Indivisible. We are not separate from the Land.

Boranup Forest, Southern WA

"We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees." Qwatsinas, Nuxalk Nation

It is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue to dishonour the ecosystems which nurture and support our very existence, our future is dire. It is now time for us to recognise that the Indigenous sense of belonging to, and oneness within, the place they live and to their environment is not just a sentiment, but a deep truth. Healing the land has become synonymous with healing ourselves, and vice versa, as it dawns on us that we are indivisible from our environment, and what we do to it, we ultimately do to ourselves. 

Indigenous Peoples (better known as First Peoples) everywhere have a profound knowing that they belong TO the Earth, not that they can OWN bits of her.

“.... the Aboriginal people of Australia believe they are integrally connected with the land, the animal, insect, and plant and sky kingdoms. There is no distinction between these elements. For them, “coming home” is about reconnecting with the place that bore them and that supported them through life. 

As white man heals so too does black man, and as black man heals so too does white man. The land is what connects us all and brings us home to our hearts. Our spirits are thus united. And we can all call Australia home, finally.” liminalsonglines.com/healing/

Aboriginal children playing, collecting bush tucker  1

Indigenous people everywhere have a sense of stewardship of the earth- that their job is to take care of their environment and live in harmony with it- that all life is a gift to be honoured. This doesn't mean they had no impact on their environments- quite the contrary. Aboriginal people have helped to create the landscape they have lived in for thousands of years- they have had complex land management practices as have other Indigenous peoples. The main difference is that indigenous land management practices happen(ed) at a rate and scale that allowed biodiversity to be maintained, rather than the mass extinctions of species we are witnessing today from western land management.

Aboriginal fire-stick farming in the Kimberley

“There are no such things as natural landscapes in Amazonia, the forest has been moulded by native peoples. The monuments of their civilization are not cities and temples, but the natural environment itself.” Darrell Posey, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples.

Kayapo River people in the Amazon. Photo by Cristina Mittermeier

The sense of belonging to, caring for and deep respect for the land and their environment is  synonymous with deep spirituality for Indigenous peoples. 

‎"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?" -Massasoit

From before the times of the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions, European man has set himself the task of controlling and dominating the forces of Nature. He has analysed Nature into its separate parts- and reduced her to nothing more than a complex machine, an instrument simply to be understood and used, overcome, for his own desires. Reductionist thinking of this sort fails to recognise that the whole is greater than the sum of its component parts.  Understanding a single part or even many parts does not necessarily inform how the whole operates. Matter and its parts were seen as female, therefore subservient, and a lower order than spirit.

Francis Bacon stated that: 

“ ...man can recover that right over nature that belongs to it by divine bequest. The gaol is to establish the power and dominion of the human race over the entree universe. The new technologies do not, like the old, merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course, they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” 

In contrast, Goethe has said 

“Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.” 

The more mechanistic view which placed us in control of and superior to Nature as espoused by Bacon, has won out and borne us into an Age of Technology which is so rapacious of Nature that we are destroying many species’ ability to live on our planet and possibly even our own.

Linfen, China- one of top 10 polluted cities 3

Like the alternate views of nature presented by Bacon and Goethe, a debate has also divided believers into those who see the bible as giving humans dominion over all living things while at the same time requiring stewardship. The book of Genesis 1:28 has been interpreted as providing permission for humans to do whatever they like to the environment. 

“God blessed them [Adam and Eve] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

However, there are many now who see such dominion as a misreading of God’s word and that we were actually required to undertake ethical stewardship. Genesis 2-24 provides insights that humans are only a single species in a large and complex web of life we do not entirely understand and can never really control.

What is needed now is a willingness for us to put aside our sense of separation and reconnect with our environments; to stop chopping down old growth forests for wood chips to make cardboard boxes to put our TVs in. The extraordinary biodiversity found in old growth forests may have a myriad of undiscovered benefits to humans in terms of pharmaceutical compounds. Simply connecting with these natural cathedrals has been found to improve physical, emotional and even spiritual health. 

In his book The Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv links the troubling trends in childhood obesity, diabetes, attention-deficit disorders (ADD) and depression, to the increasing disconnect between children and nature- he calls it nature-deficit disorder. It is difficult for children to feel deeply about the disappearing rainforests and the extinction of species if they cannot feel the connection to the birds and trees in their backyard.

“The woods were my Ritalin.  Nature calmed me, focussed me, and yet excited my senses9”.

Our living environments, our homes, families and communities, need to be turned into places of connection and healing. We have the technology and the knowledge to do so. Ian McHarg, sometimes known as the father of ecological town planning, wrote “Design with Nature” in 1969, a book which promotes an ecological view of designing homes and communities. 

McHarg said:

“Surgery on the brain or heart or any other vital organ takes courage. So too does intervention in an urban neighborhood, a degraded wetlands, or any of the other tissues of the living landscape. To heal places, landscape architects and ecological planners must not only have the knowledge and skill to make reasonable diagnoses and to prescribe sound actions, but also the courage to take on difficult challenges.                    -Prospectus (1998) 

George Seddon of Perth has written ‘A Sense of Place’ in 1972, to teach people about appreciating their local environments and the need to protect the fragile Swan Coastal Plain, said: 

“Gardeners are key land managers. Our choices therefore lie not in whether but in how we manage the land. We would all agree that we must do it in an ecologically responsible way.”

Food sensitive urban design- the next design challenge 4

By valuing the ecosystems we live within- the trees in our suburbs, the forests in our areas, the wetlands and deserts, and learning to build our homes in such a way as to connect with the beauty around us, we will slowly heal our families and our communities as well. 

We cannot separate ourselves from our landscapes, and ignore  their destruction as something happening “over there”, without a deep sense of loss of belonging- and then trying to compensate for that loss with more materialism. 

By reconnecting with our belonging, we can regain our sense of wholeness, but also a sense of responsibility towards the landscapes around us, and we can heal together.

“The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished...  more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable.” 

 Ian L. McHarg, Design With Nature

Dadirri

A special quality, a unique gift of the Aboriginal people, is inner deep

listening and quiet still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that isinside us. It is something like what you call contemplation.The contemplative way of Dadirri spreads over our whole life. It renews us and brings us peace. It makes us feel whole again. In our Aboriginal way we learnt to listen from our earliest times. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listene

We are not threatened by silence. We are completely at home in it. Our Aboriginal way has taught us to be still and wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course - like the seasons.

We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers andwater the thirsty earth. When twilight comes we prepare for the night. At dawn we rise with the sun. We watch the bush foods and wait for them to open before we gather them. We wait for our young people as they grow; stage by stage, through their initiation ceremonies. When a relation dies we wait for a long time with the sorrow. We own our grief and allow it to heal slowly. We wait for the right time for our ceremonies and meetings. The right people must be present. Careful preparations must be made. We don’t mind waiting because we want things to be done with care. Sometimes many hours will be spent on painting the body before an important ceremony.

We don’t worry. We know that in time and in the spirit of Dadirri (that deep listening and quite stillness) the way will be made clear.           

We are like the tree standing in the middle of a bushfire sweeping through the timber. The leaves are scorched and the tough bark is scarred and burnt, but inside the tree the sap is still flowing  and under the ground the roots are still strong. Like that tree we have endured the flames and we still have the power to be re-born.

Our people are used to the struggle and the long waiting. We still wait for the  white people to understand us better. We ourselves have spent many years learning about the white man’s ways; we have learnt to speak the white man’s language; we have listened to what he had to say. This learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people to take time and listen to us. We are hoping people will come closer. We keep on longing for the things that we have always hoped for, respect and understanding.

We know that our white brothers and sisters carry their own particular burdens. We believe that if they let us come to them, if they open up their minds and hearts to us, we may lighten their burdens. There is a struggle for us, but we have not lost our spirit of Dadirri.

There are deep springs within each of us. Within this deep spring, which is the very spirit, is a sound. The sound of Deep calling to Deep. The time for rebirth is now. If our culture is alive and strong and respected it will grow. It will not die and our spirit will not die. I believe the spirit of Dadirri that we have to offer will blossom and grow, not just within ourselves but in all.

Edited version adapted from the writings of Miriam Rose Ungenmerr of Daly River

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman

Receiving the Gifts from Indigenous People

In this time of accelerated damage to our beautiful planet, over exploitation of our oceans and fresh waters, destruction of our forests at alarming rates, and mass extinction of wildlife...it is well and truly time that we sought the wisdom of those peoples who lived in intelligent harmony with their environments for thousands of years....Indigenous Peoples, or First Peoples as they are more correctly called. In Australia, we have Australian Aborigines, who comprise the oldest continuous living culture on Earth- they have been here for somewhere between 50,000 and 125,000 years.

Image of Kimberley Elder David Mowaljarlai

Kimberley Aboriginal Elder David Mowaljarlai said:

‘We have a gift we have been trying to give you

 ... We want to fill up your emptiness with meaning so that you can love us and our country. We want to teach all Australians about their belonging in this country ... before it’s too late’.

Many white people are feeling disconnected from the earth, from the land where they live- often far from where their own particular indigenous ancestors lived. Noel Nannup, an Aboriginal Elder from the Perth area has shared that once we have lived here for 6 years, we are part of the land- the land knows us. 

Mowaljarlai also said : ‘Everybody who has been here can come back now, because when you’re walking around, your skin falls off, your hair drops down, even finger nails go onto the ground. All these things go into the earth, that way the land remembers who has been here, because you become part of that land.’  This sense of belonging is what we need right now more than anything- for our own healing, for our childrens’ future and for the planet. It is our disconnection from our living environment, from a sense of responsibility for caring for the land to which we belong - rather than “own”- that is allowing us to exploit, pollute and destroy the very life support systems with which we live. 

“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” From The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Aboriginal People, and Indigenous people everywhere, do not generally think in terms of hierarchies, institutions, patriarchies using left brain thinking. Indigenous people think more in terms of what Mowaljarlai has called pattern thinking or right brain thinking. It is more holistic, broad and inclusive, relational and experiential. It doesn’t divide and cut everything up into pieces- it considers the whole picture, with humans just a thread in the whole woven tapestry of life on earth rather than as the controllers. This more creative type of thinking is desperately needed now to counterbalance the overly rational linear and reductionist thinking of prevailing western minds that does not take everything into consideration but considers everything in isolation and in reference to “me me me”. 

Indigenous people can teach us how to live sustainably in any given place. There are many bushfoods and potentially ‘miraculous’ bush medicines in Australia that we have not yet learned about. From the well known tea tree oil, to witchety grubs, and flowers that have the potential to treat cancer, there is so much untapped wisdom that has been passed down for hundreds of generations.

Australian Native Bush Tucker

Aboriginal people in Australia have incredible skills in living with the land sustainably. We can only benefit from better understanding our environment, from knowing our local bush foods, how to better manage our natural fresh water sources, how to thrive in the hot summer and the cold winters, how to understand the cycles of weather, how to burn the land for the benefit of all species. First though we need to respect this ancient wisdom and we can do that by understanding our own sense of belonging and our proper place within  our landscapes. 

One of the most important things Indigenous Cultures can teach us is how to live together in community; how to value collective wisdom, how to appreciate each other, to rely on and share with each other, how to deeply listen to each other. Indigenous cultures tend to think not so much in terms of individuality as we do in the West, but as a collective- they consider each other and the greater good while making decisions. They have structures in place to guide the community which take into account the needs of everyone, including future generations and their environment. Eldership is valued and old people are not discarded into homes as in they are in the West- their maturity and wisdom is valued and utilized-  but everyone has their place and all contributions are valued. Women’s unique healing and intuitive skills are important as are mens’ abilities to protect, nurture and guide the clan. We can learn from them to consider everyone’s needs and let go of self centredness which does not ultimately serve anyone’s best interests. 

People sitting in a circle, San Salvador

What we have to learn from Indigenous Peoples is incredibly valuable, and we have a desperate need now more than ever to listen to their wisdom, to honour them and to help protect their culture - we will be enriched, reconnected to our landscapes, to ourselves, our families and our communities. 

 Indigenous Peoples throughout the world have been displaced, discounted, their cultures eroded and many lost.

They have been wiped out by massacre, neglect, abuse, alcohol, institutional thinking, and centuries of deep trauma. They need us to recognise their gifts and help them find their place in the modern world, but even more so, we need them. 

Dadirri is a name given to a type of deep listening practiced in Aboriginal Culture- a listening based in respect, inner quiet, still awareness and waiting. A listening that does not try to hurry things up- that patiently waits for things to unfold. Indigenous Peoples have been waiting for a long time for us to listen to them, to learn from them, as they watch us spiral the planet into destruction.

The Earth that they deeply know as our mother, our home is our very life support system. We all have the capacity to listen deeply and we should start now- in fact, it is essential that we do. 

Closing the Gap- Beyond the Stereotypes

Across the planet, the modern lifestyle that we take for granted in the developed world has come at a high cost to Indigenous or First Peoples, and the simple but sustainable and intelligent lifestyles they have maintained for thousands of years. As they have been dispossessed of their traditional lands and lifestyles, colonised by European cultures that do not accept or understand their ways, First Peoples struggle everywhere to maintain their culture, spirituality and stewardship ethic. The inherent value of this wisdom is beyond question. Colonised First Peoples have been surviving on the edges of an often alien prevailing culture and nowhere has this been more poignantly heartbreaking than for the Aborigines of Australia whose disadvantaged status is amongst the worst in the world and is well documented. This occurs within a very wealthy western nation. How do these social gaps become established and maintained?

Unfortunately there is a widespread lack of understanding of the true nature of Aboriginal disadvantage. Many in the white, dominant culture feel that Aboriginal people should just “get on with it”, “get a job”, “stop being so lazy”, and try harder to fit into white culture and overcome their disadvantage. The stereotype of the lazy, drunk, uneducated Aboriginal person who is treated leniently by the court system and given too much welfare, is widespread. Many people do not appreciate the depth of transgenerational trauma that runs through Aboriginal communities and also within most colonised First Peoples across the world. 

The sorts of traumas that Aboriginal people have had to deal with in the past that have led to transgenerational trauma include: 

• being removed from their traditional lands leading to loss of culture and identity;
• exposed to diseases they had no immunity to (sometimes deliberately);
• Elders and community leaders rounded up and jailed leaving the communities leaderless;
• given alcohol and opium;
• given white flour and sugar, sometimes deliberately laced with poison;
• women raped and subjugated by white colonisers and the resulting cross-cultural children forcibly removed from their parents;
• genocide- deliberate rounding up and murdering of whole clans, as well as bounties given to those who killed Aboriginal people;
• and blatant individual and institutionalised racism and ignorance by the dominating culture. 

“Aboriginal youth in the Kimberley region may experience several layers of trauma, through their own direct and secondary exposure as set against a backdrop of historical unresolved trauma and grief. These layers of trauma are thought to be cumulative in the manner in which they inform the adolescents’ experience, and continue to adversely reinforce the basic assumptions that are violated by chronic trauma exposure; that the world is meaningful and safe, that the self is worthy, and that others can be trusted”...8

.... “the endemic nature of family violence over a number of generations has resulted in a situation where ‘violent behaviours become the norm in families where there have been cumulative intergenerational impacts of trauma on trauma on trauma, expressing themselves in present generations as violence on self and others”...Trauma, Transgenerational Transfer and Effects on Community Wellbeing

Today in the modern Australian society, institutional racism continues largely unchallenged as people are constantly exposed to stereotypes of Aboriginal people by a media fixated with scapegoating, supported by governments that advocate simplistic and ineffective solutions to the very real and deeply entrenched problem of Aboriginal disadvantage and continue to divide and conquer Aboriginal people through arduous Native Title land right determinations, mining rights negotiations and Northern Territory-style interventions.

The Australian Aborigines are of course only one community of people that are humiliated in these ways- there are many other communities of First Peoples around the world who are struggling, from the indigenous Amazonians whose beloved forest is being devastated at an alarming rate, the damning of rivers in many places such as India and Canada which stops the indigenous people from being able to carry out their traditional fishing and hunting, to large scale mining which dispossesses Indigenous people from their land in the northern continental America and many other places. Many Indigenous peoples have fought long hard battles to retain or regain control of their lands, but most have been forced to make unworkable compromises along the way, and many have lost their battles completely. 

“These people have already made the place no good with their bulldozers. Our sacred places they have made no good. They mess up our land. They expose our sacred objects. This breaks our spirit. What will we as a people do if these people continue to make all our land no good?” ...The Yungngora community, Australia.

The ongoing legacy of unresolved trauma through the generations makes it very difficult for healing to occur and for those affected to succeed in western cultures. Children who are brought up in a violent home can have as severe cognitive damage as those affected by excessive maternal drinking- and many have both. The cognitive damage that occurs is cumulative since it is not a one off traumatic event but a whole childhood of them- and since neuro-developments are dependent on earlier developments taking place sequentially, normal development is disrupted and doesn’t occur.

“Continuous trauma results in the loss of more energy efficient brain mechanisms for homeostasis until the person is left with much less efficient brain mechanisms and much of the brain functioning must be devoted to simply maintaining homeostasis. This explains why children experiencing early life trauma have difficulty with focus and may appear constantly agitated [hypervigilant] when dealing with linear or production oriented tasks.”.... Early Childhood Laying the Foundations for Life

Despite the unacceptable levels of trauma, there are many Aboriginal people who maintain a high level of social and cognitive function, and who provide good role models within their communities. In fact, despite the common stereotypes, there are proportionally more teetotallers among the Aboriginal population than there are in the non-Indigenous community.  Further examples of success are that there are many more Aboriginal footballers (11%) in the Australian Football League (AFL) than their proportional representation in the Australian population as a whole (2.5%); there are sports stars such as Cathy Freeman, actors such as Ernie Dingo and Deborah Mailman, politicians, teachers and lawyers who have been highly successful as functional role models. The flourishing Aboriginal Art movement has been able to put money back into traditional communities, and also seen some highly successful artists whose paintings have sold for over $1 million, evoking serious investment from collectors and investors .

“It's this increasingly casual reaction to Indigenous achievement and success that is a marker of how far we've come. It's becoming unexceptional to have successful Indigenous filmmakers, artists, doctors, academics, lawyers, nurses and politicians. This is the other side, the often – and unfortunately – untold side, of the story we hear about Indigenous Australia.” ....Mick Dodson, Australian of the Year 2009 

Even with these notable examples of success, there is a long way to go to improve the life expectancy, health, employment, imprisonment and income of many Indigenous Australians (see Figure 1). The size of the social gap demonstrated by the information in Figure 1 is cause for international concern, especially when one considers the wealth currently being generated by sections of the Western Australian community. 

Healing these transgenerational and early life traumas will take a rebuilding of broken trust, time to understand and acknowledge the depth of the problem, deeply assessing and learning from the many failed attempts from ill thought-out institutional interventions. There are of course programs that have served Indigenous people well and these are usually characterised by high level involvement by an effective ethical Eldership in their planning and implementation.

Indigenous Spirituality and a sense of cultural identity are also keys to healing trauma among Indigenous peoples. There have been successful programs which have taken Aboriginal youth offenders out on country to better connect with their own sense of cultural identity. Experienced mentors for these programs have successfully demonstrated what it is possible to achieve and the obligations that go with cultural attunement. Job-readiness training and employment outcomes are more highly successful when Indigenous youth have a robust sense of self and cultural identity. 

Aboriginal Elder Dean Wynne out on country with Aboriginal youths

The culture of institutional Paternalism towards Aboriginal people which has been the approach since the beginning of colonisation and continues today, needs to give way to an approach that directly involves and deeply listens to Aboriginal people in directing their own solutions to the problems they face. The time for going in and making changes for them for their own good is long past and obviously ineffective, and offensive. 

The people who are making a difference are listening, patiently, and gaining trust through a long term approach of working with Aboriginal people rather than on their behalf. Aboriginal people are clan based, not tribal, and collective leadership is a distinctive feature of clans- there was no single leader but a collective process involving Elders and community discussion. 

 It is essential for development of community spirit and collective identity, that many voices are heard amongst Elders and communities. Guidance should be taken from the outcomes of these discussions. This would be true self empowerment in action. 

Indigenous research methodology and governance processes are based on wholism integration, connectedness and adaptation and are now needed in the West more than ever. Across the world, a new generation of Indigenous leadership has emerged, and the First Peoples are taking their place in the world community, with much to offer in this time of environmental and social crisis.