Aboriginal Sayings And Quotes

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.

I don’t have any pictures of the lovely Aboriginal people I met because they think it traps their spirit, and if they’re correct then Facebook is basically creating a living hell. Which is really not that surprising, now that I say it out loud.

What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human

I cannot understand the principle at all,' said Stephen. 'I should very much like to show it to Captain Aubrey, who is so very well versed in the mathematics and dynamics of sailing. Landlord, pray ask him whether he is willing to part with the instrument.' Not on your fucking life,' said the Aboriginal, snatching the boomerang and clasping it to his bosom. He says he does not choose to dispose of it, your honour,' said the landlord. 'But never fret. I have a dozen behind the bar that I sell to ingenious travelers for half a guinea. Choose any one that takes your fancy, sit, and Bennelong will throw it to prove it comes back, a true homing pigeon, as we say. Won't you?' This much louder, in the black man's ear. Won't I what?' Throw it for the gentleman.' Give um dram.' Sir, he says he will be happy to throw it for you; and hopes you will encourage him with a tot of rum. (pp. 353-354)

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human.

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human. Also (though I can’t remember who said it): The thing that keeps me from becoming a complete misanthrope is seeing how much dogs love men.

In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or 'errance' - the action or rhythm of walking - was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God. The aim of a dervish was to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, toward the end of his tourney, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will...it was quite similar to an Aboriginal concept, 'Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.' By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor's Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song. The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.

aboriginal sin We each begin in innocence. We all become guilty. In this life you find yourself guilty of being who you are. Being yourself, that's Aboriginal Sin, the worst sin of all. That's a sin you'll never be forgiven for. We Indians are all guilty, guilty of being ourselves. We're taught guilt from the day we're born. We learn it well. To each of my brothers and sisters, I say, be proud of that guilt. You are guilty only of being innocent, of being yourselves, of being Indian, of being human. Your guilt makes you holy.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that’s only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.

If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.

The Nipponese say they’re the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka.

The boomerang did all that Riley had said of it and more: at one point, having returned, it rose and floated above the Aboriginal’s head in a slow circle before descending into his hand. Stephen and Martin gazed at the object in astonishment, turning it over and over in their hands. ‘I cannot understand the principle at all,’ said Stephen. ‘I should very much like to show it to Captain Aubrey, who is so very well versed in the mathematics and dynamics of sailing. Landlord, pray ask him whether he is willing to part with the instrument.’ ‘Not on your fucking life,’ said the Aboriginal, snatching the boomerang and clasping it to his bosom. ‘He says he does not choose to dispose of it, your honour,’ said the landlord.

All three of the English types I have mentioned can, I think, be accounted for as the results of the presence of different cultures, existing side by side in the country, and who were the creation of the folk in ages distantly removed one from another. In a word, they represent specific " strata" of folk-imagination. The most diminutive of all are very probably to be associated with a New Stone Age conception of spirits which haunted burial-mounds and rude stone monuments. We find such tiny spirits haunting the great stone circles of Brittany. The "Small People," or diminutive fairies of Cornwall, says Hunt, are believed to be "the spirits of people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago. "The spriggans, of the same area, are a minute and hirsute family of fairies" found only about the cairns, cromlechs, barrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky to meddle." Of these, the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and the Elizabethans appear to me to be the later representatives. The latter are certainly not the creation of seventeenth-century poets, as has been stated, but of the aboriginal folk of Britain.

Remember, we non-Aboriginals were signatories. As a non-Aboriginal, I say we. And through Canada’s signatures we committed ourselves to the permanency of our relationship with the words that these treaties would stand “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows.” These were and remain binding legal documents. Perhaps more important, with our signatures we committed our government to act always with the Honour of the Crown.

An inquiry which I once made into the psychology of the Indian sign language with a view to discovering a possible relation between it and Greek manual gesture as displayed in ancient graphic art, led to the conclusion that Indian rhythms arise rather in the centre of self-preservation than of self-consciousness. Which is only another way of saying that poetry is valued primarily by the aboriginal for the reaction it produces within himself rather than for any effect he is able to produce on others by means of it.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East and they must go elsewhere; and they come west, as you have seen them coming for the last few years. And they are still coming, and will come until they overrun all of this country; and you can't prevent it. [...] Everything is decided in Washington by the majority, and these people come out west and see that the Indians have a big body of land they are not using, and they say we want the land.

That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable feature of current history. At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called “primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia—the remnants of peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations. The

When I say I am Black, I mean I am of African descent. When I say I am a woman of Color, I mean I recognize common cause with American Indian, Chicana, Latina, and Asian-American sisters of North America. I also mean I share common cause with women of Eritrea who spend most of each day searching for enough water for their children, as well as with Black South African women who bury 50 percent of their children before they reach the age of five. And I also share cause with my Black sisters of Australia, the Aboriginal women of this land who were raped of their history and their children and their culture by a genocidal conquest in whose recognition we are gathered here today.

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.

And barbarians were inventors not only of philosophy, but almost of every art. The Egyptians were the first to introduce astrology among men. Similarly also the Chaldeans. The Egyptians first showed how to burn lamps, and divided the year into twelve months, prohibited intercourse with women in the temples, and enacted that no one should enter the temples from a woman without bathing. Again, they were the inventors of geometry. There are some who say that the Carians invented prognostication by the stars. The Phrygians were the first who attended to the flight of birds. And the Tuscans, neighbours of Italy, were adepts at the art of the Haruspex. The Isaurians and the Arabians invented augury, as the Telmesians divination by dreams. The Etruscans invented the trumpet, and the Phrygians the flute. For Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygians. And Cadmus, the inventor of letters among the Greeks, as Euphorus says, was a Phoenician; whence also Herodotus writes that they were called Phoenician letters. And they say that the Phoenicians and the Syrians first invented letters; and that Apis, an aboriginal inhabitant of Egypt, invented the healing art before Io came into Egypt. But afterwards they say that Asclepius improved the art. Atlas the Libyan was the first who built a ship and navigated the sea. Kelmis and Damnaneus, Idaean Dactyli, first discovered iron in Cyprus. Another Idaean discovered the tempering of brass; according to Hesiod, a Scythian. The Thracians first invented what is called a scimitar (arph), -- it is a curved sword, -- and were the first to use shields on horseback. Similarly also the Illyrians invented the shield (pelth). Besides, they say that the Tuscans invented the art of moulding clay; and that Itanus (he was a Samnite) first fashioned the oblong shield (qureos). Cadmus the Phoenician invented stonecutting, and discovered the gold mines on the Pangaean mountain. Further, another nation, the Cappadocians, first invented the instrument called the nabla, and the Assyrians in the same way the dichord. The Carthaginians were the first that constructed a triterme; and it was built by Bosporus, an aboriginal. Medea, the daughter of Æetas, a Colchian, first invented the dyeing of hair. Besides, the Noropes (they are a Paeonian race, and are now called the Norici) worked copper, and were the first that purified iron. Amycus the king of the Bebryci was the first inventor of boxing-gloves. In music, Olympus the Mysian practised the Lydian harmony; and the people called Troglodytes invented the sambuca, a musical instrument. It is said that the crooked pipe was invented by Satyrus the Phrygian; likewise also diatonic harmony by Hyagnis, a Phrygian too; and notes by Olympus, a Phrygian; as also the Phrygian harmony, and the half-Phrygian and the half-Lydian, by Marsyas, who belonged to the same region as those mentioned above. And the Doric was invented by Thamyris the Thracian. We have heard that the Persians were the first who fashioned the chariot, and bed, and footstool; and the Sidonians the first to construct a trireme. The Sicilians, close to Italy, were the first inventors of the phorminx, which is not much inferior to the lyre. And they invented castanets. In the time of Semiramis queen of the Assyrians, they relate that linen garments were invented. And Hellanicus says that Atossa queen of the Persians was the first who composed a letter. These things are reported by Seame of Mitylene, Theophrastus of Ephesus, Cydippus of Mantinea also Antiphanes, Aristodemus, and Aristotle and besides these, Philostephanus, and also Strato the Peripatetic, in his books Concerning Inventions. I have added a few details from them, in order to confirm the inventive and practically useful genius of the barbarians, by whom the Greeks profited in their studies. And if any one objects to the barbarous language, Anacharsis says, "All the Greeks speak Scythian to me." [...]

I’ll find out whatever I can about this Frank. Would the girls go to the police if they were in danger, do you think?” “I can’t say,” Shyla replied, but her head was shaking as she spoke. That was hardly a surprise. A lot of Aboriginal people were suspicious of the police, or gunjies, as Shyla sometimes called them. Through conversations with Shyla, Billie had some of the picture—how contacting the authorities about anything might lead to being arrested for something else, or having the men taken, or having the Aborigines Welfare Board take children away “for their own good.” Stuff like that tended to ensure that trust was in short supply. That long and troubled history had not been forgotten and had created understandable tension between Aboriginal communities and the white authorities. That couldn’t simply vanish overnight.

Why does a kid cry? Kids got no other way to ask for help but to cry. Crying is a sign of distress and they want their stress to be over. We are distressed when our needs are not being met. So if we're hungry, a baby will cry. If they are uncomfortable because their diapers are dirty and wet, they are gonna cry. If they need attachment contact, they will cry. When our needs are met, the child is soothed and eased and their nervous system relaxes. When the needs are denied, the child gets more riled up. When the child is riled up you get stress hormones going through the whole body to the brain. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, particular cortisol, interferes with healthy brain development. When we don't pick up our kids, we're interfering with their brain development. You didn't have to tell aboriginal people this. But in our modern society, you have to teach this and people say "oh my God! Really? That's not what my doctor told me. He told me not to pick up my kid and let him cry through the night." So what I am saying is, from the very beginning, in this society, we are denying people's essential needs for healthy development. Right from the get-go. And I haven't even said anything about how we medicalize birth and people no longer have natural births and that itself is a problem. And then we live in a very stressed society, so the parents are stressed. And when the parents are stressed, the kids are stressed. Because children have no self-regulation, so if you are stressed as an adult, if you are mature enough, you can regulate yourself, you can take a few breaths, you can calm yourself down, you can say "let me slow down, let me think about this, let me deal with this." An infant can't do that. An infant has no self-regulation whatsoever. You know what it is like when you are upset? Your heart is racing, your blood pressure goes up, your nervous system is on fire, your guts might be churning or stopping, muscles are tense, everything changes about you. The same with the infant, except the infant has no capacity to regulate himself. The infant's brain requires the mature function of the adult's brain to regulate it. But what if the adult's brain is not functioning maturely because these adults themselves never got the right conditions for the healthy development? Now we have an immature adult's brain regulating or trying to regulate an immature infant's brain. Then that self-regulation never develops.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Finney did not believe in American exceptionalism—or blind patriotism. “There can scarcely be conceived a more abominable and fiendish maxim,” he wrote, “than ‘our country right or wrong,’” a maxim that, he noted, had been adopted in the case of the 1846 war with Mexico. On a national day of fasting in 1841, he called for a “public confession of national sins,” identifying those he found particularly egregious. One of them was “the outrageous injustice with which this nation has treated the aborigines in this country.” (He was referring in particular to the expulsion of the Cherokees from Georgia in 1838–39.) Another was of course slavery. By 1846 he had confronted the argument that slavery was a lesser evil than the division of the Union. “A nation,” he exclaimed, “who have drawn the sword and bathed in blood in defense of the principle that all men have an inalienable right to liberty, that they are born free and equal. Such a nation… standing with its proud foot on the neck of three millions of crushed and prostrate slaves! Oh horrible! This is less an evil to the world than emancipation, or even than the dismemberment of our hypocritical union! Oh, shame, where is thy blush?” Finney, needless to say, supported war with the South when it came.

I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait. “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.

our government is still breaking our treaty obligations. If you coolly strip away the endless administrative rhetoric about budgets and governance, the endless studies and the endemic lack of broad policies coming from the Department of Indian Affairs, you begin to realize that we are still caught up in the racist assimilation policies of a century ago. Let me take a broader example. We all know that the treaties involved a massive loss of land for First Nations. What most of us pretend we don’t know is that this remarkable generosity was tied to permanent obligations taken on by colonial officials, then by the Government of Canada; that is, by the Crown; that is, by you and me. So we got the use of land – and therefore the possibility of creating Canada – in return for a relationship in which we have permanent obligations. We have kept the land. We have repeatedly used ruses to get more of their land. And we have not fulfilled our side of the agreement. We pretend that we do not have partnership obligations. It’s pretty straightforward. We criticize. We insult. We complain. We weasel. Surely, we say, these handouts have gone on long enough. But the most important handout was to us. Bob Rae put it this way at the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Treaty Conference in June 2014: “It’s ridiculous to think people would say: ‘I have all this land, millions and millions and millions of acres of land, I’m giving it to you for a piece of land that is five miles by five miles and a few dollars a year.’ To put it in terms of a real estate transaction, it’s preposterous. It doesn’t make any sense.” So the generosity was from First Nations to newcomers. And we are keeping that handout – the land – offered in good faith by friends and allies.

When I take people out into the land I say: 'Let's watch the land talk to us.' And you'll see some jaws drop. But that's what it's doin' - it's talking to us without a voice. Our land does that all the time; our water does that, our wind. Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun do it all the time. They show us things, what's happening. They are talking to us constantly. And what do we do? We ignore them; we ignore what the Mother, the land is telling us.

But not necessarily! Look, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plain. Dust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnot. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that’s not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that’s always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it.

The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.

The aboriginals have always known the four points of the compass and the four winds of heaven—the north, the south, the west, and the east. Traditions say that the aboriginals came to Australia from another land in the north-west. One of these tells that they were forced to Australia by fierce ants. This may mean that they were pursued by a plague of huge, deadly ants, or by a prehistoric race as fierce and as numerous as ants. Since coming to Australia, thousands of years ago, the people have probably made little or no change in their habits and customs. They kept the balance of nature even, and for centuries they neither advanced nor retrograded. Their tribal laws and customs were fixed and unchangeable.

These New World practices (enslavement and genocide) formed another secret link with the anti-human animus of mechanical industry after the sixteenth century, when the workers were no longer protected either by feudal custom or by the self-governing guild. The degradations undergone by child laborers or women during the early nineteenth century in England's 'satanic mills' and mines only reflected those that took place during the territorial expansion of Western man. In Tasmania, for example, British colonists organized 'hunting parties' for pleasure, to slaughter the surviving natives: a people more primitive, scholars believe, than the Australian natives, who should have been preserved, so to say, under glass, for the benefit of later anthropologists. So commonplace were these practices, so plainly were the aborigines regarded as predestined victims, that even the benign and morally sensitive Emerson could say resignedly in an early poem, 1827: "Alas red men are few, red men are feeble, They are few and feeble and must pass away." As a result Western man not merely blighted in some degree every culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship, as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples. With this extirpation of earlier cultures went a vast loss of botanical and medical lore, representing many thousands of years of watchful observation and empirical experiment whose extraordinary discoveries-such as the American Indian's use of snakeroot (reserpine) as a tranquilizer in mental illness-modern medicine has now, all too belatedly, begun to appreciate. For the better part of four centuries the cultural riches of the entire world lay at the feet of Western man; and to his shame, and likewise to his gross self-deprivation and impoverishment, his main concern was to appropriate only the gold and silver and diamonds, the lumber and pelts, and such new foods (maize and potatoes) as would enable him to feed larger populations.

The Canadian government’s point of view was set in the imperial/colonial era. Our dominant mythologies were shaped in the same era. All our governments – federal and provincial – must simply let go of their paternalistic mindset. Aboriginals are not wards of the state. They don’t need charity. They want the power that our own history says is theirs by right. And that power contains economic solutions. What this means is that our governments should stop wasting our money fighting to maintain systems of injustice. What they need to do is digest reality and embrace reconciliation, which, as Taiaiake Alfred says, begins with restitution. This is more than good intentions. It involves a shift in power and in economic wealth. That shift in economic wealth is the solution to Aboriginal poverty.

The aboriginals say that the stars are the children of the sons and daughters of the morning star and the lady moon, who were created by the Sun Goddess. Bajjara and Arna, the prophets of the Spirit World, said, “You, my children, shall remember to whom you owe your birth, and you shall not seek to change your state like the animals, the birds, the reptiles, the insects, and the fishes. Remember, also, that you are superior to the creatures, and that you and your children and your children’s children will all return to the Great All Father, the Eternal Spirit.

Histories of botany have little to say about the suffering of the Aboriginal Australians, but they usually find some kind words for James Cook and Joseph Banks. Furthermore,

aborigine. William Hone, in his Table Book (1827-28) says that aborigine "is explained in every dictionary...as a general name for the indigenous inhabitants of a country. In reality, it is the proper name of a peculiar people of Italy, who were not indigenous but were supposed to be a colony of Arcadians." Nevertheless, these people of Latium were thought by some Romans to have been residents of Italy from the beginning, aborigine, which gave us the Latin word aborigines for the original inhabitants of a country.

If you leave here, you know what is going to happen don’t you? People are going to stop and stare at you the very instant they see the colour of your skin, and they will say: She is one of those wild Aboriginals from up North, a terrorist; they will say you are one of those faces kept in the Federal Government’s Book of Suspects. Bella Donna said that even though she had never seen this book for herself, she had heard that it had the Australian Government’s embossed crest on the cover, and was kept at the Post Office where anyone could study it. What was a post office? The girl had listened. This was the place where they kept faces plucked from the World Wide Web by Army intelligence looking at computers all day long, searching for brown- and black-coloured criminals, un-assimilables, illegal immigrants, terrorists – all the undesirables; those kind of people. Never ever leave the swamp, she said, adding that her own skin did not matter, but the girl was the colour of a terrorist, and terrorism was against the law.

I think it'll be interesting. The Aborigines certainly are, Lizabeth said. They have a tradition called the walkabout. It's a challenge for boys when they come of age. I don't know about the girls-the book didn't say. And grown men walkabout, too, when they're troubled. What's a walkabout? The book said it's to find your true self, but I don't really know what that means Lizabeth said.

Why not simply embrace the reality of the Aboriginal comeback? Why not accept that these court victories contain the elements for resolving the problem of Aboriginal poverty by creating the basis for Aboriginal power, which is in part economic power? We are dealing with a point-of-view problem. The Canadian government’s point of view was set in the imperial/colonial era. Our dominant mythologies were shaped in the same era. All our governments – federal and provincial – must simply let go of their paternalistic mindset. Aboriginals are not wards of the state. They don’t need charity. They want the power that our own history says is theirs by right. And

It isn’t fashionable to say this these days, but a willingness to go into the streets shows a commitment to democracy. And Canadian democracy, like so many others, was born in good part on the streets in the middle of the nineteenth century. It could be argued that the general

Many of our leaders are themselves addicted to the Euro-U.S. Westphalian model. They desperately attempt to fabricate simplistic myths – peopled by royal families, military triumphs, heroes, Canadian values or Quebec values – that turn out to be lifted directly from Britain or France or the United States. You might say these are simple, old-fashioned concepts of patriotism. But in this case old-fashioned refers to a model that has never worked here, a model that leads to the kind of patriotic misery experienced in Europe and the United States when races are ranked, languages forbidden, cultures excluded, one religion set in place as the official faith, or all religions marginalized so that the state’s monolithic mythology can become the state religion. This is disingenuously called a secular state. And all of this is done in the name of a safe, aggressively simplified and centralized mythology. But if that is so, you ask, what

He committed the state to a permanent reciprocal relationship. It hardly matters what the legal papers say because in an oral relationship the legal relationship is oral. That is why the Supreme Court so often decides for the Aboriginal side.

Only thus can hope be bright that there might come a tomorrow when you, the descendants of the settlers of our lands, can say to the world, Look, we came and were welcomed, and then we wrought much despair; but we are also men of honour and integrity and we set to work in cooperation, we listened and we learned, we gave our support, and today we live in harmony with the first people of this land who now call us, brothers.

Ayers Rock it’s called but its real name is Uluru, a word that’s spooky even to say, one that sounds like wind around the eaves. A holy place for the aboriginal people who saw it first. Saw it, worshipped it, but never presumed to think they owned it. They understand that if there’s a God, it’s God’s rock. Billy

both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Lilla Watson, an aboriginal activist in Australia, confronted the hordes of do-gooders who came to serve and help her people by saying, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

By the time he died at the age of ninety-eight my father had few material possessions left other than an armchair, chair and desk in which he had collected various writings precious to him over the years: poems, sayings, quotes, a few pieces he had written, some correspondence. Among these papers my elder sister found a letter from a now-dead cousin on his mother’s side written years before about how when they were growing up they were told over and over never to mention outside of the home that their family had black blood. The implication was that our grandmother was of Aboriginal descent.

Some say the idea that the world's trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit, and through that by political action, the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures might be more readily explained.

Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal Australian artist and activist, along with the activists of 1970s Queensland are credited with saying, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

For just as it is impossible for anyone to be any more or less human at any stage of his own existence, so it is impossible for him to be either more or less human than any other human being. Thus, in essentials the unborn child is the same as you and I, differing from us only in such non-essentials as size and ability, even as you and I differ from each other without lessening the humanity of either. So it is in recognition of their common and invisible humanity that we say all men are equal, subordinating to that equality all the differences in degree between one person and another. And it is because of their common humanity, with its attendant dignity and uniqueness, that we say men may not be used as a means to an end, may not be enslaved or otherwise exploited, may not be killed for the sake of expediency. In the light of this understanding of equality, it is impossible to justify the abortion movement, which would make the differences of the unborn child the basis for denying him the equal protection of the law. If lack of maturity makes him expendable, in principle there is nothing to prevent our declaring that other deficiencies make other persons expendable. Our enslavement of the blacks resulted from just such a denial of their full humanity. The Nazi atrocities resulted from calling an entire people defective by birth. The early settlers of Australia systematically shot the Aborigines for the land and resources they coveted. Defining preborn children out of the human race is no less illogical and callous.

A host of scholars – many of whom, like Deloria, have aided petitioning tribes – support the ‘small pie’ theory. They believe that government definitions of Indians and tribes are simply part of the old colonial order, set to ‘divide and conquer’ Native peoples. These scholars see these government definitions as overreliant on nonindigenous models of tribalism, blood quantum, government rolls and censuses. Many of them call upon tribes and Native peoples to undertake decolonization projects, imploring Indian leaders to pursue a new acknowledgment agenda, on that is more inclusive and less based on national imperatives and Western epistemologies of race, history, empiricism, and science. The most accepted scholarly position, which has been called the ‘liberal-inclusive’ model for identifying tribes and Indian individuals, implies that the vast majority of unrecognized Indian groups and individuals are worthy of acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is not forthcoming, they say, due to a host of factors, including federal neglect, inadequate Euro-American recordkeeping, racism, and opposition from established tribes. Scholars who take this position find it shameful that marginal, unacknowledged aboriginal peoples are languishing today. Certain individuals within this loosely defined ideological school argue that officials should rely not on the current restrictive policy, but upon self-identification, community acceptance, and state recognition.

There is a dream dreaming you.

I have a lot of anxiety about shows that are basically a display of Aboriginal pain,” David Garneau says in an interview. “Why are we—Aboriginal and non-​Aboriginal curators—presenting Aboriginal pain to a primarily non-​Indigenous audience? What do we hope to achieve?

I myself say atomic energy has made people unhappier than they were before, and that having to live in two-hemisphere planet has made our aborigines a lot less happy, without making the wheel-and-alphabet people who “discovered” them any fonder of being alive than they were before.

My disapproval extended to the personnel of the various native tribes he had encountered in the course of his explorations. On his own showing, he had for years been horning in uninvited on the aborigines of Brazil, the Congo and elsewhere, and not one of them apparently had had the enterprise to get after him with a spear or to say it with poisoned darts from the family blowpipe. And these were fellows who called themselves savages. Savages, forsooth! The savages in the books I used to read in my childhood would have had him in the Obituary column before he could say 'What ho', but with the ones you get nowadays it's all slackness and laissez-faire. Can't be bothered. Leave it to somebody else. Let George do it. One sometimes wonders what the world's coming to.

In 1770, Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, "Kanguru." From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn’t until later that they learned it meant "What did you say?

Our science, arts and social policies will only benefit if we listen, he says. ‘Aboriginal people have 60,000 years of experience and expertise to deploy and to offer the rest of the culture, and we ignore this at our peril. I know senior scientists in several fields who’ve copped to this in recent years and who say they wished they’d woken up to it decades ago. The future of our oceans – indeed our planet – depends on deeper knowledge married to an ethic of restraint. The science community has come to realise this. Indigenous stewards have always known this.