One of the books I am reading at the moment is “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World” by Tyson Yunkaporta (Amazon). I haven’t finished it yet, but I am already finding it interesting and challenging. As an example, consider the following quotes:
“Through the lens of simplicity, historical contexts of interrelatedness and upheaval are sidelined, and the authenticity of Indigenous Knowledge and identity is determined by an illusion of parochial isolation, another fragment of primitive exotica to examine, tag and display. There are zealous gatekeepers on both sides, policing, suppressing. Most of the knowledge that gets through this process is reduced to basic content, artefacts, resources and data, divided into foreign categories, to be stored and plundered as needed. Our knowledge is only valued if it is fossilised, while our evolving customs and thought patterns are viewed with distaste and scepticism. I can’t participate in this one-sided dialogue between the occupiers and the occupied.”
“So the recently imposed ‘authenticity’ requirement of declaring an uninterrupted cultural tradition back to the dawn of time is a difficult concession for most of us to make, when the reality is that we are affiliated with multiple groups and also have disrupted affiliations. For many people, these traumatic relations are unsafe to talk about, while for others there are reclaimed connections that are too precarious to declare.”
“Even our organisation into discrete ‘nations’ (to negotiate the structures of Native Title that facilitate mineral extraction) does not reflect the complexity of our identities and knowledges. We all once had multiple languages and affiliations, meeting regularly with different groups for trade, joining in marriage and customary adoption across those groups, including some groups from Asia and New Guinea. I know for many people there are elements of those laws and customs still in place, and I am one of those people. But I also know that the horrific process of European occupation resulted in the removal of most of us from our communities of origin, many to reserves and institutions far from home as part of forcible assimilation programs.”
The author provides a useful analogy of intermediaries between cultures by referencing the three types of Gauls at the time of Caesar’s invasion of then-Gaul now-France:
- those who had been fully assimilated into the invader’s culture - the toga-wearing Gauls;
- those who had not been assimilated at all - the long haired Gauls; and
- those who have a foot in each camp - the short haired Gauls.
From the book:
“The short-haired Gauls, on the other hand, carried enough fragmentary Indigenous Knowledge and struggled enough within the harsh realities of transitional Romanisation to be able to offer some hybridised insight—some innovative sustainability tips to the doomed empire occupying their lands and hearts and minds. Of course, simplistic categories that rank occupied Peoples by degree of domestication do not reflect the complex realities of contemporary Indigenous communities, identities and knowledge. They certainly do not work in Australia. Our complex history as Australian First Peoples does not align with most criteria demanded for authentication and recognition by colonists.”
Tyson Yunkaporta identifies as being equivalent to one of the short-haired Gauls, and thus able to use his position to help others learn from Indigenous culture.
Stan Grant also approaches this aspect, but from a slightly different point of view. From “Tears of Strangers: A Memoir” (Amazon):
“But the same questions could have been asked of many of the blacks present. How many of them were living comfortably in white suburbia? How many were like chameleons, pulling on the cloak of blackness only when it suited them? How many, like me, were living with white partners in comfortable homes with children in private schools? We called ourselves Aborigines, but I was unsure of what that meant any more. What, I asked myself, did I have in common with a black petrol-sniffing teenager from Yuendumu?”
“Australia has us trapped in its pervasive whiteness.”
“White Australia, our perceived enemy, has become our greatest ally. It engages in what sociologists call an ‘imperialist nostalgia’: the lament for the loss of a culture it helped destroy.”
“The Aboriginal political struggle has exposed and smashed prejudice and discrimination. It has fostered a burgeoning pride in Aboriginal heritage. But we must destroy the logic and the language of inequality and inferiority. Black society is forever changing. An immutable, homogeneous Aboriginal identity is untenable.”
“Do I have the same claim on social justice as more disadvantaged blacks? Certainly not. We share a common historical experience, and in some cases a cultural and even a family bond, but our circumstances have transformed a purely racial solidarity.”
Stan Grant has touched on all three of the categories Tyson Yunkaporta described, but in the context of historical abuses - which Tyson Yunkaporta also addresses, although that isn't shown by the quotes I have used.
Although that part of my Indigenous heritage is in the category of toga-wearing Gaul, owing to having spent all my life (with notable rebelliousness - especially becoming Pagan and a lifelong human rights defender, as it is now termed) in a white settler culture, I also share some of Stan Grant’s inner conflict, which I have written about previously (e.g., here). There are other aspects of my life that I have been reflecting on, following my discovery that my paternal grandmother was a Wiradjuri and Widjabol woman, including:
- my extremely bad temper - which, as a teenager, I decided I would control, rather than letting it control me after I literally “saw red” - i.e., my vision was of only blood red (I shudder to think what my eyes would have looked like at the time).
I was aided in achieving that by becoming a Buddhist (and many thanks to a colleague in the 80s, who came from Thailand and had spent six months as a Buddhist monk and taught me a great deal about not aggressively being Buddhist, but having a form of Buddhism that was genuinely considerate of others and avoided unnecessary impositions - I've alluded to his help before - e.g., see here and here) as a teenager, my interest in and pursuit of spirituality generally, and my connection with the dynamism of nature and a sense of accomplishment and self esteem through sailing.
I count my efforts as successful when people are surprised when I tell them I have a bad temper - although the last few years of life, especially in the corporate world, have weakened my hold on that temper.
My sources of anger include - with the benefit of hindsight - past life influences, the heart- and soul-shattering strains of trying not to be transgender (i.e., trying to fit in with society's wrong prescriptions, exerted through social conditioning), being adopted (I was lucky: I was adopted into a good, loving family, but there was unquestionably impact - loss, and difficulty bonding with some of my adoptive family ... especially my maternal grandparents, who seemed harsh and terrifying strangers to me at the time [apparently, on one occasion they were baby sitting me, I ran behind the couch and wouldn’t come out the entire evening], but, looking back, I can see were doing their best to be loving), child sexual abuse, and, I now suspect, losing contact with my birth heritage (and my birth siblings are also passionate about our family history - all of it). These influences culminated in a diagnosis of complex trauma (which most people mis-describe as PTSD) a few years ago.
Could there also be some of the intergenerational trauma that Tyson Yunkaporta and Stan Grant write about in my anger as well?
Maybe.
Does that change how I approach and manage my bad temper?
Maybe. I don’t know - I suspect not significantly ... - my frequent desire to run away as a primary school child. I had no precise idea of where I wanted to go, and a pragmatic understanding of the realities of survival that meant I knew I couldn't survive without a family, so I never went more than a few blocks away from home. Some of this may have normal childhood angst, some of it no doubt my then-unconscious reaction to being adopted, but perhaps some of it was a desire to go back to the lands my heritage came from.
I was fortunate that so much of my adopted family heritage (Irish, English, German, and Scottish) overlapped with my birth family heritage (multiple Celtic including Irish but excluding Scottish, English, German, a dash of Danish - and Wiradjuri-Widjabol), so I could explore that - I even looked into getting dual Irish-Australian citizenship, but my Irish connection was one generation too far removed, I found.
I’ve often thought my desire to run away ended when I found sailing, but perhaps it was also that our adoptive parents had confirmed our adoption, and the unconscious was now conscious, and thus easier to deal with ... - my lifelong Earth Empathy - as I mentioned here:
“as a child, I would often pick up “happy rocks”, as I called them, and take them home; then, when they weren’t happy any more I would take them back to where I found them. It was a bit like having a friend over for the night”.
Going back to “Sand Talk”, the author’s attitude to the dynamism of knowledge (and I have hinted at this topic here) is akin to Stan Grant’s presentations, and, in my opinion, excellent. This quote is an example:
“What I say will still be subjective and fragmentary, of course, and five minutes after it is written it will already be out of date—a problem common to all printed texts. The real knowledge will keep moving in lands and Peoples, and I’ll move on with it. You’ll move on too. Already, you might take away the hand gesture shown earlier, add your own shades of meaning, share it and grow something from that pattern that could never be imagined on a page. I need to pass these concepts on so I can leave them behind and grow into the next stage of knowledge. Failing to pass it all on means I’m carrying it around like a stone and stifling my growth, as well as the regeneration of the systems I live in.”
I emphasised that to younger engineers in my (pre-retirement) retirement speech at the company I work at: knowledge is not static - it evolves, as does our understanding of how to use it and for what purposes.
That is one of the key aspects of the rest of Tyson Yunkaporta’s “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World” that I am looking forward to reading more of.
I am also looking forward to reading more of Stan Grant’s work - and the other excellent books by Indigenous authors that I am also reading - to improve my understanding of this and many other issues.
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