DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

2002:383–5), and Aboriginal women have rejected this as myth. Such trade, rather, reflected
the imperative for accommodation of the demands and expectations of colonial men, who
outnumbered colonial women by as many as seven to one in the early colonies where this
was reported (Atkinson 2002:62; Grieves 2003:16; Grimshaw et al. 1994:138).
Marcia Langton (1997) has drawn attention to the role of women in the spiritual connection
to land and the inadequacy of the orthodoxy ‘constructed from the emerging ethnographic
literature from [the nineteenth] century’, essentially through the lens of Western patriarchy.
This view, that descent was patrilineal or at least determined by patrifiliation, she argues, is
negated by the role of women who:
maintain Aboriginal traditions relating to land ownership by their politicking on matters to do with the
constitution of contemporary customary corporations and nurturing of the social relations of the land tenure
system (Langton 1997:84).
Her experience in the Northern Territory, Queensland and parts of New South Wales is that ‘women retain bodies
of knowledge pertaining to the spiritual landscape’ and that grandmothers have authority to make decisions ‘with
a mind to the future of their descendants’, including the longevity and stability of social and territorial entities,
their own power within structures of authority, the recruitment of kin to their own skin groups or allocation of
them to others, and decisions concerning marriage arrangements (a key part of Aboriginal land Law). Further,
she provides evidence of the land tenure arrangements and spiritual connections to land adapting to the
disruptions of colonisation:
Since men have been the greater casualties of the colonial incursions: the flexibility offered by serial matrifiliation
and matrilateral connections to land in Aboriginal systems ensure that there are others who can assume
primary spiritual responsibility for the land on the extinction of the people who previously had the primary
responsibility (Langton 1997:96).
When analysing Aboriginal women’s life writings, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) identified the importance of
Spirituality and relationality, though subjugated, in the social relationships of these women. Aboriginal Spirituality
comes from a moral universe distinct from that of Europeans: ‘Indigenous women perceive the world as organic
and populated by spirits which connect places and people’. Unlike constructions of Christian spirituality, she
argues, ‘Indigenous spirituality encompasses the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and physiography’
and ‘the spiritual world is immediately experienced because it is synonymous with the physiography of the
land’. Moreover, Spirituality ‘is a physical fact because it is experienced as part of one’s life’ and it leads to an
understanding of personhood in very different ways to what is perceived as the norm. Life writings of Aboriginal
women are not concerned with motivations and intentions but are reflective of a wholistic, interconnected
understanding of themselves, their life contexts and events as being ‘an extension of the earth, which is alive
and unpredictable’ and a construction of self that extends beyond the immediate family (Moreton-Robinson
2000:18–21; see also Thomas 2001; Fredericks 2003).
The international context
Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road
to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology… has led modern society to a
damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that
the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have travelled and are now
seeking again The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.
William Commanda, Mamiwinini, Canada, 1991 (Stonees WebLodge 1996)
Shawn Wilson (1999), Opaskwayak Cree from Manitoba, Canada, working as an academic in Australia, noticed
that the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous Australians and Canadians that originated at opposite sides of the world
are similar. When speaking at a conference about education in the corrections system, he explained that:
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Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health • Discussion Paper Series: No. 9
Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy
The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing