right to speak

Recent findings and events have caused me to think long and hard about who has the right to speak. In our culture we are technically born with the right to speak. The question of authority is more complex, based on education and experience. I have been researching the issue of copyright, both moral and legal, in relation to Indigenous people. What I discovered, within myself and from responses of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, is that, as a culture, we have a very limited view of ‘rights’ and ‘ownership’. It would appear that ‘respect’ is a concept we only partly appreciate - and I would have to include myself in that statement.

We own land through economic privilege and are still able to inherit by birth, but in a new country the concept of dynasty as it relates to land is a little pointless, seeing as we have only been here for a couple of hundred years. What connection we had to our lands of origin, our own ‘dreaming’, is now severed by miles of ocean and several generations of immigrant culture. Our understanding of relationship to land manifests as an empty feeling of displacement and a longing for a home many of us have never seen. It is difficult for us to understand the relationship Indigenous people have to land even though some of us really try. What hope is there for those who don’t even think it is worth trying.

In Indigenous culture landforms such as hills and rivers were created by the titanic struggle of ‘mythic beings’. The land bears testimony to this creation event and is still studded with sacred sites that recall the Dreamtime, or the Dreaming as it is locally known.

These sites are ‘owned by’ or ‘belong to’ either one or more groups and therefore have a shared significance amongst the local population. In the past, this had the function of bringing together different groups. But perhaps more significantly, knowledge of the local myths associated with these places created rights of use to the land. ‘Ownership’ therefore, was based on knowledge not simply material wealth or brute strength. And this carried with it its own responsibility. Individuals and groups who held the knowledge were accountable to the ancestors, the living and to future generations.

This means that ‘there is a direct link between the mythic heroes and spirits of the Dreaming and the land’. (Silberbauer, 1994)

‘The link between the individual and the land comes from the conception site, where the animating spirit enters the mother and thus there is a direct connection between the land, spirit and the identity of the individual (Machin, 1996).

By inference one would assume that this makes the birth site sacred. Lawmen say that sacred sites are connected by a song line that extends through to sites in South Australia. Knowing this makes it easier to appreciate why denying access and removing people from their land has had such devastating consequences. Given the destruction of the individual’s traditional links to land, it also brings into question the right to speak about it. Ironically, and because we are such damn good record keepers, Indigenous people have had to allow us wadjelas to preserve some aspects of their culture while they sort out the rest. In conversations I have had with them about this it seems it is often a bitter pill to swallow and one which raises mistrust about intention and fear of exploitation. But, they are also a practical people and realise that they may just have to trust some of us.

And if that is so, then we have a greater responsibility to whom we pass on this knowledge, because it is not even our own to share. These are not our stories and we do not have the ‘right to speak’.

image: 'Zeus' version 2, mixed media.

reference: Kinjarling Report, 2005

Posted in: