I am impersonating myself as an Australian aborigine. Equivalently, I am an adivasi or a tribal person in India. I am concerned about tribal or indigenous people’s rights.
According to Amnesty Australia, I am one of the more than 370 million people across 70 countries worldwide identified as indigenous, and disaggregated into more than 5000 different groups speaking more than 4000 languages!
My ancestors were the original inhabitants of planet earth and hence I am now given a token of respect as ‘indigenous’. They had lived on particular lands, before new people arrived and became dominant.
I uphold unique customs and cultures in different parts of the world, and often face difficult realities such as having my land taken away, and being treated as a second-class or no-class citizen.
In Australia, for example, I am the proud keeper of arguably the oldest continuous culture on the planet. My heritage spans many different communities, each with its own unique mixture of cultures, customs and languages. I have come to know that before the European invasion in 1788, there were more than 250 indigenous nations, each with several clans, and that my ancestors were great storytellers, passing on their culture through songlines—an animist belief system expressed through songs, stories, paintings and dance. They were also expert hunters and gatherers and had sophisticated ways of taking care of the land. As semi-nomadic people, they moved around with the seasons, returning every season to permanent homes where they grew crops. But with European colonisation, my people dwindled from around 750000 to just 93000 by 1900. Thousands died as British settlers drove people off their lands and brought killer diseases such as measles, smallpox and tuberculosis. My folks were segregated from the rest of society, forced to adopt British customs and abandon our own culture. Many of our children were also taken away. Although our population recovered to 669000 by 2011 and racial segregation became illegal in 1976, we have no protection from still being much worse off, including in terms of health, education and unemployment. Most of us are trapped by poverty and crime and our kids are 24 times more likely to be locked up than their non-indigenous classmates. We continue to live with deep trauma and anger from losing our lands, cultures and families and without basic rights to keep our homes and communities intact. We keep protesting for land rights as we do not want non-indigenous handouts.
There is no dearth of literature—fiction and nonfiction--on our state of affairs. The literature has emerged from within us and from the non-indigenous sympathisers and empathisers. And 9 August is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples so that there is a token of recognition of our eroding existence. There is increasing tribal poetry tracking down our emotional outbursts. The Indian poet Jacinta Kerketta, “who saw glimpses of the fight over land and natural resources up close while growing up” had written a poem titled, “The Six-Lane Freeway of Deceit” which runs like this:
In the name of progress, now
There are to be four and six-lane roads
But those labouring away on concrete and
Asphalt
Are unaware. They know not
How many more free lanes of deceit
Run through the forests of Saranda
All the same, I am proud to say here why my people matter. Our non-anthropocentric existence and our knowledge and wisdom desperately matter for sustainable livelihoods on planet earth.
We do not see the earth as a resource store that belongs to us. Instead, we see ourselves as part of the earth, as walking and living pieces of the earth. We do not have an anthropocentric worldview with humans as the peak of creation and its owner. Conversely, our view is nature-centric with humans as merely participants and parts in the world. We consider our actions up to the seventh generation—that is the generation after our grandchildren’s grandchildren. That is what we mean when we say we belong to a community that belongs to a place. For us, land does not mean only physical environment. It refers to the physical, biological and spiritual environments fused together. Our traditional knowledge is practical common sense, good reasoning, and logic based on experience. It is a standard of conduct, setting out rules governing the use and respect of resources, and an obligation to share. Animals are non-human persons who are able to build up knowledge about their environment so that skilled hunters can rely not only on their own interpretation of the environment but also that of animals interpreting other animals in interaction with the environment. Nature is thus, to us, animated. It is alive. It is a place of “inter-being” by “selves” of different species. We consider species of nature as kin. They are always with us as totems (life forces stemming from and part of our creator ancestors). We remember the ideas and practices of our ancestors through rituals and ceremonies, which create continuity and stability for us to fix things. All people care for the land and its creatures, regenerating the land through ceremonies, protecting totems (species) and their habitats. This is how our land care becomes purposeful, universal and predictable. With different members of the community having different totems, and those community members knowing everything about their totem species in great detail, our communities have biodiversity protection built into our belief systems and into our social structures. Ecological balance is always maintained. “Since nature always fluctuates in some way, living through maintaining a balance means culling or taking from that which is temporarily in surplus…while not taking from animals and plants that are in need of regeneration”. This traditional environmental knowledge-based economics is totally different from the mainstream economic orientation about environmental protection as a matter of finding the right price for environmental preferences. It never leads to specialised uses for land which have destructive ecological consequences and are only possible with much energy consumption. Nature is not converted into ‘environmental goods’ for which people have ‘preferences’ of varying strengths. There is no cost-benefit analysis which is an undemocratic process rigged by economists.
Not maximising production by destroying ecology is our way of life. And this springs from our spiritual responsibilities, individual and group identity, relationships to ancestors, relationships to contemporaries, relationships to successive descendants, to other species and finally relationship to the “Great Spirit”—the inter-being which enfolds and unfolds all of these in and out itself!
This, in a nutshell, is my identity, my self-respect, and my self-consciousness.
If you belong to non-indigenous people, and are bothered about environmental crisis, don’t you need people like me?
At least, note what Avram Noam Chomsky (The Guardian, June 4, 2013) had pointed out thus: “In fact, all over the world—Australia, India, and South America—there are battles going on, sometimes wars. In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences. In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand. The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the rights of nature.”
I write this note in honour of Fr. Stan Swamy, on behalf of all the indigenous natives of India. He died on July 5, 2021 as a martyr to the cause of justice for tribal communities in India. Not working for the corporate cause, but working for an inclusive India in which every citizen is equal, was the crime he had perpetrated and he paid for it with his life. He was a non-violent gladiator but was accused by the state of being a Naxalite! (Read Walter Fernandes, in Scroll.in, July 9, 2021 or in The India Forum issue of August 6, 2021).
I conclude with the “Spiritual Song of the Aborigine” by the Australian activist, poet and educator Hyllus Noel Maris (1933-1986), which awakens hope for the rejuvenation of the climate system, biological diversity and indigenous rights in the world thus:
I am a child of the Dreamtime People
Part of this land, like the gnarled gumtree
I am the river, softly singing
Chanting our songs on my way to the sea
My spirit is the dust-devils
Mirages, that dance on the plain
I’m the snow, the wind, and the falling rain
I’m part of the rocks and the red desert earth
Red as the blood that flows in my veins
I am eagle, crow and snake that glides
Through the rainforest that clings to the mountainside
I awakened here when the earth was new.
REFERENCE
Brian Davey. 2015. CREDO: Economic Beliefs in a World in Crisis. www.credoeconomics.com
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
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