What is it like to live without justice?

How to get by in a society that gives your people no justice - this is not a kind of knowledge that anyone should have to have inside experience of. And yet this seems to be what Aboriginal people have to live with daily.

Two years ago, a 36-year-old Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee, died in custody in the jail in Palm Island, apparently having been beaten to death by an officer, Chris Hurley. Hurley is not being brought to trial, nor even suspended from police duty. Palm Island is a former Aboriginal "reserve", which used to function basically as a prison camp, and apparently still does for some people. Stephen Corporal told us about an elderly auntie of his who went to Palm Island for a visit when she was young, and was held there for years without being allowed to leave and return to her family. The commissioner in charge wouldn't let her leave, even though she was not supposed to be a resident there. Although Aboriginal people are now allowed to travel freely (astounding that this has happened only so recently!), there are still a hugely disproportionate number of Aboriginal people in prison. An old law on the Queensland books outlawing public drunkenness and public use of foul language allows police to arrest people for minor offences such as "public drunkenness" or "using rude language". Somehow, this law is only enforced against Aboriginal people. Similar things happen elsewhere in Australia. Now, I've only lived in Australia for 3 years, but I can tell you that the amount of public drunkenness by white Australians is quite high. You can't go out on any night of the week without running into drunk white Aussies. But they're not arrested. And then there was the F-word study that Michael told me about, which showed that white police officers were more likely to use foul language in public than any other group in Brisbane. But it's white police officers arresting Aboriginal people for foul language. So Aboriginal people end up in jail, where they are brutalized.

Palm Island still seems to be run like a prison camp. My outrage today is caused by reading that the Queensland State Coroner just ruled that a police officer caused his fatal injuries when he was in custody two years ago. According to witnesses, that officer was Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley - this does not seem to be in doubt. Yet the Police Commissioner has not suspended this officer from all duties. Nor has there been any move to try him for murder. Mulrunji Doomadgee's son committed suicide about a month or so ago, seemingly as an act of protest, or in despair that justice would never be done.

John Howard likes to wax lyrical about "an Australia where everyone has a fair go." This is not a fair go. Not happy, John. This is not how "civilized" nations should behave.

Art: From the mundane to the sacred

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "How do Aboriginal visual/performing/expressive art forms present an Aboriginal Approach to knowledge?"

This was my second free write following further discussion.

We started off the 2nd discussion with the concept of art moving from the mundane to the sacred. Liz talked, as an artist, about her understanding of the process of art, by analogy to breathing. Breathing, you take something in, process it, and exhale something different. We are all, all the time, "inhaling" the world around us, our culture, our surroundings. Artists process what they inhale, and then the process of creating art is their kind of "exhalation." The painting or the song or the poem will then be "inhaled" by others, continually creating a changing reality. So, what does this have to do with the sacred and the profane? We didn't seem to come to a clear understanding of this, but we talked about one possibility being that "art" is when you consciously realize the power of what you're doing by exhaling something, and non-art is when you don't realize the power of what you produce that will be taken in by others. So an offhand comment isn't art because even though it might have a big effect on someone else who inhales it, it wasn't produced with any awareness of the power of the effect it might have. This got us to the concept of mindfulness vs. mindlessness. Liz said, and I think I wrote it down in close to her exact words: "When people aren't careful about their intent, then they're not careful about what they produce." This seemed very profound to me. Being careless about one's intent vs. being careful about one's intent might be one thing that distinguishes the mundane from the sacred: mundane=careless about intent; sacred=careful about intent. Liz talked about the sacred space of being mindful, knowing that you're creating art.

There were so many things we talked about, I'll just touch on another one. We talked about the interpretation and understanding of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art, and contemporary vs. traditional art. Traditional Aboriginal art is understood as being one product or representation of a process of knowledge, which the culture and group participate in and manage. I said that I thought this wasn't true of non-Aboriginal art, that it's just the individual who’s owning the knowledge expressed in the art. But Liz pointed out that early paintings of Australia, of Cap Cook’s landing at Botany Bay, represented things a certain way: he was portrayed as tall, heroic, towering over the smaller natives, whereas in reality he was shorter and more scarred from disease than they were. So others besides the people who painted such works owned and managed the concepts that were expressed in those paintings. Some authority commissioned such a work, made decisions about who would see it and how it would be exhibited in Australia and around the world, and those authority figures were indeed owning and managing so-called "knowledge" about the reality of colonization of Australia. Whoever decided to reprint such paintings in textbooks for schoolchildren in Australia was continuing to further someone's cultural agenda about how Cook and Aboriginal people should be portrayed. School children don't know, parents don't know, teachers don't know, and I certainly don't know who such authorities were, how those decisions got made, how that art, imagery, and knowledge were managed. We are outsiders to that process. Wish I knew who the insiders were! So non-Aboriginal art can also be part of a cultural process of managing knowledge, in which there are insiders and outsiders. But in the case of propaganda art, inside-ness is a matter of who has power and control over others, it's an insideness of domination, and outside-ness is a matter of being controlled and dominated. That is not what "inside" and "outside" mean with respect to Aboriginal knowledge, as I talked about in my journal – it's not about power over.

We also talked about art as an expression of individual and group identity. We were discussing how traditional Aboriginal art is seen as representing a culture, whereas contemporary Aboriginal art might be seen as expressing more of an individual identity. Western art gets seen as expressing an individual identity, not as an expression of a culture. But then we also talked about whether contemporary Aboriginal artists can ever be seen as just producing art as an expression of individual identity, or whether white people always see an Aboriginal person as "speaking for Aboriginal people" generally, or speaking for their culture. But then, don't non-Aboriginal people also express their culture? Aren't they also speaking for their culture? When Quentin Tarantino makes some sick, violent film, isn't he expressing something of the pathology of American culture? Doesn't the creation of (and the fact that there's a market for) that kind of “art” show something about the culture that produced it? Liz said that white artists are "interpreted within a bubble that doesn't know that the art is an expression of a whole culture." So white artists are more often interpreted as individuals, and indigenous artists are not. I told a joke about this from an African American comedian, Wayne Brady, "What does the African American community think about this?" "I don't know, I'll ask them when we all meet next Friday."

Art as knowledge and authority

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "How do Aboriginal visual/performing/expressive art forms present an Aboriginal Approach to knowledge?"

This was my first "free write" after our triad discussion today.

Liz raised the point that Aboriginal knowledge is about a process that is shared among the community; the process is the knowledge. The end product is not the knowledge. Art in my culture is usually thought of as the end process: the painting, or the play, or the piece of music. Taking this perspective on Aboriginal knowledge as process, then the knowledge in art would be the process that created it, the ritual, spiritual, community context that created it as well as the act of creation, from the first germ of the idea through to the “product.” So when an Aboriginal painting is displayed in a gallery, only the end product is displayed, not the process.

This leads us back to the concept of "inside" and "outside" knowledge in art. Only certain understandings and interpretations are available to outsiders who view the end product in a gallery. White Australians will only have outside knowledge of what some of the images, symbols, and designs mean. Only people who participated in the process that led to the end product will have inside knowledge of the art. So, as Wally Caruana said in his piece, the art contains many levels of knowledge, both inside and outside. The problem is that many Westerners don't recognize that they have only outside knowledge. True ignorance is not understanding your own ignorance, your own status as an outsider to certain knowledge.

We also talked about knowledge as a form of authority and status in Aboriginal culture. To produce art is to make a statement of authority: I am an insider for this knowledge. Therefore when Westerners copy Aboriginal images and print them up on a t-shirt for sale, for example, they are doing (at least) two things wrong. The t-shirt producers are stealing the copyright ownership of the art, and denying the ownership rights to money made from the sale of that art to the indigenous artist. They are also falsely asserting authority over the knowledge embodied in the art. When white Australian painters use "indigenous" designs in their art, saying that they're embodying a "new Australian aesthetic", are they not doing the same thing? Asserting authority to use such designs and images, falsely asserting authority over that knowledge? But then white Australian artists come from a culture that doesn’t see art and knowledge as being so intimately related.

How does one understand categories like "traditional" Aboriginal art vs. "contemporary" or "urban" Aboriginal art? If a painting does not use traditional images, does it assert the same kind of ceremonial, spiritual, and cultural authority that a "traditional" painting does? There is still a process that led to that painting, and that process includes the experience of what it's like to be an Aboriginal person living in an urban, contemporary society. There is still a history to that painting, and we don't always know what the history of that painting is. Hannah pointed out that that is true for any art, not just contemporary Aboriginal art – all paintings have a process and a history that someone viewing them in a gallery won't know. So my question about contemporary Aboriginal painting is this: Is the painter the only person with inside knowledge of what the full meaning and history and context of the painting is? Or are there other contemporary Aboriginal people with that kind of inside knowledge? Is there any ceremony or ritual or cultural process in which other people besides the artist participate that leads to the production of the painting? I think that for Western artists, the answer to that question is no. It's just the individual who has inside knowledge of the process that led to the painting. As an outsider to contemporary (or any) Aboriginal art, I realize that I don't know the answers to these questions about contemporary Aboriginal art.

Caruana's piece also talked about art being a process of moving an object from the mundane world into the sacred world, changing its state. Does contemporary Aboriginal art do the same thing? Does it represent a changing of state from the mundane to the sacred? Or is it a different kind of process, say, a cultural critique? Does putting a cultural critique into a painting move that critique from the mundane world to the sacred world? Are these different categories of art even sensible?

Could be something, but what?

I know this: the universe does send us messages. The trouble is, most of us don't know how to read them.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, p. 207 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004)

I have such different relationships with North America and Australia. In North America, I feel that I have a relationship with the land , a spiritual connection to it. I miss the Rocky Mountains, the aspens, the pine trees, the way I would miss a friend or a lover. The government of the United States, in contrast, I have nothing but an official relationship with. I used to believe in the ideals of democracy, embodied in the Constitution of the US, but I can't anymore. I knew too much about what the government actually does to believe it embodies those ideals. The government of Australia is certainly one I have some problems with, but overall, I'm much happier to be paying taxes to this government. There is a reasonable public health care system, there is a welfare state. Those things don't work perfectly, but they work a lot better than in the US, where they're nonexistent. However, I feel little relationship to the land in Australia. It's not that I don't think one can have a relationship with the land and Australia, it's just that I don't. Apparently, it takes a white immigrant longer than three years to develop a relationship with the land. It's very hard for me to be happy living in a place where I don't feel a spiritual connection to the natural world around me. I respect the land here – it seems fierce and powerful. I do a bit to try to protect the land also: save water, try to avoid using plastic shopping bags since I found out what they do to turtles, donate to conservation, try to ride my bike or use public transport instead of driving. But these are intellectual decisions I make based on ideas about the environment, and the idea that it's just "polite" when living on a piece of land to try to treat it well. In Colorado, protecting the land is a matter of "that's what you do for a friend."

There has to be more to my coming to Australia than just finding out how important it is for me to feel that I'm living on land I'm spiritually connected to. My sense when I came was that this would be a good place to work on the relationship between science and indigenous knowledge. That's what all the dreams and intuitions that guided me here seemed to be pointing to. OK, could be something, but what??!! UQ is turning out to be a wonderful place to explore connections between indigenous knowledge and science. But the more I read and think and reflect about indigenous knowledge, the more I ache for the kind of connected experience I feel with the land in Colorado. Delving deeper into an authentic Australian form of knowledge just makes me realize how little I feel that I fit here. I love the work that I'm doing helping to build a relationship between Psychology and ATSIS, but part of me just wants to be in the place I call home: Colorado.

Here, I feel like I'm just living on the surface of the skin of the land -- those are the words that keep coming to mind to describe the way I feel. In Colorado, in Northern California, or in the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up, I feel like I'm living in the land, deeper in it. However little I understand its communications, it does communicate. It's the land that nurtured me for 40 years, and it's beautiful, so beautiful. I love North America, however much I detest its current government. So where do I belong?

What is that quote from Michael: colonization forces everyone to ask of themselves constantly "who am I?" Going back to the discussion from last week in class about commodities and decontextualized objects in capitalist economies: If I'm just a commodity, then I have no history. I'm just a worker with a set of useful skills for my employer, and an employer is just a set of resources that I can use to do my work and my research. So it makes sense for me to move around the globe, to find the employer-employee relationship with the best match between skills and resources. But I'm not a commodity. I'm a person with a history, with relationships to lands other than this one. And yet, I'm here, and I bring all of that history with me when I work on indigenous knowledge and science. I bring all that history with me when I try to build a relationship between my department and ATSIS. So where do I belong?

I'll finish with another quote by the same author, an Asian Indian woman who immigrated to California. As preamble to the quote, I don't agree that Native Americans have been completely driven from California, nor that their ways of dreaming are not still alive, but I understand the feeling of dreams not coming:

Dreams would not come to me in California, because it was too new a place. Its people had settled there only a few hundred years ago, and neither its air nor its earth…was weighted yet with dreams. Yes, there had been older inhabitants, but they had been driven from the land, and in going, had taken with them, along with their hopes, their ways of dreaming.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, pp. 197-8 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004)

Knowledge as a gift vs. a commodity

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "Indigenous Knowledge as an area of academic study has only relatively recently been recognized in a broader sense. The UN has been fostering Indigenous Knowledge for some time but has largely pursued the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to draw on Indigenous Peoples' understanding of the environment as a means of developing greater agricultural enterprises. Consider what the implications might be for Indigenous peoples and their entitlement to equality and human rights when you examine the differences between TEK and how Indigenous scholars, in particular, are articulating Indigenous Knowledge/s in the braoder sense as being the Intellectual Traditions of a human group."

This is what I wrote in the second "free write" during our discussion group in class today:
What is ownership? Westerners have a particular understanding of "ownership" and "management" that may be very different from indigenous people's understanding of ownership and management. Indigenous people's concepts of owning and managing land, or owning and managing knowledge gets translated into English as "own" and "manage." But much of indigenous understanding and connotation of words may be lost when translated into English. Here, our group just ran into a blank space, a place where it seemed we all realize that we didn't know what the concepts of own and manage mean to indigenous people. We were just stopped, confounded.

Now, this raises a question in my mind -- how fair is it to conduct discussions and legal proceedings concerning ownership and management of country, of knowledge, only in English? How different with such discussions be if whitefellas had to stretch and understand the corresponding words in Aboriginal languages?

We also talked about gifts versus commodities. An object is a gift has a history, social connections, emotional meanings attached to it. A commodity does not; it has only a monetary value. The commodification of something is the stripping-away of its history, so that it becomes an object without context. Traditional ecological knowledge, or any knowledge of indigenous people, is seen by Western commercial interests as a commodity, as something that can be removed from the cultural and ecological and spiritual context that gave rise to the knowledge, and then manipulated for monetary gain. But knowledge, to indigenous people, cannot be, or should not be, de-contextualized in that way. Therefore, the debates on appropriate compensation to indigenous people for their knowledge or , once again, predicated only on Western assumption that knowledge can be de-contextualized and given a numeric value. I have no idea, practically, how one would change the system to accommodate a change in that assumption.

We also talked about "in whose interest is it to keep objects de-contextualized, to keep people ignorant of the histories of objects?" If one knew the true history of objects for sale, would one still buy them? If you knew what the lives of the Asian sweatshop workers who make your clothing were like, if you knew what the lives of the CEOs and sales clerks were like who sold you the shirt, if you knew how much money each of those people made, would you still buy the shirt? Many people would not. So it's in the interests of those who profit most from the sale of objects to keep people ignorant of the histories of what they buy. So we can then ask the same question about traditional ecological knowledge -- in whose interest is it to keep the world ignorant of the history and context of that knowledge? Who benefits from de-contextualized knowledge?

Colonial attitudes to indigenous knowledge & intellectual property rights

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "Indigenous Knowledge as an area of academic study has only relatively recently been recognized in a broader sense. The UN has been fostering Indigenous Knowledge for some time but has largely pursued the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to draw on Indigenous Peoples' understanding of the environment as a means of developing greater agricultural enterprises. Consider what the implications might be for Indigenous peoples and their entitlement to equality and human rights when you examine the differences between TEK and how Indigenous scholars, in particular, are articulating Indigenous Knowledge/s in the braoder sense as being the Intellectual Traditions of a human group."

This is what I wrote in the first "free write" during our discussion group in class today:
(Our group was taking it as a given that indigenous people should be compensated for their intellectual property rights and knowledge, and trying to chew over some of the issues within that idea.)
The idea of recognizing "indigenous intellectual property rights" is based on a Western concept that knowledge is inside people's heads. My understanding of traditional ecological knowledge is that knowledge is in the whole ecosystem, in the minds and sentience of other living things as well. When indigenous people "know" something, they know it because it has been communicated to them by the living world. But no one person can know everything or should know everything. Any person or people are just links in a web of knowledge that exists in the ecosystem. Western commercial interests see knowledge as a resource to be obtained. Just as oil underground is an "economic deposit," so is the knowledge of indigenous people an " economic deposit" that can be "mined" for commercial gain, in this commercial worldview. So the most forward-thinking Westerners talk about compensating intellectual people fairly for their knowledge, their intellectual property rights. But this views still buys into the idea that knowledge is in people's heads. If knowledge resides in and is given by a whole ecosystem of which people are just one part, then the proper way to "compensate" the source of knowledge would be to give money not only to the indigenous people whose language told Westerners about the knowledge, but also to the whole ecosystem that produced the knowledge. How do you give to an ecosystem? It would require recognizing that ecosystems themselves have rights and can be treated as entities by Western law. And once you grant that ecosystems have rights, the whole colonial system unravels.

The other thing (of many!) that we talked about was the idea that a Westerner who thinks they have some traditional ecological knowledge does not, in fact, have the same thing that indigenous people have when they have traditional ecological knowledge. The indigenous person is a participant in a whole system, in which the knowledge is in the world, not just in people's heads. The Westerner abstracts traditional ecological knowledge from that web, that system, and therefore has something different. Now they just have a commodity. The intellectual person has participation in knowledge, and a gift from the world.

Another idea was questioning the very assumption that one person I system of knowledge (like science) can and should know everything. Media portrays science as conquering the unknown, with the idea that at some point, the unknown will all be known, and that endpoint will be a good thing , a good state to be in. But that is not how actual scientists see what they're doing. The scientist who has completed training and has experienced conducting research understands that his/her knowledge is incomplete and must always be so. "Novice" scientists (students of science) and the general public buy into the idea that knowledge is cumulative, and science "knows" more and more over time. "Expert" scientists, those who are actually practitioners of research, know that this is not how science works. It is a logical necessity that you end up with more questions than you started with, and that any given scientific theory will eventually be proved untrue or incomplete. This is why Thomas Kuhn wrote about "scientific revolutions" -- the idea that scientific theories are always "overthrown" by new theories, and that this process is never-ending. There is no objective of "progress," only the continual replacement of one understanding with a different understanding. Portraying science as "conquering the unknown" is just using the metaphor of colonization of "unknown lands" to describe science, but it's not an appropriate or accurate metaphor. So, in whose interest is it to portray science in this way? Who benefits?

Silence, gesture and words

Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni¹

I think about the statement: "If you don't understand an Aboriginal person's silence, you will never understand his words." I certainly don't necessarily understand silence. It's something I've been raised to be uncomfortable with. And yet, within my culture, many of my friends say that I'm a good listener, that they really feel heard when they talk to me. I talk a lot, but I listen a lot too. But I don't understand the silences. What does an Aboriginal person's silence mean? How could I understand that? Silence can be wiser than chattering mindlessly, but it can also have other social meanings.

I got a little insight from the Steve Harris piece² on Yolngu rules of interpersonal communication. I might be able to understand silence in a couple of instances. Sometimes, the silence doesn't mean anything, in the sense of it's not a pregnant pause. It just means the other person assumes you've done as you wished and don't need to be thanked, for example. If you give a Yolngu person a ride in your boat, and he walks away in silence without saying thank you, is he being rude? No, he will assume that you, like he does, have chosen to do something because you wanted to do it, i.e., you gave him a ride because you wanted to give him a ride in your boat. There is also the possibility that one might encounter silence when one has asked a confronting question, such as a why question, a question that doesn't leave the person a way out. I'm not very good at being indirect, myself. But at least I can understand what silence might mean when I'm too blunt and direct for another person's culture. But these two examples are not going to cover many situations in which I might encounter an Aboriginal person's silence.

Nuance in social interaction is mostly in tone of voice and gesture, not in the content of what is said. I'm also likely to misunderstand gestures, nonverbal cues. Nonverbal gestures vary hugely from one culture to another. One would have to spend years living in a culture to be able to understand these nuances. I'm sure there are lots of nonverbal cues from white Australian culture I don't get – my friend Heidi says I stand too close to people, for example. In signaling amusement, Aussies seem a lot more subtle and understated than North Americans (either U.S. or Canada). I'm at a loss.


¹ Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, p. 322 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004).
² Stephen G. Harris (1987). Yolngu rules of interpersonal communication. In W.H. Edwards (Ed.), Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader (pp. 1-9). Melbourne: MacMillan, 1987.

A dream about spiritual appropriation

After writing all that yesterday, I remembered a dream I had, back in 2001, I think, maybe 2002. In the dream, I was in a big community center somewhere in the US. An anthropologist friend who works with indigenous tribes in the Peruvian Amazon had brought me there, because there was a new kind of hallucinogen there that he wanted to try. We went into the main hall, which was mostly empty except for some tables up at the front. The drug was there in some flat, chalky cakes. He broke off a piece and ate it, saying that he had heard it was stronger than anything else. I didn't take any, because I was afraid of trying something so strong. We walked around outside, and he grew quieter and quieter, disappearing into his own inner world. He finally said, "This wasn't a good idea," and went back to his home to finish his trip.

I went back into the community center, which was now filling up with people, well-off white folks. They were gathering for a ritual in which they would take the hallucinogen. They were all dressed up in palm frond and feather headdresses, shell jewelry, trying to look like Amazonian Indians. I wasn't there for the ritual; I only found out that it was happening by wandering around the room listening to people. I kept looking around at all these people and thinking it wasn't right for them to dress up like that, pretending to be something they weren't, and stand around chattering and gossiping as they were. I thought it would be better if they were quiet and meditative, preparing for the inner journey they were about to take. Putting on certain clothes wouldn't make the ritual be a good one. But I didn't say anything. I walked past a group of women, and overheard one of them saying, "I'm so glad none of those hyper-rational scientist types are here!" I grabbed her and wrestled her down to the ground. I wanted to really get in her face. I had both her shoulders pinned to the ground, and I was leaning over her, pushing my face towards hers. In a wicked, TV-villain kind of voice, I said, "I'm a scientist, and I'm here!" Then I laughed a "bwahahaha" kind of TV-villain laugh, and then I woke up.

Might be something.

Spiritual colonialism & the "Castaneda Complex"

So here I am, a scientist who's interested in building mutually respectful dialogue between science and indigenous knowledge, and it's beginning to look like there's no way to do that without also talking about spirituality. The spiritual dimension of life is not separable from knowledge in Aboriginal life, it seems. Now, as scientists go, I'm one who pays attention to spirituality – I don't cynically dismiss it. But…there's a historical reason I'm hesitant to talk about spiritual matters, and I guess I would call that reason "spiritual colonialism." I'm wary of participating in it.

For many years in the U.S., it was against the law for Native Americans to practice their spirituality. In a nation that was allegedly founded on the principle of separation of church and state, the state felt free to exercise its power in this one area of religion. Apparently the principle doesn't apply to non-Christian religions. The law changed (need to look up the year), and Native Americans were free to have their ceremonies, but the law has never recognized the importance of sacred places. The U.S. government has never acknowledged that by denying access to, mining on, or dumping nuclear waste on a sacred place, the state is interfering with the free practice of Native American religion.¹ Obviously, many practices must have been kept secret during the long time when practicing their own spirituality was illegal. I don't know his source for this, but my friend Ken Cannon said that one hundred years ago, Native Americans were very secretive about their spirituality, and would not talk to whites about it. He didn't know about the law, but if Native Americans were punished by law for practicing their spirituality, keeping secrets would make perfect sense. This secrecy appears to have changed, and Native American elders began to talk about spirituality.

As a result, just as the U.S. government appropriated the land, some white Americans began to appropriate native spirituality. Particularly during the 60's, the disaffected youth of the U.S. were looking for alternatives to Judeochristian views, especially any alternative that seemed to be earth-based. The need for Americans to look for an alternative to the spirituality of their parents and grandparents was real, and continues to be real. But how does a culture whose own ancestral traditions have gone extinct go about re-creating a genuine spirituality? No one knows how to do this, so people tried anything they could. Many tried to find out what they could about Native American spiritual ways. Some turned to any information they could get about pre-Christian religions from Europe, which continues today as the neo-pagan movement. Even more turned to Asia, becoming Buddhists or Hindus or Hare Krishnas. At the same time, anthropologists were starting to write about native spirituality in Mexico and South America, with particular emphasis on their own participant observation in ceremonies involving hallucinogens. Carlos Casteneda wrote his first book on Don Juan, unleashing a 50-year tide of curious whitefellas to harass and pester the brujas and healers and tabaqueros of North and South America: "please, tell us the secret ways of knowledge and power." It is this seeking that I call the "Castaneda complex," the idea that you will be special enough, chosen from your culture to be given access to some spiritual knowledge and power from another culture. Some seekers may have been genuinely interested in knowledge or meaning, and had respect and some understanding for the cultures they spent time in. Others were clearly just interested in having a far-out groovy trip on some exotic Mexican mushroom, and others were attracted by the possibility of having "power." If one feels powerless in U.S. culture (people who aren’t rich), or if one has a position of power in that culture (rich people) but doesnt feel secure in that power², of course one is going to be attracted to the idea of having some kind of secret power that other people in U.S. culture don't have.

In the U.S. today, many white New Agers feel free to say that they're practicing "Native American spirituality", or "indigenous spirituality." I hang around a lot of hippies, so I've seen this many times. Some whites conduct sweat lodge ceremonies, or medicine wheel ceremonies, based on their own understanding of what these ceremonies are, and don't provide any background on who taught them, nor have any awareness of political issues facing Native Americans today. A ceremony comes with a cultural context and a history. The white people do not have the same cultural context or the history. When they do such ceremonies, they are in fact doing something quite different from what Native Americans are doing. They may mimic the external forms, but the internal meanings will be all different, and the power of ceremony is in the internal meanings. The meanings for Native Americans are inside knowledge that the whites can't have. What I don't understand is why white people think it's not OK to say, OK, we lost our ancestors' cultural and spiritual traditions, Judeochristian religion isn't working, so we're going to have to re-invent some kind of spirituality that's our own. It seems they feel more valid or more comfortable borrowing from other cultures' spiritualities.

There's a market for this need. In the U.S., hundreds and hundreds of weekend or week-long workshops on "native spirituality" are offered. "Spend a weekend with us, and learn the secret ways of Toltec mysticism," as if these could be taught in a weekend. Not on offer over that weekend is any instruction in what kind of history the Toltec people have had, particularly since colonization. Highly paid corporate executives pay huge sums to go away on weekends to learn the secrets of "shapeshifting and shamanism" so that they can use these secrets to be more effective corporate managers. Again, no training is offered in the cultural ethics that may have given birth to such practices in whatever indigenous culture(s) they come from. Native Americans have decried the appropriation of their spirituality by whites, and many communities have been sharply critical of any native people running such workshops. But for every 20 who protest that this is not real spirituality, and that exploiting it for commercial gain is wrong, there is one who will give a workshop, and thousands of spiritually starving whites who will register. Given that the U.S. has denied Native Americans access to ways of generating wealth, and grossly financially mismanaged native lands, it seems understandable that some people will do anything they can to make a living.

The ads for these workshops bother me. The more compassionate part of me thinks that it's understandable that whites are desperate for some approach to meaning that their own culture isn't giving them, and so I try not to judge their motivations for going. I just think it's sad that people are gullible enough to think they could get genuine spiritual knowledge in a weekend The harsher, more judgmental part of me jumps right into judging the motivations of anyone who goes to such a workshop. It's the fast-food approach to spirituality, part of what Chogyam Trungpa³ called "spiritual materialism." I notice that such workshops are never advertised as, "Spend years working hard and being interdependent with the people whose power you're trying to get, gaining a real understanding of the lives of the people in this culture. Maybe they'll tell you a thing or two and you'll really understand what it means."

What I cannot know, as an outsider, is whether what is on offer in these workshops bears any resemblance to true Native American cultural or spiritual practices. For all I know, it's a cartoon version, and the real spiritual knowledge is kept for insiders. I guess I hope that is the case, but I can't know.

As far as I can tell, spiritual matters are inside knowledge for Aboriginal people, not to be discussed in any depth with outsiders. That was true of Native American spirituality 100 years ago, and look at the situation now. I would hate to see Australia in 100 years be filled with New Age workshops alleging to teach white executives about Aboriginal spirituality in a weekend. I don't think that Aboriginal people will go down that path, but as a white Australian, I would like to avoid any kind of appropriation. I now don't know how to engage in a dialogue between science and indigenous knowledge without touching on spirituality. I would like to avoid entering into anything that smacks of the Castaneda complex, to avoid appropriating anything about Aboriginal spiritual views. I don't know exactly how to do that while talking about different approaches to knowledge. I'll try to follow a right path, but it will mean feeling my way.

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003. An exception is a minority opinion written in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Sierra Club v. Morton. The dissenting opinion was written by Justice William O. Douglas, and is reprinted in Appendix I of Deloria's book.
² Power gained by having taken resources by force can never feel secure.
³ Trungpa was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who wrote about the particular difficulties Americans have in approaching other forms of spirituality. His major book is Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Boston, MA: Shambhala Press, 1973.

Is knowledge just intellectual?

Maybe one of the reasons I feel at a loss in this class is that I've been trying to bring only my intellect to the class. It's a class on approaches to knowledge, so I bring my intellect. Well, and my politics. But my feelings and intuitions? My past and my social connections? Those aren't acknowledged as part of approaching or managing knowledge in my discipline. But here maybe I have to bring my whole self, not just my intellect.

Communication and intuition

I feel so at a loss in this class. I am very used to linear, cause and effect, deductive reasoning. I'm good at that. I don't know how to read signs in nature, or how to understand what it means when things happen in a certain way – what is the world trying to communicate? As Michael said, "Could be something." Could be something, but what? I always want to know the answer, definitely, explicitly. I'm not so patient about waiting to understand things intuitively. I like to be able to lay something out clearly and explicitly. I have forgotten the name of the woman in class who talked about how she can communicate with spirits of people, and how she can tell when she's going down the wrong path, because things just get in her way until she gets the message that she should be doing something different, and when she does the right thing, events unfold more easily. Yes, I understand how that can happen, and I've certainly experienced those times in my own life when a large number of obstacles seem to get in my way, but how does one know for sure? What does the presence of obstacles mean?

I came to Australia because I followed intuitive signs in my life, not for any reason that I could articulate, but because my dreams and intuition led me here, and because when I tried to keep a foothold in North America, too many obstacles came up. I thought it was clear I was supposed to come here. And then I got here and felt lost for 2 ½ years wondering, why am I here? Why did the universe nudge me here? This semester is the first time I've felt like I was even getting close to the reason for coming here. But here on this continent, where I don't know the land, I don't feel like I can follow signs anymore. I'm blind, in a way I wasn't in my homeland. There, I was not blind, merely stumbling around in a fog, making out shapes vaguely. Sort of crashing around in the underbrush of my intuitive life, but not completely lost. Here on this continent I feel lost. I don't have access to the same sources of intuition I had in North America.

"Could be something." But what? What? I'm so impatient to know what. My friend Mari says that when I look for answers in my intuition, I'm like someone who orders a meal in a restaurant, and then, instead of waiting for it to be served to me, runs into the kitchen to make sure the cook is preparing it on time and exactly the way I want. Well, that's true, I am impatient like that. That's what a good friend can do, give you a true look at yourself that makes you squirm a bit.

And yet I believe that knowledge doesn't have to be only linear – explicit premises leading to certain conclusions through a process of logical deduction – but can be more like an interconnected web. Loops, circles, webs, thinking of future and past and present as always being able to interact with each other. Plants, animals, water, rocks, atmosphere always in communication. I believe that, but I'm not good at that kind of thinking. Knowledge as sharing information through a well-ordered web of social and ecological and spiritual relationships. It sounds great, but that just isn't how I've been trained. So I'm struggling.

And I feel at a loss with communicating in the class, too. I get so much out of it when the undergraduate students talk – they make such wise and interesting observations. But they also seem so hesitant to talk. I never in my life have been hesitant to talk or say what I think. Even in my first year at uni, I was always one of the first to ask a question or make an observation. So my talking alot is my personality, not just the result of my current position in life as a lecturer. And yet how does my speaking up influence the undergrads' speaking up? Does my position as a lecturer spouting off what I think squelch anyone else's willingness to talk? I don't want it to.

When Michael asks a question and all there is in the room is silence, I feel as if I want to say something. Silence after Michael asks a question feels like a wasted opportunity. I want to grab the opportunity. I've been able to hold back sometimes, but sometimes that just means the silence continues and I get frustrated that students aren't talking, and we don't get to have an interesting discussion. But how much of a role do I play in that dynamic? Should I speak up more, or shut up more? I learn a lot more when the undergraduate students talk than when I talk. Hmmm, if you don't understand undergraduates' silence, you will never understand their words. But… their words are awfully interesting.