8.4 Bunuba women (Patsy Bedford, Millie Bedford/Hills, Kaylene Marr), WA Patsy Bedford, Millie Bedford and Kaylene Marr all spoke with my team about their experiences with the native title system and the Bunuba Cultural Mapping Camp, for the benefit of this Report. In their interviews, they all talked about identity, truth-telling and healing from their different perspectives. They also spoke about refocusing our efforts on our own cultural connection to Country and to each other – on our own terms. Not for the sake of anyone else’s system or process, nor on anyone else’s timeline. Native title claims have proven to be divisive for us Bunuba, like so many other First Nations around Australia. Native title has come on top of the initial waves of colonial dispossession, including the Stolen Generations. It has further disenfranchised our families, fuelled lateral violence, and interfered with both our cultural identity and community decision-making. Native title and the subsequent post‑determination processes of identifying for the purposes of PBC membership have proved a process of confusion and re-traumatisation for many Bunuba. One of the reasons native title has been so destructive for our community is because of Western anthropological methodology and concepts associated with establishing connection via descent. This approach to identity has interfered with the way we traditionally identify ourselves and understand connection. Because of the extent of dispossession over the previous century, many different First Nations people from our region were moved around and many have had to reconstruct their identities. The native title process unsettled that identity reconstruction for many people with its focus on genealogy. However, native title has also been good in some ways. In particular, it has revitalised connection to culture for many people. For us Bunuba, it has been helpful to clarify connections to Country within our community, including where other peoples had been living on Bunuba land after being dislocated, but are not Traditional Owners of Bunuba country. A big challenge that we are dealing with now as Bunuba women is to re-focus our connection to Country according to our own culture, on our own terms, and unite and empower our people despite – and utilising – the coloniser’s genealogical foundations of identity. Genealogy cannot be put back into a box and forgotten. Bunuba women have come together to re-possess and make the most of the information that the anthropologists and historians have about our ancestors and the genealogical connections of our community today. We have decided to use that Western style of information in combination with the knowledge we have received orally from generation to generation, to create a foundation of knowledge from which we can start to heal our intra-community conflicts. At the very least, we need to hold all of the genealogical information about us, ourselves. We are navigating the inevitable changes that colonisation, and then native title, has brought about for our understanding of connection to each other and to Country. We are doing this consciously so that we can mitigate the damage so far as possible and ensure protection and promotion of our cultural ways to the full extent possible. The Bunuba Cultural Mapping Camps were designed for people to come together and work through our connections with the help of anthropologists who, in some cases, had more information on genealogical connections than our people. The idea of the camps was to help our community heal from the trauma that was exacerbated and, in some cases, caused by the native title process. 70 Women in Native Title: Native Title Report 2024