement on a local and national scale, I initially view it through an up-close lens, which in turn provides the basis for assessing the movement’s transnational connectivity.