'Learning to read the signs: law in an Indigenous reality' by Ambelin Kwaymullina and Blaze Kwaymullina in (2010) 34(2) Journal of Australian Studies 195-208 comments
This article examines Aboriginal views of knowledge, time and space, and discusses the implications of these views for understanding Aboriginal legal systems. In doing this, we adopt an Indigenous perspective formed and informed by the ancient holistic knowledge systems of Aboriginal people. The article is part of a new wave of Indigenous scholarship where Indigenous thinkers worldwide are seeking to elucidate the nature of our systems and their interaction with Western ways of knowing.
In a discussion with one of my grandfathers, he commented that he thought Captain Cook was a man who couldn’t read the signs. He was talking about an intuitive way of knowing, a fluid and dynamic language grounded in country and linked to the wider world, that our old people are very adept at. Country is alive. The world is alive. This is the essential unchanging nature of the universe. This is the reality of life for Indigenous peoples.
When Captain Cook landed on the east coast of Australia in 1770 he carved the date of his arrival and the name of his ship, the Endeavour, into a nearby tree. For Cook, the carving was a way of marking presence and territory, a warning to the other colonial powers that the British Empire now had a legal interest in this land. But to the Aboriginal peoples who already occupied the territory that Cook sought to annex, this statement of legal claim was itself a violation of laws far more ancient than those governing the colonial powers of Europe. Unbeknownst to Cook, he had just made first contact with one of the many thousands of living beings inhabiting a vast continent, a contact that had ended with mutilation. The same act that signalled ownership to European colonial powers signalled just the opposite to the Aboriginal custodians of the land, whose right to inhabit country is premised on a responsibility to care for all the life within it. This initial clash of cultures has, in many respects, yet to be resolved. While praiseworthy efforts have been, and are being, made to engage with Aboriginal understandings of the world, the historical dominance of Western knowledge systems and the damage wrought by colonisation mean that there is still much work to be done before there can be a true and lasting meeting of minds, hearts and worlds.
... While this paper presents an Aboriginal perspective - and in particular a perspective influenced by the culture of the Palyku people to whom we belong - it is not to be read as the only Aboriginal viewpoint on these issues. The perspectives held by Aboriginal peoples of Australia are many and varied, informed as they are by the specific Aboriginal country from which we each come, the people to whom each of us belong, and our individual and collective experiences of the trauma of colonialism.
Knowledge in a holistic worldview
In Aboriginal philosophy the universe is a pattern comprised of other patterns, of systems inside systems. It is a holistic view in which everything is interrelated and interdependent. Nothing exists in isolation. All life - and everything is alive in an Aboriginal worldview - exists in relationship to everything else:
Imagine a pattern. This pattern is stable, but not fixed. Think of it in as many dimensions as you like - but it has more than three. This pattern has many threads of many colours, and every thread is connected to, and has a relationship with, all the others. The individual threads are every shape of life. Some - like human, kangaroo, paperbark - are known to Western science as ‘alive’; others, like rock, would be called ‘non-living’. But rock is there, just the same. Human is there, too, though it is neither the most nor the least important thread - it is one among many, equal with the others. The pattern made the whole is in each thread, and all the threads together make the whole. Stand close to the pattern and you can focus on a single thread; stand a little further back and you can see how that thread connects to others; stand further back still and you can see it all - and it is only once you see it all that you recognise the pattern of the whole in every individual thread. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the whole is in all its parts. This is the pattern that the Ancestors made. It is life, creation, spirit, and it exists in country.
Aboriginal knowledge systems exist within the context of relationships, and because all relationships interconnect, so does all knowledge. In a sense, the way one thing relates to another is the core of what knowledge is. It is in the dynamic interplay between relationships that information is shaped, defined and becomes ‘known’. This has been described, in Western terms, as a ‘holistic’ worldview because it stresses the connections between the parts and the whole. Aboriginal knowledge systems do not compartmentalise knowledge or ways of knowing into specific disciplines, because intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual understandings of the world cannot be divorced from one another. Many, but not all, conflicts between Aboriginal and Western ways of knowing are derived from a clash between a reductionist view of the world and a holistic one. It was this form of ‘knowing’ that dominated during the colonial era where the powers of the West believed they had a mandate to take dominion over the earth, and it continues to exert a strong influence over Western ways of knowing. Embedded in Western disciplines is the idea of progress, the idea that the more knowledge that is acquired, the more advanced and powerful human beings become. In a sense, knowledge is power. In contrast, the purpose of knowledge within Aboriginal systems folds back into the underlying principle of balance. Knowledge is both constructed and transmitted around the idea of balancing relationships between all things in the universe. Gladys and Jill Milroy of the Palyku people comment on this, in relation to the invention of the wheel as a mark of human ‘progress’:
the British valued the wheel, but they did not value its connection to the tree. The invention of the wheel is tied inexorably to the progress of Western civilization, but at the heart of the wheel, was the death of the tree ... the spiritually rich nature of Aboriginal cultures, where knowledge and relationships between people, country and all living things are highly prized, went unappreciated [by the British] because they could not see beyond the missing wheel to the living tree. What they valued was the resources and material wealth the land could provide, with no understanding of, or care for, the deeper story.
A reductionist worldview, which has at its core the idea that the whole is never more than the sum of its measurable parts, results in compartmentalised disciplines of knowledge. It results also in a belief that the only way to understand the world is to stand apart from it; that it is both possible and desirable to disconnect from surrounding relationships so as to become an ‘impartial’ observer. Central to this notion of impartiality is the need for emotional distance or objectivity, the requirement to sever most of the self from the subject in order to acquire knowledge of it, leaving only a tenuous connection of the intellect. But Indigenous peoples across the world have experienced, all too intimately, what it was to be researched by those who had disconnected their intellect from their hearts:
To know of culture, they took story, song, knowledge; to know of body, they measured skills and stole bones, leaving spirits shrieking from collector’s shelves and behind museum glass. To know of sacred places, they trespassed and violated. Their learning dispossessed - of song, story, dignity, humanity, voice - and the findings of that learning justified those dispossessions. They gazed through a fragmented vision of their understanding at all they took; they categorized, classified, named - they described each part in a minutiae of detail, and understood nothing of the whole.
In Aboriginal systems, the world can only be known by acknowledging and respecting relationships, not by ignoring or denying them. Disconnection can only result in inaccurate observations - for any observer, if only by the mere fact of their presence, must always affect that which surrounds them. In the words of Gagudji elder Bill Neidjie ‘[m]an can’t split himself’. All learning is shaped by the broader nexus of connections that is the world, and it is by locating the self within this nexus, rather than removing the self from it, that understanding is to be gained. Thus, far from producing valuable knowledge, Indigenous systems would view a perspective based in disconnection as a fundamentally flawed one - for, since the whole is in all its parts, there is no distance in creation. Indeed, a state of being where the individual sought to remove themselves from the system, to sever or suppress their connections to the web of relationships that forms the world, might well be termed exile. Such a state, which would result in a failure to perceive connections that inevitably leads to a failure to value them, could only end in destruction for both the individual and the collective. Nunga lawyer Irene Watson writes of this in the context of contemporary Western law:
Today in the modern world the will to live in a place of lawfulness is lost to the greater humanity. Evidence of this is found in the growing list of global crises, poverty, environmental disasters, famine, war, and violence. What the greater humanity have come to know as law is a complex maze of rules and regulations; the body of law is buried, barely breathing. Law came to us in a song, it was sung with the rising of the sun, law was sung in the walking of the mother earth, law inhered in all things, law is alive, it lives in all things ... Law was not imposed, and those who lived outside the law did just that, they were in exile from the law. We could say the greater proportion of humanity now lives in exile from the law.
The privileging by the colonising nations of Western Europe of their own reductionist knowledge-systems above all others led to a systematic devaluing of holistic Indigenous worldviews that is only now being overcome. In the legal field, a colonial inability to conceive of Aboriginal legal systems as equal to those of the West is reflected in the persistent description of Aboriginal legal systems as comprising ‘custom’ or ‘customary law’. Such terms are inevitably burdened by historical constructions of Indigenous societies as inferior and lacking in ‘real’ law. In addition, the concept of custom - which rests on the notion that behaviour practised over long periods solidifies into rules of conduct - inherently contradicts Aboriginal views on the origin of law in Australia. Aboriginal creation stories tell that law was given by the same Ancestors who made the world and continue to live within it, and that the purpose of the gift of law was to show all life how to sustain country. In this context, Aboriginal statements that ‘something is to be done because the Ancestors did so’ - historically often misinterpreted as indicating that an individual is blindly copying the behaviour of previous generations - in fact reveal a complex legal system premised on the interconnection of life in country and of the place of human beings in sustaining that life. It is possible that a scholar employing a reductionist Western perspective might disagree with Aboriginal views on the nature of creation, but what is important is that Aboriginal systems are based on this view being true. It seems strange indeed to assert that an understanding of Aboriginal law can be gained by employing a descriptor, such as ‘customary’, that both echoes colonial prejudice and contradicts Aboriginal views of legal origins.
In a holistic Indigenous worldview, law cannot exist in isolation from the connections between all life. Law both sustains and reflects the nexus of relationships, the pattern of creation that is the world. Law is part of a larger way of knowing the world, one which is formed by a living landscape where time is measured by cycles, not lines; and the ‘space’ of country is both physical and metaphysical.
