To Be Two: Racing and E/Racing Myself As a Non-Aboriginal Woman and Mother to Aboriginal Children (Essay‪)‬

Introduction If I use the word "story", what does it mean to you as a reader? Perhaps like me, the word story takes you back to a place in your childhood where everything was lived through your imagination. For some of you, the word story might easily be replaced with others such as fairytale, fable, fiction or it might even take on a more cynical twist to mean a fanciful retelling of facts. Story is a kind of remembering and Franz Fanon might mischievously suggest that stories are revolutionary which should "properly be called a literature of combat" (1967, p. 193) for they evoke dangerous truths about a nation's history and identity. If Hannah Arendt were here she might say that "storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it" (1968, p. 105) and Virginia Woolf would insist stories are essential for us to begin moving from the "cotton wool of daily life" to "moments of being" (1976, p. 72). Storytelling is one of the primary methods of writing in critical race research, and in this paper, I would like to take up Patricia Hill Collins' (2004, p. 45) call for a critical racialised theorizing of motherhood in feminist thought to consider what it means to be a non-Aboriginal mother to Aboriginal children. I take an autoethnographic approach to ask questions about discourses of whiteness at play in my everyday experiences of mothering and how my white race power and privilege manifests as motherwork with my children. I share the lingering uncertainties I hold about essentialist categories of race by asking whether being a non-Aboriginal woman makes me a "good enough" mother to my Aboriginal children and by exploring the ways in which my understandings of motherhood have shifted across the "colour line" (Dalmage, 2000). Is it possible as Irigaray (2000) asserts "to be two" in this context, and what kinds of racing and e/racing of self and m/other take place?