DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

Spirituality is a term that requires special care in its definition. It is important to recognise the difference between
spirituality and religion. Spirituality can be seen as an internal connection to the universe that includes a
sense of meaning or purpose in life, a cosmology or way of explaining our personal universe and a personal
moral code. Religion, on the other hand, could be defined as the specific practice and ritual that is an external
expression of some people’s spirituality. What is important here is that spirituality is your relationship to the
universe around you. It is the relationship again that is important, rather that [sic] the objective form that this
relationship chooses to manifest itself (that is what religion is). My relationship to the universe is unique to
myself, and it would be unrealistic to expect anyone else to share exactly the same relationship. Thus Indigenous
spirituality could be defined as Indigenous peoples’ unique relationship with their universe (Wilson 1999:1).
Further, Wilson recognises the commonality of Indigenous Spirituality that exists across the world:
For many Indigenous people having a healthy sense of spirituality is just as important as other aspects of
mental, emotional and physical health (Wilson 1999:1).
It is the case that Aboriginal Australians share a similarity of belief systems with other Indigenous people in the
world in that their philosophies also tie them to the earth and the sustaining of the species and the natural
world. In this, spiritual health is of foremost importance (United Nations 1993).
Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith has produced a groundbreaking work on the subject of decolonising the
methodologies of the Western academy, paving the way for Indigenous knowledges development. In this, she
recognised that Indigenous peoples worldwide share the importance of Spirituality in their worldview and
thus the key to the understanding of the context of their lives, historical and contemporary. Spirituality is the
grounding of the essence of a person, the moral and ethical basis of their being that defines the path of their
existence, their actions within the parameters of the context of their world. She writes:
The essence of a person is [also] discussed in relation to Indigenous concepts of spirituality. In these views
the essence of a person has a genealogy that can be traced back to an earth parent, usually glossed as an
Earth Mother. A human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate and, in the Western
sense ‘inanimate’ beings, a relationship based on a shared ‘essence of life’. The significance of place, of land,
of landscape, of other things in the universe, in defining the very essence of people, makes for a very different
rendering of the term essentialism as used by Indigenous peoples.
The arguments of different Indigenous peoples based on spiritual relationships to the universe, to the landscape
and to stones, rocks, insects and other things, seen and unseen, have been difficult arguments for western systems
of knowledge to deal with or accept. These arguments give a partial indication of the different worldviews and
alternative ways of coming to know, and of being, which still endure within the Indigenous world. Concepts
of spirituality that Christianity attempted to destroy, then to appropriate, then to claim, are critical sites of
resistance for Indigenous peoples. The values, attitudes, concepts and language embedded in beliefs about
spirituality represent, in many cases, the clearest contract and mark of difference between Indigenous peoples
and the West. It is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand and
cannot control… yet (Smith 1999:74).
Thus Spirituality, the essence of personhood, inimical to Westernisation, and central to Indigenous identity,
remains the last frontier of colonisation and, in a sense, the enduring last stand of Indigenous people in their
resistance to the colonisation of their worlds. This is also the seed from which Indigenous knowledges can
develop, in Australia as much as in any other part of the world. Many Indigenous academics are exploring ways
of working within the academy ‘in ways that support decolonising the mind and spirit’ (Iseke-Barnes 2003).
Eva Marie Garroutte (2003), in her book Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America, has explored
issues to do with identity and Spirituality, especially in the area of research and academic developments, to
‘bring together the project of Indian people to live together in communities in a good way with the project of
the academy to cultivate knowledge’ (Garroutte 2003:102). Her approach requires the development of a new
intellectual perspective, dramatically different, with new ideas about the very nature of scholarship that she calls
‘radical Indigenism’. The use of the word ‘radical’ does not mean a connection to Marxist theory, nor is it meant
to be confronting. Garroutte uses this word from its meaning being ‘the root’:
17