Post No. 2,786 - Ancestor work

I recently watched one of the Activist Witch’s YouTube videos (probably this one), and afterwards felt I should do some ancestor work - which I hadn't done for some time. 

I was feeling a little guilty about that - in particular, I felt I should have been doing some ancestor work regarding my Indigenous heritage (I had been focused on trying to establish physical connections). As a result, I expected to be berated in some way - possibly because of my white settler heritage (although some of those were renowned for being good with Indigenous people). 

Well ... what I was told off about was not more actively and proudly claiming my Indigenous heritage. 

Oops. 

And hence ... the poem   “Separation”,   updating my “About Me” page,   and this post. 

I cannot talk about Indigenous culture - although there are some truly excellent teachers on that, and I know what they have taught me, but I can talk about my feelings, the reality of that part of my heritage, and ... the fact that I have been robbed of an important part of my life. 

To some extent, I have written about that in various places. 

The important perspective that was emphasised in that meditation is that my people - and all Indigenous people - have also been robbed. Robbed of what I and others could have contributed. 

Even robbed of the ability to claim and use the accomplishments of lost ones such as myself - and, from a mainstream point of view, I have had what many would consider a successful life, thereby debunking all aspects of discrimination based on alleged lack of ability.

I have more to think on with this. 

PS - Stan  Grant's books are also an excellent source of thoughtful, thought-provoking material that is often relevant to this. See also here, and here & here.

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

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Post No. 2,517 - Some of my current reading by Aboriginal authors and further reflections on my heritage

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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Post No. 2,487 - Reflections (on Indigeneity)

Further to my previous posts here and here, the quest to find out more about the Indigenous part of my heritage led me to the free online Sydney University course at https://www.sydney.edu.au/about-us/vision-and-values/our-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-community/kinship-module.html. 

There is a lot to learn - especially about specific kinship relations (which will have to wait until I can get to northern Victoria), and I am feeling overwhelmed ... and concerned about whether, or how well, I can meet my kinship obligations. 

I also won’t restrict my caring - I’ve always put family of choice ahead of family of blood, and life as a whole (especially sentient life) ahead of division into subsets ... much as this  revered  elder showed caring for others.

But this has been an interesting reflection on belonging - especially when I consider my vague but persistent desire to run away as a child in my primary school years. (Starting sailing in high school helped with a lot of things - mostly, being able to enjoy the dynamism of Nature, but it gave me a coping mechanism for much of life.) I also note that several elders - including, I think, the person mentioned above, have been proud of the non-Indigenous parts of their heritage.

But I also note the interview of Gary Blakey at https://youtu.be/Oq23bGXQj0E

I am concerned that his experience of being rejected, despite evidence of being - in part - Indigenous, may wind up being mine. 

If it is, mind you, I’ll keep doing what I am now: I’ll just be missing a formal recognition of part of me - and I’ve had that in other areas of my life as it is.  

PS - I have subsequently come across a very useful - and reassuring - perspective on this at https://youtu.be/AZVtHCTk7PA.

 

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Post No. 2,347 - An updated perspective on my Indigeneity

As a bit of an update and correction of perspective to my post here, I have realised I should be saying my birth father is the closest connection I have to being Indigenous, as his mother was Indigenous.
 

PS - see also here.

 

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Post No. 2,306 - A reflection on my Indigenous heritage (1,760 words, 7 - 11 min. read) [Content Warning: forced adoption, family separation]

I was born in around the mid-20^th Century in Australia, as I alluded to here. What I didn’t mention there was that I was adopted, at around two weeks old - a little old, for the practices used then (they tried to prevent any bond forming between mother and child). That happened in response to social disapproval: my parents were too young to marry when they had me - they did marry when they were old enough, and had two more children.

The laws in that Australian state, at that time, banned making any information available to either party about the adoption. 

When the laws were changed, in the early part of this century, to allow information to be made available (provided neither party objected), I decided to try to make contact. 

The announcement of the changes included some good information on what could happen - i.e., this could be a good experience, a poor experience, or have no effect at all, so I knew the risks up front. After receiving details of my original birth certificate, I started contacting people with the same family name as mine at birth, and eventually I found my birth family. 

So I now have two families of origin - birth, and adoptive (I also have families of choice [friends] and through relationship), and the experience of making contact was very good (although I have a stack more birthdays to remember, and I’m not good at that).

I went through a complex set of emotions during this process: I won’t go into all of my experiences, but, as an example, one issue was balancing my love for my adoptive family with guilt for having looked for my birth family - i.e., does the search lesson my love for my adoptive family? 

The answer is no, as love is additive.

Having found my birth family, I knew from an early stage that there was a strong Indigenous connection (including marriage, and extensive contact) - in fact, I gave a book I had on Indigenous food to one of my birth siblings, as they would appreciate - and use - it far more, and to far greater effect, than I. 

I didn’t think through, or realise, what that could mean - at that time.

Life has been busy-to-hectic for all of us since then, with a strong focus on family, personal, and other issues for all of us - and I am in awe of what members of both my families of origin have coped with.

Thus, it is only recently that I have found out just how close that Indigenous connection is - close enough that identification as Indigenous is a genuinely viable option, although official recognition includes being recognised by the people you are descended from, which I suspect may not happen. 

I am now going to write about my experience of that discovery, and some of the aspects in my decision making about whether or not to identify as Indigenous. 

This is NOT a post about Indigenous experience - only (some of) my personal reactions to discovering how strong my Indigenous bloodline is.

So, my first reaction to discovering that was joy; my second, close behind, was getting caught up in the “what percentage Indigenous is enough to be Indigenous?” mistake.

There are a whole stack of reasons why “percentage of Indigeneity” is a mistake; others are more able to explain that, so I’m not going to try to. I will, however, consider my reaction to one of those arguments, which is that if a drop of Indigenous blood is enough to condemn one to a life of too often violent discrimination (as has been the case in “Australia” * ), a drop of blood is also enough to identify as Indigenous. My initial reaction was that it was verging into a double wrong, but I realised - given some clear thinking! - that it was about taking pride in something that is being used as an epithet or trigger for abuse, much as reclaiming “queer”, or, from the side of the elites, police transforming the epithet “pig” into an acronym “PIG”, for “pride, integrity, guts”: if the agents of the oppressor show this sort of reframing/reclaiming is good, who am I to disagree? 😀 

As it is, I have a reasonable “percentage of Indigeneity” (I won't go into details for a range of reasons, including personal privacy, and protecting those in my life), but a far more compelling motivator for me to accept being Indigenous, and identify as such, is my commitment to being as authentic as I can.

A truth of my life is that I am female; another is that my heritage includes being Indigenous.

However, I cannot escape the other truth of having had (and still having) a life of white privilege - what happened to the school child in WA a couple of weeks ago is unlikely to happen to me on the basis of race (although various forms of violence for other reasons have been a part of my life, and, for my safety I do not go to certain places/situations [some online]). I’ve been as inclusive, activist and caring (including this form of generosity, which I came to through the issue of “Right Livelihood” when I was a Buddhist in my teen years, back in the 1970s) as I can, largely simply because it is right, but there is still an inescapable element of white privilege - actually, I can somewhat relate a little to the character Kay in the film “The Sapphires”.

Considering this more deeply, my concern is actually, to quite an extent, a fear of being unwelcomed or criticised by Indigenous people who did not have the benefit of passing as white. 

The principles and emotions associated with this issue are similar to the issue of “passing” for trans and gender diverse (TGD) people, and in that area, I came down firmly on the issue of choosing not to pass personally and cop all the flak that comes with that, but I understand and accept those who do choose to pass - survival is a desire all of us have, although our paths to that goal may vary. 

That realisation also helped me to come to feel accepting of both that issue, and the issue of “percentage of Indigeneity”.

What also helped was reading that a widely respected Elder, who is no longer with us, was also proud of his Celtic heritage. 

When I came to terms with all that, I wrote the poem at https://musingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2022/10/from.html, which is also copied below (and I have also posted it on Medium): 

From the ancient forests of Europe
came my people
to be
here.

From the hills and dales and mines
of lands green and lands braw and wild
came my people
to be
here.

And to my people already here
my people joined
to pass to me
the braid of many threads
that is I.

However, I also realised that I had missed out on - been robbed of, in a sense - key parts of my heritage. 

I am working at recovering those missing parts of my heritage. I have my birth family siblings for help, but I have strong sympathy for those who have made similar discoveries and have no-one to help them - and I have read some stories in mainstream media about people in that sort of situation. 

I’ve spent some time looking back and wondering what I could have missed in realising, or even suspecting, this aspect of myself before now - and, much as there were people who were aware of my true gender before I transitioned, I can see where some people had picked up my Indigenous aspects well before now.

So ... here and now, I am trying to learn the language of what I think was my grandmother’s people (there is an excellent podcast on Indigenous languages called Word Up, at https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/word-up/id1252891387), and looking forward to ticking the “I identify as Indigenous” box ** when it is next available and appropriate to do so (ticked once so far), and learning more. 

 * Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land. 

PS - there are two other aspects of this that I want to touch on. 

The first is that I also have a spiritual lineage that I am proud of - partly the paths I have walked in this life, partly those I know who are not of this Earth (my BPM  Guides, my spirit family, etc), and the personal experiences I have had in past lives, which include African (pre-colonial era), various Asian, ancient civilisations, Siberian (more than ten thousand years ago, that one), Jewish and other religions, etc.
I know at least some Indigenous cultures here accept the reality of reincarnation - apart from the Dreamtime stories, there was, for instance, a white woman in Queensland a century or so ago, a noted writer who covered peace processes where she lived, who was recognised as a former Indigenous person who had reincarnated (just as I was recognised from my last reincarnation prior to this one by a former comrade).
Those lineages share importance equally with my other families.

The other issue is focus.
There are terrible wrongs that have been and are still being done to Indigenous people in this land (such as the killing I mentioned above), and those must be addressed urgently.
Other wrongs also need to be addressed, such as those being done to people with disabilities, LGBTIQA+ people, those trying to exist on social security, those in lower socio-economic classes, those who are ill or young or aged, etc.
Many of those wrongs also exist in other parts of the world - including, in particular, the spiritual / moral crime of policies that allow, or fail to remedy, poverty. I was very pleased when the name of the electorate I live in was changed away from one of this city’s founders and an abuser of Aboriginal people to that of a respected elder who, in the 1930s, took a petition to the German Embassy in Canberra urging protection of Jewish people in Germany.
Knowing my Indigenous heritage has given me a stronger focus on Indigenous rights, but I’ve been an advocate for Indigenous rights for decades - to the extent I was invited at times by government departments to join organisations that were for an Indigenous membership (something I can now note the irony of); key to this note is that I won't ease up on my focus on helping others, especially globally, existential threats such as the climate crisis and nuclear threats, and problems caused by wars (not only Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine), and globally severe problems such as poverty (and Australia has NO excuse for any poverty).
Charity starts at home, but it doesn't stop there. 

 ** PPS - after further reading and thinking, I’ve now come to accept that, in many circumstances, I can’t claim Indigenous heritage, other than as one factor in my heritage, until I've made contact with my grandmother’s people and been accepted by them.
Given my life circumstances - age, being a carer/distance/the ongoing pandemic, etc ... and the fact that my paternal birth family grandparents [including my Indigenous grandmother, who was in the fierce grip of Lutherism] were responsible for me being adopted out in the first) - that may never happen.
And yet, given that my grandparent's people include my full siblings in my birth family, that MAY actually happen ...

  *** PPPS - ... and I now know I am descended from the Wiradjuri and Widjabul peoples, and will hopefully know our skin names soon ... 

PPPPS - for an updated perspective on some of this, see here ... and also here.

PPPPPS - see also https://medium.com/@lauramquainoo/stunning-news-biracial-people-like-halle-berry-are-not-actually-black-344efa9ff329. 

 

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