Aboriginal Indigenous spirituality and beliefs

Too many white people have tried to explain Aboriginal spirituality. I don't want to follow. I'd like to let Aboriginal people express what they feel Aboriginal beliefs and spirituality are all about.

Expressing spirituality: A ceremony for Australia Day

Take part in an Aboriginal opening ceremony for Australia Day and watch young girls and boys performing contemporary and traditional dance moves.

Gallery: An Aboriginal ceremony for Australia Day

What is Aboriginal spirituality?

Our spirituality is a oneness and an interconnectedness with all that lives and breathes, even with all that does not live or breathe.—Mudrooroo, Aboriginal writer [1]

Aboriginal spirituality, Mudrooroo continues, "is a feeling of oneness, of belonging", a connectedness with "deep innermost feelings". Everything else is secondary.

Aboriginal spirituality and the land

Aboriginal spirituality is invariably also about the land Aboriginal people live on. They experience a connection to their land that is unknown to white people. A key feature of Aboriginal spirituality is to look after the land, an obligation which has been passed down as law for thousands of years.

A powerful explanation of the spiritual connection of Indigenous people to the land can be found in a publication of the now abolished ATSIC [13]:

We don't own the land, the land owns us. The land is my mother, my mother is the land. Land is the starting point to where it all began. It's like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I'll go. The land is our food, our culture, our spirit and identity.—S. Knight [13]

Aboriginal author and Yorta Yorta woman Hyllus Maris (1934-86) expressed this connectedness with the land beautifully in her poem Spiritual Song of the Aborigine [6]:

Aboriginal spirituality is the belief that all objects are living and share the same soul or spirit that Aboriginals share.—Eddie Kneebone, Aboriginal Reconciliation campaigner and painter [3]

This is a very fundamental statement about Aboriginal spirituality. It implies that besides animals and plants even rocks have a soul.

An Aboriginal person's soul or spirit is believed to "continue on after our physical form has passed through death", explains Eddie Kneebone [3]. After the death of an Aboriginal person their spirit returns to the Dreamtime from where it will return through birth as a human, an animal, a plant or a rock. The shape is not important because each form shares the same soul or spirit from the Dreamtime.

But what is the Dreamtime?

What is the 'Dreamtime' or the 'Dreaming'?

'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming' has never been a direct translation of an Aboriginal word. The English language does not know an equivalent to express the complex Aboriginal spiritual concepts to white people.

Aboriginal languages contain a lot of words for spirituality and beliefs, such as

• tjurkurrpa, jukurrpa, tjurgurba (Pitjantjatjara people, north-western South Australia),
• altjeringa, alcheringa, alchera, aldjerinya (Arrernte people, central Australia),
• palaneri,
• bugaregara,
• ngarangani,
• ungud (Ngarinyin people, north-Western Australia),
• wongar (north eastern Arnhem Land),
• bugari (Broome, north-Western Australia).

There is no spelling orthodoxy because native speakers did not write down Aboriginal languages.

'The Dreaming' or 'the Dreamtime' indicates a psychic state in which or during which contact is made with the ancestral spirits, or the Law, or that special period of the beginning.—Mudrooroo, Aboriginal writer [7]

Aboriginal spirituality does not consider the 'Dreamtime' as a time past, in fact not as a time at all. Time refers to past, present and future but the 'Dreamtime' is none of these. The 'Dreamtime' "is there with them, it is not a long way away. The Dreamtime is the environment that the Aboriginal lived in, and it still exists today, all around us" [3]. It is important to note that the Dreaming always also comprises the significance of place [14].

Hence, if we try to use an English word, we should avoid the term 'Dreamtime' and use the word 'Dreaming' instead. It expresses better the timeless concept of moving from 'dream' to reality which in itself is an act of creation and the basis of many Aboriginal creation myths. None of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages contain a word for time [4].

We are the oldest and the strongest people, we're here all of the time, we're constant through the Dreaming which is happening now, there's no such thing as the Dreamtime.—Karl Telfer, senior culture-bearer for Kaurna people, Adelaide [18]

Note that the Dreaming is not the product of human dreams. The use of the English word 'dreaming' is more of a matter of analogy than translation [14].

The Dreaming also explains the creation process. Ancestor beings rose and roamed the initially barren land, fought and loved, and created the land's features as we see them today. After creating the 'sacred world' the spiritual beings "turned into rocks or trees or a part of the landscape. These became sacred places, to be seen only by initiated men." [12]

The spirits of the ancestor beings are passed on to their descendants, e.g. shark, kangaroo, honey ant, snake and so on and hundreds of others which have become totems within the diverse Indigenous groups across the continent [14].

It is interesting to note that many Aboriginal people also use the term 'Dreaming' to refer to their concepts about spirituality. This might be because some of them find ceremonies or songs in a state of dreaming, a state between sleeping and waking [7]. Strictly speaking, dreaming and mythology can be considered as the same thing: the deep mental archetypes and images of wisdom which we take on to be guided by them when the conscious mind is in a state of quietness [19].

The fact that the Dreaming is still around Aboriginal people is a fundamental difference to other spiritual beliefs. In Christianity, for example, the spiritual world is 'heaven', reachable only after death and never while the person is still alive.

What we draw on from our memories, and think, imagine and create in our daily lives is our dreaming. —Djon Mundine, Bundjalung man and Aboriginal Curator, Campbelltown Arts Centre [22]

Each Aboriginal person identifies with a specific Dreaming. It gives them identity, dictates how they express their spirituality (see below) and tells them which other Aboriginal people are related to them in a close family, because those share the same Dreaming [5]. One person can have multiple Dreamings [5].

Each form shares the spirituality from the 'Dreaming'. It is during ceremonies that the trance-like dreaming state seizes the Aboriginal people and they connect with the ancestral beings [8].

Resources

Aboriginal Men of High Degree is a book written by anthropologist A.P. Elkin.

Indigenous people who read the book agree with what he says about Aboriginal spirituality, ceremonies and rituals.

What is not Aboriginal spirituality?

Many texts and books use 'Aboriginal religion' when addressing Aboriginal spirituality. But these two terms should not be confused:

Spiritual "relates to people's deepest thoughts and beliefs, rather than to their bodies and physical surroundings" [2].

Religious is "something that [...] is about or connected with religion", i.e. "the belief in a god or gods and the activities that are connected with this belief, such as prayer or worship in a church or temple" [2].

Hence spirituality is the foundation of religion, the deeper layer of any religious practice and expression.

How Aboriginal people express spirituality

Indigenous people express and identify with their spirituality in different ways. These include

• ceremony (corroborees),
• rituals,
• totems,
• paintings,
• storytelling,
• community gathering,
• dance,
• songs,
• dreamings,
• designs.

[Aboriginal] spirituality is preoccupied with the relationship of the earth, nature and people in the sense that the earth is accepted as a member of our family, blood of our blood, bone of our bone. —Mudrooroo, Aboriginal writer [17]

Ceremony as a way to express spirituality. These Aboriginal people fill ochre into the pits of an old tree carving. The carving represents a deceased person's totem. Filling the totem with ochre is a symbol of healing.

Example of a ritual

One example of how Aboriginal people express spirituality is a ritual they do before they walk across country. To express respect for the country's spirits they perform a welcome ritual whose exact nature varies from nation to nation.

• In some NSW nations Aboriginal people put ochre on the forehead, top of the palms and chest. This signalled that they were open to receive information [15].
• Other NSW Aboriginal people pick up a pebble or earth, throw it into the air and say "I am John, I'm in your country, please welcome me."
• The Nyoongar in the Perth region rubbed soil into their armpits so that it would take on their smell. The soil was then released back to the land. This told the ancestral spirits about the person asking for the protection while travelling on the land [16].

Secret Yolngu ceremony

'Riyawarray: Common Ground' is a film that honours and celebrates Yolngu (Aboriginal) customary law and culture. Yolngu people's right to live their lives as free people without the inappropriate impositions of the Federal Government's emergency response the intervention.

This powerful snapshot documentary on Yolngu rites, rights and rituals as expressed through the recent Yirritja Ngarra Ceremony, was filmed in August 2008 at Milingimbi, Arnhemland, about 450 kms east of Darwin.

Aboriginal spirituality changes and adapts

Not only other religions can change Aboriginal spirituality (see previous section), but also the environment Aboriginal people live in.

Toyota Dreaming

Aboriginal adaptation in spirituality also extends to the Dreamings available to them. While traditional Dreamings include Australian flora and fauna, post-invasion Dreamings incorporate things which have impacted on Aboriginal culture and society. This has led to new Dreamings such as [14]

• "Cough", relating to introduced diseases such as tuberculosis, the common cold, influenza and whooping cough,
• "Itchiness", from smallpox, chicken pox, etc,
• "Toyota", because four-wheel drive vehicles altered ways of life and contact with places and other groups.

Biami - a recent Aboriginal spirit

According to Aboriginal writer Mudrooroo, Biami (or Byamee, Biame, Baiame) is an Aboriginal 'all-father deity' which found its way into Aboriginal spirituality as a response to Christianity [10]. Biami has a continuous presence in Indigenous writings from the eastern states of Australia, because that was where Aboriginal people learned about Christianity.

Leslie Saxby Jupurula, an Aboriginal teacher and painter, tells a story of Biami which is surprisingly similar to the book of Genesis in the Bible:

The Biame Art Gallery in the Hunter Valley, NSW, has published a complete story of 'Biame and Creation' on their website.

Aboriginal rock painting of Biami This Aboriginal ancestor is often depicted with many arms. Image: www.newcastle.edu.au

Aunty Eileen and the evil spirit

"Aunty Eileen, a Bundjalung elder from northern NSW, was approached by a man who was being haunted by a spirit every night."

How would you expect this story to continue?

If we fancied a romantic view of Aboriginal spirituality (which is still promoted a lot in advertising) we would expect Aunty Eileen to chose some mythical method, to perform a ceremony or sing the spirit away.

None of this happened in this real-world story [8]. Aunty Eileen simply told the man to put a Bible under his pillow and read a verse from it should the spirit return the next night.

Aboriginal spiritual art and World Youth Day 2008

The Crucifixion, an Aboriginal spiritual painting by Richard Campbell.

The Catholic World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney provided another example of how traditional Aboriginal art and spirituality join modern-day spiritual beliefs.

Aboriginal artist Richard Campbell, a member of the Stolen Generations, created a series of Indigenous artworks which were used on official merchandise for the World Youth Day.

The artworks reinterpret major Catholic themes and stories from within Aboriginal spirituality, and his works Fourteen Stations of the Cross, The Madonna, The Crucifixion and The Resurrection, were used on merchandise for the 225,000 pilgrims [9].