Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental Engagement: Towards Community and Place in India and Australia Michael Davis
Local Connections: memory resides in ochre • In the Dubbo Regional Museum, a lone piece of yellow ochre is among a small collection of Aboriginal cultural objects largely unprovenanced; • Out of context, and with an absence of story and history, yet this ochre speaks powerfully of local Aboriginal peoples’ connections to this place.
Aboriginal community, place and ecology • In the rural region of Dubbo, NSW, Tubba-Gah people talk of a special connection they have to ochre. This connects people, place, ecology and cultural heritage. • Ochre was, and still is important not only as a marker of place for Tubba- Gah Wiradjuri people, but also as a signifier for the name they give themselves. Ochre was a very significant resource, and the Dubbo area was noted for quarries for red and yellow ochre. This material was important in Tubba-Gah society for ornamentation for body and material culture items, for ceremonial and ritual use. It was also an important trade item, and its access and use was governed by strict cultural norms. An early local historian Garnsey had written that ‘the ochre was traded extensively along trade routes [and] there is evidence of it being located hundreds of kilometres distant from Dubbo’ ( Garnsey). The association between the Tubba-Gah people and ochre is important in linguistic as well as symbolic and cultural senses. The clan/band name Tubba-Gah, rendered as Dubboga by Garnsey, was named for the red ochre deposits ‘quarried from the banks of the Macquarie River near Eulomogo Creek’. This is also the site of an important stone axe grinding industry.
The connectedness of things • For Tubbah-Gah, ecology, material culture, environmental stewardship and rights, person, place and cosmology are all powerfully intertwined; • Wiradjuri have strong and enduring connections to rivers and riverine ecologies:
Wiradjuri, environment & place Tubbah-Gah form one of the clan groups of the large Wiradjuri Nation. • • Wiradjuri identity is closely associated with geographical and topographical features, especially rivers: • – Three great rivers, the Macquarie, the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee, intersected Wiradjuir country and gave to the families associated with them some common bonds as river people. (Read, 1988, pp. 2-3). • • Read (1988, pp. 2-3) suggests that for Wiradjuri, identity is formed by connection between people, name and place: • – These associations between people and local area are for the most part ancient. ... The essence of modern Wiradjuri unity, therefore, is not boundaries on a map, not even a common Aboriginal culture, (which is shared by near neighbours) but the old Wiradjuri kin-groupings, now bearing European names, which identify with certain regions. • Anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald: • – Wiraduri consciousness of space, and of the ways in which it is constructed, is a system of knowledge that Wiradjuri people share but, like all systems of knowledge, it is not equally accessed or distributed. Various discourses are available by which Wiradjuri speak of the divisions within the landscape that make that landscape meaningful. These are frequently and not unexpectedly contradictory. They may emphasise the autonomy of the local area but also the commonalities of the region. They may prioritise economic or political or spiritual relations at different times, depending on context.... (Macdonald, 1998, p. 163).
Indigenous people and environmental justice In Australia Indigenous peoples and environmentalism has been shaped by the following themes: • Claims for rights & recognition (incl. Land, native title, heritage) • Calls for greater participation & decision- making • Protection from development for for significant areas, sites & places
• At the heart of many of these campaigns and claims is a call for recognition of Indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledge (sometimes referred to as ‘traditional ecological knowledge – but see critiques of this).
Alliances with ‘green’ movements (e.g. FoE, ACF, WWF, etc) Some key moments: • Jabiluka: Kakadu Uranium mining • Ngarrindjeri Coorong Lakes • Qld ‘Wild Rivers’ legislation, role of TOs • Murray-Darling Basin management & planning
• Tubbah-Gah people have maintained their ecological knowledge away from their country, while being dispersed over past decades; • The ‘universal’ quality of knowledge is captured by 19 th century English poet John Clare who wrote: – “Knowledge gives us a great number of lessons for nothing like Socrates she is not confined to Halls or colledges or forum(s) but like him accompanys us in our walks in the fields and attends on us at our homes ... in fact she is every where with us ready to instruct and assist our enquireys ... we have only to feel a desire to come at the means of her acquaintance and she is instantly ready to instruct us how to meet with the matter. (Robinson and Powell, 2004, p. 242).
The fate of knowledge • Tubbah-Gah and other Wiradjuri people have suffered immense historical dispossession, dislocation, and loss of culture through missions and re-settlement; • Many were moved away from their country around Dubbo; • Others dislocated from elsewhere now live in this area; • This has resulted in a loss of knowledge and heritage, and a complex local politics of Indigenous identity and self-representation.
“I live somewhere else, but I’ve never left here” • The complex articulation of place and being by Tubba- Gah is articulated powerfully by one Traditional Owner in conversation, who expressed her identity by stating ‘ I live somewhere else, but I’ve never left here ’* • This statement captures a sense that identity resides both in place, and out of place. It is also referenced to Tubba-Gah history, which has been one of dispossession, dislocation, exile and loss of knowledge. The Traditional Owner who expressed this sentiment currently lives away from Dubbo in another part of Australia, but retains her strong connections to country and people in place. *(Mrs Narrell Boys. I am grateful to Mrs Boys for giving me permission to quote her for this presentation).
“…out of my knowledge…”: the locality of knowledge But there is also a sense from Clare’s work, of knowledge being connected to particular place, as he wrote in his autobiographical fragments: “I lovd this solitary disposition from a boy and felt a curiosity to wander about the spots were I had never been before ... I remember one incident of this feeling when I was very young ... it was in summer and I started off in the morning to get rotten sticks from the woods but I had a feeling to wander about the fields and I indulgd it ... I had often seen the large heath calld Emmonsales stretching its yellow furze from my eye into unknown solitudes when I went with the mere openers and my curiosity urged me to steal an oppertunity to explore it that morning ... I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it ... so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures and discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water ... so I eagerly wanderd on and rambled among the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me and I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys ...”
Towards geographies of place • The Tubba-Gah ochre connection draws attention to the power of place in thinking about Indigenous identity, knowledge and culture; • Reconciling specifics of place and locality with global: • e.g. “relational geographies …” (see Massey 2004, Castree 2004 for example)
The identity of place • “If space *& place+ is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space [& place] through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local and the (so-called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable … and inevitably historically changing” (Massey 2004: 5)
Global/Local • There is a dialogue between universal or global discourses on Indigenous environmentalism, human rights and ecological knowledge, and specific local, community interests; • Indigenous peoples’ claims and interests for recognition and rights in knowledge, heritage and culture are also political claims for recognition of difference within the nation-state;
Knowledge ‘in’ and ‘out of’ place • The UN Convention on Biological Diversity states at Article 8j that signatory countries shall ‘as far as possible and as appropriate’: • Subject to national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge innovations and practices.’
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