You wrote:
>> It's as if, in your view, a person could remain
>> Aboriginal without having any awareness of the fact;
>
> There are more than a few cases of people, for example the author Sally
> Morgan, who have "become" Aboriginal after discovering who their ancestors
> were, in spite of attempts by parents and/or other family members to conceal
> this. (They told Sally that they were Indian and/or Pacific Islanders. Which
> says something about contemporaneous attitudes in itself.) Morgan, in fact,
> is now accepted as Aboriginal by all concerned.
Yes, that is true, and it is a very interesting phenomenon. People who were taken away from their families often feel a really, really intense (dis)connection to 'their people': they are extremely bitter for having heritage taken away from them, but at the same time they are adamant that they could not take it.
I once witnessed the opposite phenomenon. Sometime around the Olympics, I went to a protest about the stolen generations business. This woman who was phenotypically caucasian down to the blue eyes and blistered sunburns gave this extremely emotional speech where she said she was Aboriginal, but the government had in fact tested chemicals on her that made her white. She cried and cried, her son by her side also crying. Apparently, she was accepted by Aborigines, though I don't know what they made of the story. Nobody dared question it. I wondered about this a lot, and came to the conclusion that I really could not believe her story. That makes it even more interesting. Here is a woman, who was really lumpen, living in the Block (the Aboriginal quarters, where rent and quality of life is about a quarter of the next block). For whatever reason, she identifies with the stolen generations, but instead of having her culture taken away from her, she has had her race.
Partly I think that this and the Sally Morgan phenomenon are only possible because the parameters of discourse are still racist, and that can be a source of strength as well as stigmatisation to people. You can tell the story of how your spirit defied death, and that's always a ripper. But I don't have a very high regard for Morgan, so I won't say any more than that...
Thiago