The Pulse of History IN MY BLOOD IT RUNS AND INDIGENOUS IDENTITY
Indigenous Australians’ lives are too often overlooked by politicians, media organisations and the broader sphere of middle-class Australia. In light of this, director Maya Newell’s feature documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019) provides tremendous insight into the Northern Territory’s Indigenous communities. By directing its point of view through protagonist Dujuan Hoosan, a ten-year-old Arrernte/ Garrwa child-healer, Newell’s film offers an intimate portrait of the embodied and psychological experience of being a young Aboriginal child. In My Blood It Runs is one of those unique films that gets under one’s skin, with audiences of diverse backgrounds given the opportunity to empathise and identify with young Dujuan and his family as they struggle to cope with various government institutions – the education system, welfare and law enforcement – whose ostensible purposes are to support individuals and their wider community, but which nonetheless frequently damage lives and communities due to cultural misunderstanding.
Importantly, Dujuan mediates our access to his family by narrating aspects of his life, and he contributes to some of the cinematography by using a handheld camera to shoot footage of them. This manner of revealing Dujuan and his relatives to viewers is sensitive to cultural difference, as it defuses the potentially appropriative nature of documentary filmmaking. Sometimes, Dujuan’s story also involves phrases and words from his native Arrernte and Garrwa tongues, which has the added effect of disrupting a non-Indigenous audience’s point of view.
But what makes this documentary particularly memorable is its emphasis on language’s power to shape and mediate our everyday experience, sense of history and imaginative life. This theme is revealed through Dujuan, who lives within and across three linguistic groups and communities:
