This week I’m IndigenousX

IndigenousX originally began as a hashtag and it stands for Indigenous Excellence. I’m not sure if it was coined by Luke Pearson, but he has certainly been the one to run with it, creating an actual Twitter handle and guiding its style. 

A while back Luke began asking people if they would like to guest Tweet from the account, and since then, a few different folks of given their voice to the account.

Personally I think guest tweeting is a great idea. It kinda supports the notion that there isn’t one Indigenous voice, but many.

I figured my turn would come one day and have been quietly hoping it would be a long way off cause I’m really nervous about what I would tweet about. And I have go laugh because as I was thinking about it, guess what phrase came to mind? Crazily – “what if I’m not black enough”. Argh!!!

Silly hey? Internalised authenticity doubts. Talk about nuts. But it was also because, like the other blackfellas on Twitter I tweet about all kinds of things not just so-called “Indigenous issues” … @ren_1 has recently been tweeting about moving house (poor thing), @nomadiquemc is always tweeting about heavy metal music, and rarely does @ceetothejay let a day pass without referring to Kanye or new pair of kicks she’d love to own.

Conversations about identity and “issues” are definitely discussions that are had, but not to the extent that others may think. Most folks spend their days worrying about the same things everyone else thinks about – Have I got enough money to pay for it? Why can’t the kids take out the rubbish when I ask them to? Do I look good?

So.. it brings me back to my original dilemma, what am I going to Tweet about from the IndigenousX account for the next five days? I’m not 100% certain, but I think I’ll tweet about my ordinary life weekend and weekday life (mum, wife, suburbs, chook-owner, business-owner, wants to exercise more, hates cooking but watches cooking shows, doesn’t garden but reads gardening books) kinda like I do from @leesawatego. I’ll give up the “black enough” insecurity, the self-doubt and self-judgement and just get on with it.

See you on Twitter.
Cheers, Leesa

Ps. I’ll also be a retweeting machine of news & links.

Update: It’s Monday and it turns out my “residency” at @IndigenousX has seen me create a bit of a photographic essay. I decided to resurrect my old Posterous account and have created a new space just for this six day project. You can find it here: http://my-week-of-indigenousx.posterous.com/

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