Carolyn Smith-Morris - Indigenous Communalism: Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective

Indigenous Communalism

Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective

CAROLYN SMITH-MORRIS

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number: 2019002221

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2020 by Carolyn Smith-Morris

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Cylinders of cigarette ash lay corralled near the edge of the kitchen table, camouflaged in the flowers of the vinyl tablecloth. Whenever another truncated branch was shaken loose and fell, shattering among the swirling carnations and peonies, Ray just brushed it into the pile with his left pinky. Ray Keed was a six-foot-two elder among the Wiradjuri Aborigines of western New South Wales, Australia. In his generally quiet and sometimes stern way of moving about the world, he managed the affairs of his family, attended to his passionate and politically savvy wife, and chaired the Bogan River Wiradjuri Traditional Owners group. He took very seriously the work of shepherding in the next generation of leaderswhether his own Aboriginal kin or the string of non-Kooris (that is, non-Aboriginal) students brought to him by an anthropology professor from Sydney whod worked with the Wiradjuri for many years. I was one in the string.

Ray and his wife, Valda, would be my hosts and supervisors for a summers work on a Native Title claim. That is to say, they would house and feed me, introduce me to dozens of their Wiradjuri family and community members, lead me into conversations about culture, heritage, and tradition, and guide me away from inappropriate or offensive mistakes typical of non-Kooris. Our shared purpose was to document the many ways these people envisioned themselves as Wiradjuri, as belonging to a parcel of land, and as sharing a heritage that others did not share. Our relationship was quite (though not completely) new when we did this work, but the intimacy of the topic was so personal that our bonds grew quickly.

It was in the early years after the passage of the Native Title Act, which made possible the first-ever claims to unalienated Crown land by Aboriginal entities, that Ray and Valda called me back to Australia. Through my mentor, Dr. Gaynor Macdonald at the University of Sydney, I was asked to help with the job of collecting and documenting the Bogan River Wiradjuri claim to one small claimable area. It was the mid-1990s, and I would live and work with Ray and Valda for several weeks gathering genealogies, family histories, place histories, and other data called for by the Act.

Because Ray and Valda were subtle and intelligent observers, they knew before my arrival all the ways I would reveal myself to be an outsider and in what ways I might be helpful. They had worked before with Gubba (white) younglings, trying to share with them the lessons of cultural difference, if not also of contemporary Aboriginal life. In fact, this work involved hours and hours of elders talk, of which much came from Ray and Valda, but also passing time in the countryside and ancestral sites.

Our work was conducted around kitchen tables, on porch chairs, and while tending children. We laughed at stories that family members and Koori neighbors and friends told about their youth and the big family gatherings over their lifetimes. There were plenty of stories about conflicts between community members, but many more about the lifelong bonds within the community and the chronicles of sharing and care that sustained those relationships (see, e.g., Powell and Macdonald 2001). We even had a picnic at a site underneath 150-year-old rock paintings where we practiced throwing some boomerangs made by one of the cousins.

On my first night in their home for this job, Ray, Valda, and I reminisced about having met when I was an undergraduate student, and about the many undergraduates they had known. Ray and Valda took a group of students on a campout into the bush one time, also orchestrated by my mentor, Gaynor. Young visitors journeyed to this landscape of gum trees and brush flowers, where rabbits are a menace and the roadkill is kangaroos, and learned from these campouts about respect for the earths resources, living more simply and with fewer commodities, and the Koori way of getting along with others, which they called caring and sharing (Macdonald 2000, 2017, forthcoming).

One night they told me about the time a big row erupted at the campsite over the washing of dishes. Rather than scraping the plates clean, using sparse liquid soap, and dunking all the dishes into a single pan of clean water to rinse, the Gubba kids were running the spigot for ten or fifteen minutes just to get the dishes clean. To Ray and Valda, such a wasting of water was not only an economic offense but a spiritual one. Australia is an extremely arid environment, with very few perennial sources of water. The Wiradjuri territory includes three seasonal rivers and lies generally north of the perennial Murray River, giving them relative water security. But this limited security is never taken for granted. Life is designed around those sources, and waterways are vital to local cultures, both practically and spiritually. The argument over water between Ray and those students embittered a few people but was a worthwhile and fundamental lesson about survival in Wiradjuri territorynot just about physical survival in an arid environment, but about spiritual and cultural survival in the context of presumptuous and privileged Others. Ray and Valda told this story to me on my first night in charge of washing up in their kitchen. I took the hint and let the dishes dry a little soapy.

Other good Gubba villains were teens who preened and flirted with each other too much, who ignored the wisdom of tradition and elders, or who were too often simply rude in expecting things to be like home. For professors who take students into foreign cultures, these are common enough lessons. But since I had come together with Ray and Valda not just as elders and young adult but as claimants and a research assistant, the lessons and stories took on greater dimensions.

In the highly political experience of a legal land claim, Indigenous peoples are made the subjects of intensive, outsider scrutiny. They have to prove the depth and duration of their cultural heritage in ways that dominant whites never do. What might have been family chatter or funny storytelling on another occasion was now being audio-recorded and added to the legal case file. Stories became accounts, family memories became Koori culture. I tried not to make the recording of these stories too obvious or intrusive and sometimes waited until I was alone to write things down. But the very fact that an anthropologist is taking notes on the conversation, turning it into a performance of ethnicity, is enough to make anyone a bit more philosophical and moralistic.