Dgadi-Dugarang: Talk Loud, Talk Strong: A Tribute to Aboriginal leader Uncle Ray Jackson, 1941-2015

Abstract

In this brief memorial essay, we pay tribute to the late Uncle Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and tireless social justice activist. Uncle Ray Jackson’s social justice work encompassed a broad spectrum of social movements. Throughout his work, he insistently brought into focus critical relations between national and transnational formations of settler-colonial power, between its racist modalities of governance and the lived violence that it produced for its targeted subjects, including Indigenous peoples, refugees and asylum seekers and other ‘suspect’ peoples and racial undesirables. We also mark one of Uncle Ray Jackson’s most significant contributions to the ongoing assertion of unceded Aboriginal sovereignty in the context of the Australian settler-colonial state: his establishment of a number of Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies. We discuss the political significance of these ceremonies for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.