Aboriginal Spirituality General Revision

What is kinship?

A highly sophisticated network of relationships traditionally accepted by Australia’s Aboriginal peoples including particular rights, obligations, relationships, roles and responsibilities to the land and/or other people, groups and mobs.

What does kinship include?

• Biological relationships and totemistic relationships

• Connected to totems and expressed through skin names which are both key to identity

• Social organisation

• Ensures the young and old are cared for

• A way of inheriting ceremonial rights and responsibilities

What does kinship influence?

Social protocols, how people care for children, business, and also how wealth is shared.

What are the 3 levels of kinship (in order of level)?

Moiety, Totems and Skin names

What is moiety kinship?

Moiety, which is Latin for ‘half’, means that people and nature are split into two parts, and to understand the universe these two parts must come together. Moiety is determined either from one’s mother or father, and these moieties can also alternate between each generation. People who have the same moiety are considered to be siblings and cannot marry each other. They also have a reciprocal responsibility to care for one another and pay each other back. Each nation and language has it own terms for moeity.

What is totem kinship?

Totem kinship is when a person’s identity is linked to a part of the natural environment, which in turn links them to the universe. Each person has at least 4 totems (nation totem, clan totem, family group / skin name totem and personal totem). People are accountable for the protection and conservation of their totems, but they don’t own them; they must protect them so that they can be passed on to the next generation. A moiety has a specific totem, with each moiety’s totem complementing the other moiety’s totem. For example, if one moiety has a grey kangaroo totem, the other moiety might have a red kangaroo totem. While individuals can hunt and eat totems that aren’t theirs, they cannot hunt and eat their own totem, and they are responsible for the welfare and population of their totem. Totems also reflect an individual’s strength and weaknesses.

What is skin name kinship?

Skin names indicate a person’s blood line, kind of like a surname / last name. However, the skin names alternate every generation. Every 16-32 generations, the cycle is complete and starts anew from the first skin name, at which point all 16-32 skin names go back into the cycle. Skin names also have either a prefix or suffix to indicate the gender if the person e.g. Naparula for females and Japarula for males. Depending on the nation, skin names will either come from a person’s mother (matrilineal nation) or a person’s father (patrilineal nations), with each nation has its own term for every skin name. If people share a skin name, they are considered to be siblings, and thus cannot marry one another and they have a responsibility to care for and support one another. This means that a person is never alone, they are never an only child. If you are still a bit confused about skin names, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynQEtTfQjQc&t=1s

What is the Dreaming?

The spiritual core of Aboriginal spirituality that encapsulates both the spiritual and physical dimensions, giving meaning to all aspects of life. It is the worldview for Aboriginal people.

What is ceremonial life?

Ceremonial life is the important link between Aboriginal people, the Land and Identity. Ceremonial life helps to maintain the ‘present’ part of the metatemporal aspect of Aboriginal Spirituality, while also helping to pass on and maintain beliefs and practices, thus fostering the ‘future’ part of the metatemporal concept. It also helps to:

1. Establish Rites of Passage

2. Pass on social information

3. Facilitate personal connections

4. Facilitate spiritual connections

All ceremonies acknowledge a Creation event and show the metaphysical presence of the Dreaming world in the real world

What are obligations to Land and people, and why are they in place?

Obligations to Land and people refers to how Aboriginal people have obligations to care for and sustain the Land as a result of the inextricable (unbreakable) connection between Aboriginal people, the Land and the Dreaming.

There obligations are in place because:

1. The Land is seen as the physical medium of the Dreaming, and is the resting place for Ancestral beings

2. Sacred sites (sites where Dreaming events occurred) are a part of the Land, and thus are places where certain rituals must be performed e.g. Balance rites

The land is the meeting point, it is where tribes derive their identity from, its where they get their totems from, and it dictates their relationship with each other

What is ceremonial life?

Ceremonial life consists of various ceremonies and rituals that are central to Aboriginal Spirituality and the Dreaming. These can include birth, death, initiation/coming of age etc. These bring the community together and keeps the Dreaming alive, reinforcing its temporal connections. These ceremonies and rituals also pay respect to the Ancestor Beings and fulfil their laws.

What are two examples of ceremonies?

The birth ceremony consists of:

• The newborn being given their personal totem, which will be with them for the rest of their life. The giving of the totem helps to identify the responsibilities and duties that the newborn must fulfill during their life, in particular in relation to the preservation of their totem.

• The newborn is believed to be a reincarnation of a spirit from a deceased person. It is believed that these spirits wait near totemic sites, and choose the woman whom to be born from when the woman passes the site.

Rituals for the death ceremony:

• Vary from group to group.

• Some groups bury their dead, while others cremate the body or placed it on a tree platforms.

• Special Aboriginal burial sites are marked by a mound, special markings, decorated etc. Carved wooden poles are also placed, and these are known as Pakamani poles.

• Mummification or delayed burial can also occur, so that the various mourning rituals could be completed (according to the group).

• These rituals can involve special chants, dances, body paints, arm bands, mourners wailing etc.

• The dead person’s belongings are also disposed of. The purpose of funeral rites is to give deceased individuals a proper burial that allows their spirit to go back to their ancestral home.

• The people partaking in the funeral rites are very careful not to disturb the spirit, as it is now considered to be sacred. Funeral rituals aim to provide safe passage for the spirit as it moves into the afterlife.

Why is the Land important within Aboriginal Spirituality?

The Land is a resting place for the ancestral beings, and thus the Land is sacred and must be cared for. Furthermore the Land is known as ‘Mother’, as it gives life and sustains, and thus must be cared for. As a result of both of these aspects, Aboriginal people are stewards to the Land.There is an inextricable connection between Aboriginal people, the Dreaming and the Land. Inextricable means that it can never be broken. You cannot speak of one without speaking of the others.

Furthermore, Rituals are connected to Sacred Sites on the Land. These Sacred Sites are where Dreaming events occurred, where rituals occur e.g. balance rites, and where the Dreaming and the rituals are connected

Land is also the meeting point, where tribes draw identity from, where individuals gain a sense of identity, where relationships exist and where relationships are dictated.

The land therefore is not only a source of livelihood; it is the source of a person’s identity.

What are ritual estates?

The land a specific group of Aboriginal people have responsibility for is known as their Ritual Estate. While they may travel to other Ritual Estates to hunt, farm, gather resources etc, great care must be taken in other groups’ Ritual Estates to obey the laws and customs. Sacred sites must not be approached. Each Ritual Estate has at least one site from the Ancestral Beings, with the Elders having the responsibility to perform appropriate rites each year.

What is dispossession?

Dispossession is the action of depriving someone of possessions including property and land. 

When dispossession is referred to in terms of Aboriginal Spirituality, it describes the forceful removal of Aboriginal people from the land.

This has involved warfare, conflict and removal.

Massacres and large scale poisoning have occurred where whole tribes and family groups were destroyed. Any survivors were dispersed away from the land.

Groups and the government were unwilling to empathise, understand or try to accept and be tolerant of difference.

The removal of the Aboriginal People is a direct result of White Australian Government policies of the pasts.

Squatters prevented Aboriginal peoples access to waterholes, hunting ground and, importantly, their sacred sites.

The concept of private property, which is enshrined in European Law, meant it was now illegal for Aboriginal peoples to enter what had been their ancestral territory. They were often shot for doing so.

What were the three policies the Government used in relation to Aboriginal spirituality?

Protection: The policy of protection was used in order to segregate full-blooded Aboriginal people from each other and prevent them from communicating with outsiders. Under this guise of ‘protection’, the Government removed Aboriginal people from ‘white society’ and removed them from the land they inhabited, thus allowing the government to use the land for their own self-interests.

Assimilation: The policy of assimilation attempted to integrate half castes and Aboriginal children into white, European society by changing their culture, identity, language and beliefs.

Integration: The policy of integration aimed to provide Aboriginal peoples with more rights, including being counted as a part of the census, as well as being able to openly embrace their culture and spirituality. This therefore fostered Aboriginal spirituality by allowing Aboriginal people to openly practice it. However, the government did little to implement this.

What were some of the impacts of dispossession for Aboriginal Spirituality?

• Missionaries and Government settlements also prevented Aboriginal people from practicing Aboriginal spirituality, thus further seperating them from the land and the Dreaming, and by extension separating them from the identity and culture.

• Land, identity/culture and the Dreaming are the 3 integral parts of Aboriginal spirituality, and Aboriginal people were seperated from all of them, thus forcibly tearing them from their spirituality.

• Missionaries where Aboriginal people were placed used them as inexpensive slave labour (highly immoral), and this labour was used by farmers, miners, Church groups, the Government etc. Due to this fact, many Aboriginal people who were not a part of the missionaries yet fled to more barren, harsh, even unfriendly land where they could live in solitude with other Aboriginal people. Churches encouraged Aboriginal people to join the missionaries for food, water, medicine and European education.

• Cultural genocide of the Aboriginal culture. 

• Furthermore, the seperation of Aboriginal people from their land often resulted in them being placed in other nations’ territories, leading to cultural conflicts as well as conflicts over resources.

• Kinship separation involved removing children from their families, and this resulted in the separation of these people from their cultural norms and teachings of their Kinship relationships.

• Belonging to a Kinship group gives purpose and responsibility to one’s daily actions. The laws and norms of social behaviour (practices and behaviours, their way of life) are based on Kinship.

• Through kinship separation, Aboriginal people were purposely sent to places they had little to no connection with the land, the people and the language.

• Removing an individual from a Kinship group removes their understanding of their place in life and destroys their ability to live in society.

• The individual will not be able to take their rightful place amidst the eldership; they are not able to fulfill their roles within the family.

• Separation from family and kinship removes the sense of belonging to oneself and belonging to life.

• Removal from Kinship take away the position markers, the focus points from an Aboriginal person and they lose their place in the Dreaming.

• Separation from Kinship groups denied Aboriginal people the opportunity to express their spirituality in traditional songs and dance.

• It made it impossible to preserve their own language, with the result being that important words and concepts relating to Aboriginal spirituality were lost.

• Aboriginal ways of learning within the group and ways of exercising responsibility were often lost. May were denied the opportunity to participate in rituals that gave them full access to the Aboriginal community. 

• The responsibility for raising and nurturing children is a social obligation which is shared within the Kinship group. When children were separated the parents and the wider community lost the connection and could no longer exercise their responsibilities. 

• Parents were not given the opportunity to acquire traditional parenting skills. They were not permitted to raise their children in the traditional manner – white culture did not provide them with effective parenting skills.  Since family and sacred roles were intertwined this led to a breakdown in spirituality also.

• The long term effects of this separation from land and kinship are expressed through problems including:

  • Lower life expectancy

  • Higher rate of infant mortality

  • Overrepresentation in prison

  • Lower levels of schooling = educational disadvantages

  • Higher unemployment rates

  • Higher drug and alcohol use

  • Higher use of Government services

What was the Land Rights Movement, and what were the significant events during it? Provide dates too.

ALSO, USE THIS WEBSITE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE NATIVE TITLE AMMENDMENT ACT OF 1998: https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UNSWLawJl/1999/7.html

• 1966: Wave Hill Walk-Off

  • 200 Gurindji workers, led by Vincent Lingiari, went on strike and refused to work at Wave Hill station, protesting against poor wages and the location of the station, as it was based on what was traditionally Gurindji land. The 9-year strike that followed ended in Prime Minister Whitlam returning a portion of the land to the Gurindji people; a significant resolution that later impacted legislation that allowed First Nations people to claim Native Title.

• 1972: The Tent Embassy

  • A group of Aboriginal men protested by placing a beach umbrella on the Parliament House lawn in Canberra and calling it the ‘Aboriginal Embassy’. They were spurred to do this because they felt out of place in their own country as they did not have ownership of their own traditional lands. This protest evolved into a movement that greatly impacted Land Rights, as it revealed to the wider Australian community the issue of Aboriginal Land Rights.

• 1992: Mabo decision

  • The Australian High court determined that First Nations people had the right to Native Title where they could show a continuous occupancy and connection with the land. This not only eradicated the notion of Terra Nulius (the idea that Australia was not occupied at the time of colonisation), but also recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the land.

• 1993: The Native Title Act

  • First Nations people were provided with a legal system to officially claim Native Title. However, the system also ensured that Native Title would not supersede freehold, such as private and pastoral leases. The Act also ensured that any freehold titles would recognise, help to sustain and coexist with Native Title as much as possible.

• 1996: Wik decision

  • Any land under pastoral lease could also be under Native Title; however, Native Title did not extinguish pastoral lease, and the land could still be used for pastoral activities. However, a 10 point plan was also introduced, which limited the ability of Aboriginal people to claim native title, and thus acting as a setback to the Land Rights movement.

• 1998: Native Title Amendment Act of 1998

  • Changed the original Native Title Act, and aimed to reduce First Nations peoples’ access to applying for and using Native Title, such as through the 10 point plan. This was achieved in various ways, such as the fact that through the Amendment, miners could use and develop land without negotiating with Aboriginal groups who had Native Title over that land. In other words, the Government could do whatever they wanted with land, even land under Native Title, in a variety of different senarios. For example, if the Government deemed that Native Title over certain land was blocking ‘public services’, then such Native Title would be extinguished. This therefore meant that Native Title could be superseded by other external factors in a plethora of different circumstances, thus providing setbacks to the Land Rights movement.

When was the 10 point plan introduced?

What is a modern example of Kinship / ceremonial life?

The metatemporal nature of kinship / ceremonial life can be seen throguh the Wurundjeri people, who revived a female coming of age ceremony known as ‘Murrum Turrukuruk’, which had not been used for over 180 years.

A Wurundjeri First Peoples coming of age ceremony revived - Museums Victoria

What is a modern example of the effects of dispossession / the Stolen Generations?

• The trauma and effects from the dispossession and the Stolen Generations can still be felt to this day. This can be seen through the 2020 Census, which highlights how Indigenous males have a life expactancy of 71.9 years, which is 8.8 years less than non-Indigenous males; this dramatic difference in life expectancy has been linked back to a plethora of impacts dispossesion and the Stolen Generations had on Aboriginal individuals and communities.

‘Taken to hell’: even today survivors of Kinchela boys’ home are known by their numbers | Stolen generations | The Guardian

Is this example fine?

What is a modern example of the Land Rights movement / Native Title?

A more modern example of the impacts of the Lands Rights movement and Native Title can be seen through how the Kabi Kabi people were recently recognised as native title holders of the Sunshine Coast.

Kabi Kabi people recognised as native title holders over the Sunshine Coast - ABC News