Challenging Indigenous Marriage from Within: Memories of the Tiwi’s Martina and the figure of Malinche

• Main Author: Rademaker, Laura
• Other Authors: Boris, E, Dawson, S T, Molony, B
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2023
• Subjects: Martina; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/304848; https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003050384-8; https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/304848/3/TMP39092136202311614444.pdf.jpg

This chapter readdresses and realigns Indigenous women’s 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 women’s accounts of their foremother. When the story is translated into the cultural categories and priorities of Tiwi people, it is clear the Tiwi understand Martina’s actions as achieving important social and marriage reforms for their community. Martina’s 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 people’s 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.