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This article braids our personal and political narratives to examine approaches to creative ethnography as a technique of writing for activists’ goals. Using autobricolage—mixing art, activism and ethnography—we explore narrative as a decolonising strategy to centre Indigenous ontology. The insights carry implications for how we understand and engage with the experiences of others, particularly marginalised voices. The article also offers reflections on the current climate of protest and its new opportunities for social change and solidarity. These reflections are as important for defenders of climate change as for protesters of BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. Shared histories of colonialism and migration can potentially provide the basis for productive settler-Indigenous social relations among current and future generations. By sharing our experiences as native migrantsliving in Australia—Harwood from Aotearoa and Guntarik from Borneo—we show how stories reinforce one another, trigger new memories and reveal parallel politics.

In 2016, we organized digital storytelling workshops with First Nations1participants in Melbourne (Australia) to cocreatively “map” sites of historical significance through locative technologies. These digital memory maps allowed participants to share their oral stories about their relationships to different places with broader audiences through a cultural walking trail mobile app from both their individual and their collective perspectives. Functioning much like a museum tour guide in an outdoor setting, we named this app “Memory-scapes,” as it would feature First Nations people's memories of different places, allowing interested members of the public (tourists, students, and educators) to listen to and watch the digital stories as they physically walked the trail. We found that a cocreative archival framework for digitizing these oral histories supported our work with community. Through this project, we illustrate how First Nations people's knowledges are populating the archive in forms that place the control of content back in their hands. These community-driven archives reveal how new archival practices are shifting the media landscape of representational possibilities. While calling attention to the politics of representing place, we also question the emancipatory potential of digital technologies for First Nations people.

Aboriginal historiographies challenge conventional interpreting of societies and cultures’ histories which are often linear, singular, and excluding of other than dominant narratives. But alternative solutions to conventional history are often binarized as minority or oppositional groups and simply “accommodated” in what continues as the dominant story. The work of Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari from his time with Gurindji people, an Aboriginal Australian group from the Kalkaringi region in northern Australia, is discussed here as an innovative way of re-framing how we think outside such dichotomies. Following Hokari's lead the author's own cross-culture positioning is then used to explore Aboriginal construction of knowledge and history amongst the Ganai/Kurnai, the Aboriginal people originating from the region of Gippsland in southern Australia. This broadens the argument for valuing multiple alternative histories that such lived experience offers for majority and Indigenous peoples alike.