Kincentric Geography and Re-Indigenization: Coming Home to Family

Guest contribution from Sandra Wooltorton, Anne Poelina and Hozaus Claire

We acknowledge cultural custodians and the Land and waters where we live and work in Martuwarra Fitzroy River Country in northern Western Australia. We acknowledge the local knowledge holders of Australia, and wherever you are in the world.

Our intention in this post is to introduce the notion of re-indigenisation, to reconnect the people of the planet with the planet. This is a direction promoted and led by Indigenous people[i] and it makes a strong basis for justice and learning relationship with living places. We draw on the work of Indigenous people and those no longer Indigenous to place[ii], noting that the big ideas we develop are also within the philosophy of the West. This work is something that belongs to all of us, everywhere.

During the last 40 years, there has been an efflorescence of Indigenous writing and scholarship, in which Indigenous intellectuals and scholars explain the need for decolonisation to be part of a turn towards planetary healing[iii]. We all have within us this capacity to reconnect with our places in relational ways, and a great many people are very keen for everyone to know and understand this.

Each of the authors live and have spent many years in the West Kimberley. Sandra’s ancestry is mostly Anglo Celtic; her family on her mother's side has lived in Australia for eight generations. Anne is a Nyikina woman who belongs to the Martuwarra River, and Hozaus is a young Gooniyandi man who also belongs to the Martuwarra River. Anne and Hozaus are from neighbouring Kimberley language groups.

In the West Kimberley, we – and thousands of others – are determined to save one of the last wild rivers on the planet, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. We teach that the Kimberley is a cultural landscape, where the culture and language of Indigenous people is essential to understanding the ways the landscape, River ecosystems and people have lived together in regenerative ways for many thousands of years. That is, Country and encultured people are enmeshed and interdependent. Country needs people and people need Country; each cannot do without the other.

Kimberley Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing

Taking the idea further, the Kimberley is a kincentric cultural landscape[iv], having a deep and unbreakable relational bond linking people to place. Indigenous people view both themselves and their places as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. We agree with Salmón[v] in that life anywhere is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them – including all the natural elements of an ecosystem – as kin. For emphasis, we will put it the other way around: if humans do not view the life surrounding them as kin, as loving relatives, then human lives in that environment are not viable.[vi][See also Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world]

Martuwarra at Balginjirr. Picture credit Anne Poelina

This depth of relationship or enmeshment is what is meant by kincentric[vii] cultural landscapes, and it is a very different way of viewing the relationship between people and place than that held by most of modern society.

Martuwarra Fitzroy River

Therefore, what would it take for us to be able to see persons of all species as our relations, including rivers, trees, mountains, and forests, who share with us and our liveliness? What would it take to recognise these living beings as our kin? From any standpoint, we are deeply and irretrievably enmeshed. To be kincentric is our history, our ancestry, and it is still needed to guide the ways we live.

Indigenous languages are local languages, and Indigenous vocabularies and meaning systems are closely adapted to their places. Indigenous languages often describe social systems to include species of the same region – so a kangaroo or a tree might be your ecological brother or your sister. Kin relations are reciprocal, just as any kin relations are. In this way of knowing, just as you're obliged to care for your sister or brother, so you are obliged to care for your ecological kin sister or brother. The reciprocity is expected and received, which might be the provision of fruit from a tree, or a message associated with the presence of a kangaroo. Many Indigenous children are also given a totem at birth, which they must look after, care for, respect, and become familiar with as they grow up and through their lives. It is said that totems teach a person to be a good human, allowing us to learn how to care for self, family, totem species and all others.

In a Nyikina Kimberley kincentric landscape, liyan is a word used to describe the relationship with and to Country. Anne explains:

my ‘liyan’ is my moral compass. It is a feeling which helps me decide my movements on Country or River, and it helps me to read people and determines my relationship with them. This feeling or liyan is deeply personal and guides my life journey with human and more-than-human beings: the plants, the trees, the birds, and animals. It is part of my inner spirit and guides my rights and responsibility to our Mardoowarra, River of life. This is the law of relationships. For me liyan is personal, spiritual, and not for human beings to determine. It responds to the law of the land, not the law of humans.

The kin-centric responsibility to care for Country is intergenerational. Country also has liyan, and in your calm state, Country and you can respond to each other through liyan. Perhaps liyan is the seat of your intuition where you and Country or River sense each other's needs, gifts, sentience, and respond accordingly. There is a deep enmeshment between people and place that somehow many of us in the West have lost.

Now, as can be seen in the Living Waters co-operative inquiries [viii], many people are re-learning this enmeshment. These voices seem to bring the richness of Country back to life, returning its liveliness and vitality. This is everyone's birth right. So how do we teach and learn kincentric geography, the ever-deepening bond between us and our places? In the present co-operative inquiries we engage with and reflect on our own experience with rivers using photographs, works of art, music, and words. We write accounts, we discuss our thoughts and feelings and answer our own questions through discussion with each other and River. It is a beautiful process, which we see as having great similarities with Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing. Just imagine the depth of knowledge, knowing, understanding, and relating one could gain by doing this experiential, embodied, creative discussion and engagement, every day of your life. You would have a deep love for your place; you would not be able to leave it and certainly not sell it. You would protect it for life, like the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council does.

In one of our research groups at Nulungu Research Institute, we have been deepening a learning style based on Indigenous knowledge. Our new paper explains ‘Feeling and Hearing Country’ as an Australian Indigenous practice whereby Water is life, Country is responsive, and the elders generate wisdom for a communicative order of things[ix]. We ask, ‘How can we work together, all peoples of the planet, in the task of collectively healing Mother Earth?’ The work uses experiential, creative, propositional, and practical ways of knowing and being in and with Mother Earth, just like cooperative inquiry. ‘Evidence’ in this inquiry may take many forms based upon engagement with an animate sentient world. We suggest that this method can generate new meanings, implications and insights and regenerate practical knowledge of Country.

As an Indigenous tradition, the cooperative inquiry process mimics daily life practices of many Kimberley families and communities to this day. People might go fishing or goanna hunting (for example) by day, and then sit around a fire at night retelling the experience, perhaps laughing about particular elements of the experience, and maybe dramatizing them while others watch and laugh. Some family members might illustrate the experience, whereupon more conversation about the experiences will take place, deepening the story – so that the various aspects of the story are clear and understood by all. (See Picture).

Artist Hozaus Claire, beside his award-winning Martuwarra painting

Many Kimberley people are also casual or more serious musicians, and daily events and sentiments are often the subject of guitar compositions. Similar types of activities – often with attention to the minute detail – are the subject of traditional dance, which are practised widely across the Kimberley. There is effort given to ensuring children learn traditional dance, while Elders look on. Elders play a significant role here, and often traditional stories are told around the fire – sometimes particularly for children. This is Aboriginal tradition in daily life: feeling and hearing Country. Here, we might say: ‘always was, always will’.

In the Kimberley, cultural practices enacted and taught the right way, by the right people – particularly traditional dance – can enable the regeneration of healing life energies, it can freshen up stories, knowledges, and link ancestral wisdom to the present, while co-creating healthy futures. We are saying that the spirit of feeling and hearing Country can enliven human spirit, Country, and all beings via participative creative process that is helpful for the world at this time, when many humans have forgotten their place in the world. As a research method, this work can support the unlearning of epistemological errors, the unlearning of knowledges that are incorrect, and show how inquiries can collectively heal Mother Earth, reinstating vitality in all things. It facilitates what we call ‘coming home to Country’.

What we do in this inquiry is ‘baby steps’ in the direction of feeling and hearing Country. Indigenous worldviews remind us that there are viable and healthy aspirations beyond Western colonial and postcolonial assumptions. We remind ourselves that Western consumerism is not how most of the global population see our world. Indigenous languages and ways of knowing suggest enmeshment rather than dualism. (Dualism divides the world into superior and inferior pairs of concepts: people and nature; reason and emotion; even Indigenous and non-Indigenous.) In Indigenous ways of knowing, these pairs of concepts are also enmeshed.

Linking to Western Knowledges

In describing the work of knowing Country from a kincentric point of view, it is useful to consider the perspectives of colleagues. Andreas Weber[x] describes our fundamental feeling of aliveness as a very experiential thing, an aliveness which is the life of Country, in its subjective dimension. There is a core knowledge of experience around which everything exists. This is our centre, perhaps our core, shared with our vibrant living world. This sounds to us like liyan, an ecstatic world that is shared or distributed that fosters life.

Stephen Harding’s Gaia teachings show us that life keeps water on the planet, and most of our planet is water[xi]. He says that in the Great Western myths, the universe is a great intelligence, the cosmos has a purpose, anima mundi, the world. But following Descartes in the 1600s came the view that only the human has a soul, and the rest of the world is a machine, and nature can be controlled. This perspective made possible the waves of colonisation, empire, and exploitation. This is another whole story, but it is relevant to remind us that we cannot do this re-indigenisation without decolonizing ourselves and rejecting consumerist ways of seeing the world.

Freya Matthews names one of her papers after the Indigenous concept of Law Lands, which means the law is in the land[xii]. Kimberley Indigenous people maintain that the law is in the land; it is not a human made law. It has always been here. And the laws of the land match the laws of nature. So here is where real change worldview can take hold. Water is life. Country is our first teacher. And this is what we're learning now with Cooperative inquiry.

We are explaining these ideas with Western philosophers to put more words around the depth of Indigenous inter-interrelationship with place as kincentric geography. There is a deep unbreakable relational place bond, such that removal from Country causes a breakdown in knowledge and ways of knowing, which may last for several generations. To give a sense of the difficulty of describing an Indigenous worldview to a non-Indigenous person, an elder once explained to William Stanner, an anthropologist who worked in the early 1900s in North Australia. The Indigenous elder told him,

White man got no dreaming, him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different. Him got road belong himself. [Told by] Muta, a Murinbata man.[xiii]

We now know – through climate change, species loss and general injustice across the planet – that the road ‘belong ourselves’ is a dead end.

Our task now is to re-indigenise, to form in relations with one’s local place on the planet

Our task now, we suggest, is to re-indigenise, to form relationships – kin relations – with one’s local place on the planet as if we were all people of the planet. This is a basis for all types of justice: we can never have ecological justice without social or cultural justice. Similarly, we can never have ecological justice without Indigenous justice, cultural justice and so on. What we are saying is that we cannot save this River, the modern era, or ourselves, without saving cultures that engage in direct experience of Country, creativity, story, and practice. Therefore, we need to learn with Indigenous and local cultures.

We wish to acknowledge financial support from the Australian Research Council for this research. It forms part of the project: Intergenerational Cultural Transfer of Indigenous Knowledges. Professor Anne Poelina is research leader, and all authors are research team members.

Sandra Wooltorton is of Anglo Celtic ancestry and is from Noongar Boodjar, also known as southwest Western Australia. She lives and works as a Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame Australia, in Yawuru Country around Broome in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. She acknowledges Noongar traditional owners, and Aboriginal custodians in Australia and elsewhere. She is a geographer, educator and transdisciplinary researcher with a deep interest in ecological philosophy. Samples of her recent collaborative articles are Feeling and Hearing Country (2019); Hearing, Voicing and Healing: Rivers as Culturally Located and Connected (2021); The Land Still Speaks: Ni, Katitj (2017), River Relationships: For the Love of Rivers (2021) and Regeneration time: ancient wisdom for planetary wellbeing (2022).

Anne Poelina is a Professor and Co-Chair of Indigenous Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia. She is a Kimberley, Nyikina Warrwa Indigenous woman; Chair, Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, an active community leader, human and earth rights advocate, and filmmaker. She holds membership to national and global Think Tanks. A Peter Cullen Fellow, Adjunct Professor, College Indigenous Education Futures, Charles Darwin University, with Visiting Fellowships at the Australian National University, Canberra, Charles Darwin University and the Institute for Post-Colonial Studies, Melbourne. Prof. Poelina is the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) inaugural First Nations appointment to its independent Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences (2022). Awarded Kailisa Budevi Earth and Environment Award, International Women’s Day (2022) in recognition of her global standing.

Hozaus Claire is a Walmatjari Gooniyandi man from Fitzroy Crossing in the West Kimberley. Now working as a Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame Australia, he grew up in the Fitzroy Valley with the elders as his teachers.  At 28 years of age, his artwork and stories are a vibrant legacy to the importance of his elders’ traditions and culture, and the honour he has in the continuation of these traditions. Each one of his paintings represents a personal and deep connection to Country and the amazing, rugged beauty that is the landscape of the West Kimberley. Through his paintings Hozaus explores the relationship between Indigenous and non-indigenous people and the gap between, but also their connection and how one’s upbringing, education, jobs and family can influence this. He aspires to reveal the beauty and diversity in which everyone can experience in sharing the Land and working together. 

---

[i] Williams, L. (2021). Indigenous intergenerational resilience: Confronting cultural and ecological Crisis. Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003008347

[ii] Williams, L., Bunda, T., Claxton, N., & MacKinnon, I. (2018). A Global De-colonial Praxis of Sustainability — Undoing Epistemic Violences between Indigenous peoples and those no longer Indigenous to Place. The Australian journal of Indigenous education, 47(1), 41-53. https://doi.org/10.1017/jie.2017.25

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Milgin, A., Nardea, L., Grey, H., Laborde, S., & Jackson, S. (2020). Sustainability crises are crises of relationship: Learning from Nyikina ecology and ethics. People and Nature, 2020(2), 1210-1222. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10149

[v] Salmón, E. (2000). Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship. Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1327–1332.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Sandra, Anne and Hozaus (and others) are also part of a connected cooperative inquiry, funded by the Australian Research Council and entitled, ‘Intergenerational Cultural Transfer of Indigenous Knowledges’.

[ix] This paper is currently in press. It is called ‘Feeling and Hearing Country as Research Method’ and will be published Open Access in Environmental Education Research later this year.

[x] Weber, A. (2020). Sharing life: The ecopolitics of reciprocity. Heinrich Boll Stiftung, . https://in.boell.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/Andreas%20essay%20new.pdf

[xi] Harding, S. (2022). Gaia alchemy: The reuniting of science, psyche and soul. Inner Traditions Bear and Company.

[xii] Mathews, F. (2020). From wilderness preservation to the fight for Lawlands: Towards a revisioning of conservation. In R. Bartel, M. Branagan, F. Utley, & S. Harris (Eds.), Rethinking Wilderness and the Wild: Conflict, Conservation and Co-existence (pp. 254-273). Milton : Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429299025-19

[xiii] Stanner, W. E. H. White Man Got No Dreaming : Essays, 1938-1973. Canberra; Australian National University Press, 1979.