Authors: Wade Davis
In truth, the visionary realm of the Aboriginal
peoples of Australia represented one of the great experiments in human
thought. Descendants of the first wave of humans to leave Africa, the first
peoples of Australia arrived on an island continent that had been
geographically isolated from the rest of world for over a hundred million
years. They encountered an austere and impossible place, the driest land
mass on earth, where evolution itself had taken a bizarre turn, producing
plants and animals unlike any other: egg-laying mammals, giant flightless
birds, and a host of creatures that nursed their embryos outside the womb in
the safety of a marsupial pouch. Among the first animals the Aboriginal
peoples saw, perhaps even at sea during one of the open crossings, were
saltwater crocodiles 8 metres long, primordial creatures that could see,
hear, and breathe when almost totally submerged. These reptiles hunted by
stealth, killing anything they could overpower, and would have welcomed,
though not warmly, a new form of prey.
Once on land, the people went walking. Through
time, small extended family bands reached to every corner of the continent,
establishing clan territories, which became loosely associated through
common language into larger networks or tribes. The size of the clan
territories depended on the carrying capacity of the land. The grasslands
and eucalyptus groves of the south and east had relatively large
concentrations of people. The central and western deserts were so sparsely
settled that men were as shadows on the sand. By the time of European
contact there were as many as 10,000 distinct spheres of spiritual and
societal focus, 10,000 homelands, each aggressively defended by boys raised
to be warriors.
The boundaries of the clans, both geographic and
cultural, were defined by sacred places, by narratives linking people and
ancestors, and by a web of social relations so intricate it would take
Western anthropologists a century even to begin to chart its complexity.
There were over a hundred named kin relationships, each implying specific
rights and obligations, rules and regulations of blood and marriage that
established a social map allowing every individual to know at all times how
he or she was expected to behave. In place of technological wizardry, our
great achievement, the Aboriginal people of Australia invented a matrix of
connectivity. In doing so, they generated a protective shell as daunting,
comforting, and complete as the city walls we erect with similar motivation
to insulate our lives from the vicissitudes of nature.
Within the clan territories, individuals
developed a localized knowledge of place that was extraordinary. I recently
spent a month in the remote reaches of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory
of Australia with a remarkable man, Otto Bulmaniya Campion, and his extended
family – his wife Christine, his uncle Geoffrey, all the kids – out on the
land. I wanted to know about the Dreaming and the Songlines, something more
than I had learned from books. At first I asked questions, sought
definitions, but then, recognizing my folly, I simply watched.
Arriving at a billabong, a pond or slough, a
place to camp, Otto and the lads immediately set fire to the grass, both to
cleanse and to regenerate the site. As they bathed they beat the water,
sending a message to the crocodiles. They then purified themselves with the
smoke from ironwood branches, and with their hands wrapped a ring of mud and
red ochre around the trunk of every tree. In a few gestures they
domesticated the space, sweeping the ground with branches, erecting
windbreaks, peeling off great sheets of paper bark from the
melaleuca
trees to serve as bedding and blankets. The
mothers and young children slept in one circle, the elder men in another,
and young single boys in yet a third. When they went after
barramundi
fish, they kept up a constant dialogue,
describing the nature of their hunger and needs, invoking the ancestors and
the spirit of the ancestors of the fish. Food they called
bush
tucker
, and it could be anything – green ants, flying fox, geese,
or wild yams. When they hunted, they covered their bodies in mud, masking
their scent, becoming as one with the prey. One morning, Christine and
Otto’s son painted themselves in red ochre, a ritual compact that allowed
the boy to become transformed into the image of the Rainbow Serpent.
Around the fire at night, Otto conversed with his
father’s spirit, a voice that came out of the flames. By day he tracked
kangaroo with an intense deductive logic that would have put Sherlock Holmes
to shame. But once the animal was dead, he reverted to reverence, a strict
protocol that dictated precisely how the carcass had to be treated lest the
direst of calamities befall the hunter and his community. The tongue is
carefully extracted so that children grow to speak properly and with
respect. The legs are broken at the knee to liberate the animal’s spirit,
and then folded and bound in a specific order and manner. The gut is cut
open to reveal parasitic worms, eaten raw, flavoured only by the green
roughage extracted from the stomach. The distribution of the meat reflects
the authority of kinship, head to the hunter, tail to the brother-in-law,
hindquarters to second and third brothers.
As we walked the land together I was astonished
not only by the depth of Otto’s knowledge, but even more so by his way of
knowing. His thinking was completely non-linear, a sort of magical pattern
of what seemed to be free association. A trail of ants would lead to sweat
bees, a comb of honey dug from the ground prompted a reference to a mythic
bird, talk of a spirit, which in turn brought us back to the Morningstar
Songline, Rock Wallaby Dreaming, and the utility of the paperbark tree, a
source of shelter and so much more. Kapok trees coming into bloom implied
that baby kangaroos, or joeys, have enough hair to survive the death of
their mothers. A yellow-red blossom on an unknown tree, with a colour
suggestive of the fat of an emu, revealed to Otto the proper time to hunt
the long-necked turtle.
I came to realize, simply by being with Otto and
his family, that in a sense the Aboriginal peoples had never been truly
nomadic. To the contrary, they lived locked within the territories
delineated by their ancestors. This was a revelation. Imagine for a moment
if all the genius and intellect of all the generations that have come before
you had been concentrated on a single set of tasks, focused exclusively on
knowing a particular piece of ground, not only the plants and animals but
every ecological, climatic, geographic detail, the pulse of every sentient
creature, the rhythm of every breath of wind, the patterns of every season.
This was the norm in Aboriginal Australia.
What linked the clan territories was not the
physical movement of peoples but rather the strength of a common idea, a
subtle but universal philosophy, a way of thinking. This was the Dreaming.
It refers on one level, as we have seen, to the first dawning, when the
Rainbow Serpent and all the ancestral beings created the world. And it is
remembered in the Songlines, which are the trajectories that these ancestors
travelled as they sang the world into being.
But the Songlines, I discovered from Otto, are
not straight or linear. They do not even necessarily exist in
three-dimensional space. In their numbers, however, they weave a web across
an entire continent. For a civilization that lacked the written word they
became a record of the past, a promise of the future, and a network that in
the moment bound together all of the people. The goal of the individual, as
Otto taught me, is not to follow the Songline from beginning to end, but to
honour the ancestors at the points of power and memory that mark the passage
of a Songline through one’s particular clan territory.
But, critically, the Dreaming is not a myth or a
memory. It is what happened at the time of creation, but also what happens
now, and what will happen for all eternity. In the Aboriginal universe there
is no past, present, or future. In not one of the hundreds of dialects
spoken at the moment of contact was there a word for time. There is no
notion of linear progression, no goal of improvement, no idealization of the
possibility of change. To the contrary, the entire logos of the Dreaming is
stasis, constancy, balance, and consistency. The entire purpose of humanity
is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial
activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely
as it was at the moment of creation. Imagine if all of Western intellectual
and scientific passion had focused from the beginning of time on keeping the
Garden of Eden precisely as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful
conversation.
The universe of the Aboriginal people was no
ideal world. Conflicts were violent. The rituals could be austere in the
extreme. The acquisition of initiatory knowledge among the Warlpiri, to cite
but one example, involved the cutting and transformation of the male sexual
organ, a vertical incision that ultimately left the penis fully splayed. But
the overriding mood of the civilization, as W.E.H. Stanner described, was
one of acceptance of belief. There was little place for skepticism, inquiry,
or dissent. The Dreaming, as he wrote, “defined what was, determined what
is, embodied all that can be.”
In the Western tradition existence is something
to be contemplated. Our thinkers and philosophers step outside of life to
discern abstract ideas that we define as insights. The Dreaming makes such
reflection both meaningless and impossible. It envelops the individual in a
web of belief and conviction from which there is no exit, for one cannot
think that one’s thoughts are wrong. To violate a law of the Dreaming is a
transgression not limited to the moment, but rather one that reverberates
through all dimensions, through the eternal past and the limitless future.
The Aborigines, as Stanner understood, were not a people without a history.
They were, he wrote, a civilization that in a sense had defeated history.
The Dreaming answered both the questions how and
why. It dictated the way a person must live. Man’s obligation was not to
improve upon nature, but to sustain the world. The literal preservation of
the land was the most fundamental priority of every Aboriginal man and
woman. It was a profoundly conservative ideology. I am not saying whether it
was right or wrong, good or bad. But it had consequences. Clearly, had
humanity as a whole followed the ways of the Aborigines, the intellectual
track laid down by these descendants of the first humans to walk out of
Africa, we would not have put a man on the moon. But, on the other hand, had
the Dreaming become a universal devotion, we would not be contemplating
today the consequences of industrial processes that by any scientific
definition threaten the very life supports of the planet.
THIS STORY, LIKE ALL NARRATIVES
, weaves its way back to the beginning. I opened
this lecture by speaking of the Sacred Headwaters, this astonishingly
beautiful and rare jewel of a valley from which are born the salmon rivers
of home — actually of
my
home, for the Stikine is where I live. The
people of the Stikine River valley, one of the most extraordinary places I
have ever known, have rallied against these projects, for they have a very
different way of thinking about the land. For them the Sacred Headwaters is
a neighbourhood, at once their grocery store and sanctuary, their church and
schoolyard, their cemetery and country club. They believe that the people
with greatest claim to ownership of the valley are the generations as yet
unborn. The Sacred Headwaters will be their nursery. The Iskut elders,
almost all of whom grew up on the land, have formally called for an end to
all industrial activity in the valley and the creation of a Sacred
Headwaters Tribal Heritage Area.
Since the summer of 2005, Iskut men, women and
children, together with Tahltan and First Nations supporters from Telegraph
Creek and beyond, have maintained in all seasons an educational camp at the
head of the only road access to the Sacred Headwaters. Those who would
violate the land they hold in trust have been denied entry. Those who accept
and revere the land as it is have been welcomed. With everyone they have
shared their vision of a new era of sustainable stewardship for their
homeland and for the entire northwest quadrant of the province. After so
many years on the line, they are not about to give up. In the end, what is
at stake is the future of one of the most extraordinary regions in all of
North America. The fate of the Sacred Headwaters transcends the interests of
local residents, provincial agencies, mining companies, and those few who
favour industrial development at any cost. No amount of methane gas, coal or
copper can compensate for the sacrifice of a place that can be the Sacred
Headwaters of all Canadians, and indeed of all peoples of the world. This,
ultimately, is the message of the Elder Brothers.
Five
CENTURY OF THE WIND
“The ideal of a single civilization for everyone
implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates
us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that
disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.” — Octavio Paz
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
has been found, and it lies on the southwest
coast of Africa, not far from the homeland of the Juwasi Bushmen who for
generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari. Humanity’s
point of departure from Africa has also been located with some precision, on
the other side of the ancient continent, on the western shore of the Red
Sea. From there we walked through desert sands and over snow-covered passes,
through jungles and mountain streams, eventually finding our way across
oceans and wind-stripped coral atolls to black sand beaches that fronted
entire continents of untold mysteries and latent hopes. We settled the
Arctic and the Himalaya, the grasslands of the Asian steppe and the boreal
forests of the north, where winter winds blow so fierce that willow sap
freezes and caribou graze on branches dead to the sun. On the rivers of
India we encountered sounds that echoed the human heart, and in the searing
silences of the Sahara we found water. Along the way we invented ten
thousand different ways of being.
In the mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico the Mazatec
learned to communicate across vast distances by whistling, mimicking the
intonations of their tonal language to create a vocabulary written on the
wind. Along the beaches of Dahomey, Vodoun acolytes opened wide the windows
of the mystic, discovering the power of trance, allowing human beings to
move in and out of the spirit realm with ease and impunity. In the forests
of Yunnan, Naxi shaman carved mystical tales into rocks, while in the
Orinoco River delta their counterparts among the Warao endured nicotine
narcosis in their quest for visions and inspiration, knowledge of the Lords
of the Rain, the House of the Swallow-Tailed Kite, the heraldic raptor, and
the dancing jaguar.
Off the shore of Sumatra on the island of
Siberut, the Mentawai people recognized that spirits enliven everything that
exists — birds, plants, clouds, even the rainbows that arch across the sky.
Rejoicing in the beauty of the world, these divine entities could not
possibly be expected to reside in a human body that was not itself
beautiful. Thus the Mentawai came to believe that if nature lost its lustre,
if the landscape became drab, if they themselves as a physical presence in
creation ceased to do honour to the essence of beauty, the primordial forces
of creation would abandon this realm for the settlements of the dead, and
all life would perish. To respect the ancestors and celebrate the living,
the Mentawai, both men and women, devote their lives to the pursuit of
aesthetic beauty, preening their bodies, filing their teeth, adding
brilliant feathers to their hair, and inscribing delicate spiral patterns on
their bodies. In daily life they approach every task, however mundane, fully
adorned.
In the mountains of Japan, outside of Kyoto,
Tendai monks sleep for two hours a day and, with only a bowl of noodles and
a rice ball for food, run through the sacred cryptomeria forests seventeen
hours at a stretch for seven years, covering at one point in their Kaihigyo
initiation 80 kilometres a day for one hundred days. As a final ordeal they
must go without food, water, and sleep for nine days, even as they sit in
silent meditation, their bodies exposed to the roaring heat of a bonfire.
Tradition dictates that those who fail to complete the training must end
their lives. Beneath their white robes they carry a knife and a rope. Slung
from their back are rope sandals. They wear out five pairs in a day. In the
last four centuries only forty-six men have completed the ordeal, a ritual
path of enlightenment that brings the initiate closer to the realm of the
dead, all with the goal of revealing to the living that everyone and
everything are equal, that human beings are not exceptional, that nothing in
this world is permanent.
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK WHY
it matters if these wondrous yet exotic cultures
and their belief systems disappear. What importance does it have to a family
in Vancouver or Halifax, on a Saskatchewan farm or living in the embrace and
comfort of a Newfoundland cove, if some distant tribe in Africa is
extinguished through assimilation or violence, if their dreams and spiritual
passions articulated through ritual turn to vapour? The query, as you might
guess if you’ve had a chance to reflect on the first four of these Massey
Lectures, confounds me. If someone needs to ask that question, can he or she
possibly be expected to understand the answer?
Does it matter to the people of Quebec if the
Tuareg of the Sahara lose their culture? Probably not. No more than the loss
of Quebec would matter to the Tuareg. But I would argue that the loss of
either way of life does matter to humanity as a whole. On the one hand it is
a basic issue of human rights. Who is to say that the Canadian perspective
on reality matters more than that of the Tuareg? And at a more fundamental
level we have to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we want to live in?
Most Canadians will never encounter a camel caravan of blue-robed Tuareg
moving slowly across an ocean of white sand. For that matter most of us will
never see a painting by Monet, or hear a Mozart symphony. But does this mean
that the world would not be a lesser place without these artists and
cultures and their unique interpretations of reality?
So I respond with a metaphor from biology. What
does it matter if a single species of life becomes extinct? Well, imagine
you are getting onto an airplane, and you notice that the mechanic is
popping out the rivets in the wings. You ask the obvious question and the
mechanic says, “No problem. We save money with each rivet and so far we’ve
had no problems.” Perhaps the loss of a single rivet makes no difference,
but eventually the wings fall off. It is the same thing with culture. If the
marathon monks cease to run, or if the children of the Mentawai shift their
sense of beauty to something more mundane and uninspired, or if the Naxi
shaman no longer write in stone and abandon their native script, Dongba, the
world’s last living hieroglyphic language, will the sky fall? No. But we’re
not talking about the loss of a single species of life or a single cultural
adaptation. We are speaking about a waterfall of destruction unprecedented
in the history of our species. In our lifetime half of the voices of
humanity are being silenced.
The problem is not change. We have this conceit
in the West that while we have been celebrating and developing technological
wizardry, somehow the other peoples of the world have been static and
intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Change is the
one constant in history. All peoples in all places are always dancing with
new possibilities for life. Nor is technology per se a threat to the
integrity of culture. The Lakota did not stop being Sioux when they gave up
the bow and arrow for the rifle any more than a rancher from Medicine Hat
ceased being a Canadian when he gave up the horse and buggy in favour of the
automobile. It is neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity
of culture. It is power, the crude face of domination. We have this idea
that these indigenous peoples, these distant others, quaint and colourful
though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away, as if by natural law,
as if they are failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us.
This is simply not true. In every case these are dynamic living peoples
being driven out of existence by identifiable and overwhelming external
forces. This is actually an optimistic observation, for it suggests that if
human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be the
facilitators of cultural survival.
To gain perspective on this clash of power and
culture, let’s turn for a moment to the history of our own continent and the
experience of a single First Nation, the Kiowa. Originally a hunting and
gathering people from the headwaters of the Missouri River, the Kiowa came
down from the mountains to the grasslands of the Dakotas about a century
before the American Revolution. They encountered the Crow, who taught them
the religion and culture of the Plains, the divinity of the Sun, the ways of
the buffalo, the power and utility of the horse. They later moved north into
the Black Hills, where they fought the Lakota, before fleeing south, driven
by the Cheyenne and Arapaho across the headwaters of the Arkansas. There the
Kiowa clashed with the Comanche, before forging an alliance that gave the
two nations control of the southern grasslands and the vast herds of buffalo
that moved as shadows across the continent.
Once each year, at the height of summer when down
appeared on the cottonwood trees, the people came together for the Sun
Dance, a time of spiritual renewal. The teepees went up in a wide circle,
the entire encampment oriented to the rising sun. The medicine lodge was the
focal point, for within it, on a stick planted on the western side, hung the
Tai-me
, the sacred image of the sun. It was a simple fetish, a
small human figure with a face of green stone, a robe of white feathers, and
a headdress of ermine skin and a single erect feather. Around its neck were
strands of blue beads, and painted on its face, neck, and back were the
symbols of the sun and the moon. For the Kiowa the Tai-me was the source of
life itself. Kept in a rawhide box under the protection of a hereditary
Keeper, it was never exposed to the light save for the four days of the Sun
Dance. At that time its power spread into all and everything present: the
children and the warrior dancers, the buffalo skull that lay at its base as
the animals’ representative of the sun, the Ten Medicines Bundles displayed
before it, the men who for four days and nights slowly turned their shields
to follow the passing sun, the young dancer who stared at the sun all day
every day sacrificing his vision that the people might come to see.
As late as 1871, buffalo outnumbered people in
North America. In that year one could stand on a bluff in the Dakotas and
see buffalo in every direction for 50 kilometres. Herds were so large it
took days for them to pass by. Wyatt Earp described one herd of over a
million animals stretched over a grazing area the size of the state of Rhode
Island. Within nine years of that sighting, the buffalo had vanished from
the Plains. U.S. government policy was explicit. Exterminate the buffalo and
destroy the cultures of the Plains. Theodore Roosevelt, revered today by
conservationists, expressed the national mood. “The settler and pioneer have
justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as
nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”
In less than a decade the systematic slaughter
reduced the bison to a zoological curiosity, and destroyed all native
resistance. General Philip Sheridan, who orchestrated the campaign, advised
the U.S. Congress to mint a commemorative medal, with a dead buffalo on one
side, and a dead Indian on the other. On July 20, 1890, the Sun Dance was
officially outlawed, and on pain of imprisonment the Kiowa and all the
Plains cultures were denied their essential act of faith. An outbreak of
measles and influenza in the spring of 1892 struck a final blow.
What transpired on the American frontier was
repeated throughout the world. In 1879 in Argentina, General Roca launched
the Conquest of the Desert, a military campaign, which had as its expressed
goal the extermination of the Indians of the Pampa and the seizure of their
lands and cattle. The people of Tasmania were annihilated within
seventy-five years of contact. The Reverend John West, a Christian
missionary, rationalized the slaughter as the necessary cleansing of the
land of an offensive people he described as a “detested incubus.” The
colonial administration of French Polynesia in 1850 as a matter of principle
formally banned all expressions of Polynesian culture, inter-island trade
and voyaging, ritual prayer and feasting, tattooing, wood carving, dancing,
and even singing. In 1884 British colonial authorities outlawed the potlatch
in the Pacific Northwest. A year later, as European delegates gathered at
the Congress of Berlin to carve up the African continent, they formally
pledged their support for all efforts “calculated to educate the natives and
to teach them to understand and appreciate the benefits of civilization.”
The follow-up conference leading to the Brussels Act of 1892 called on
colonial powers throughout the world to “bring about the extinction of
barbarous customs.”
That same year the first of 40,000 Bora and
Huitoto Indians died in the Northwest Amazon, along the Río Putumayo,
murdered by the traders and overseers of the Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company.
In the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s private armies, again in pursuit of
latex, the white blood of the forest, slaughtered as many as 8 million
Africans. In 1919, in the immediate wake of the First World War, a global
conflict that had obliterated European youth and violated every notion of
decency and honour, the victors gathered in Paris, and by the terms of
article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, placed tribal peoples, all
those incapable of withstanding the “strenuous conditions of the modern
world,” under their tutelage as a “sacred trust of civilization.” In the
hundred years leading up to the war, indigenous peoples had been forced to
surrender to colonial powers lands spanning nearly half the globe. Millions
had died, victims of the very civilization that in its own spasms of
self-destruction would twice, in little more than a generation, come close
to immolating the entire world.