40 The Cultural Interface
The best of regenerative agricultural and pastoral practices meet the best of the Traditional Indigenous land management systems in an approach that looks at landscape and ecosystems as a whole. Tyson Yunkaporta has a few ideas about how two cultures could work together, for the enrichment of both.
I read Poor Fella, My country by Xavier Herbert probably 40 years ago. While the details are gone there is a scene that has imprinted itself in my mind. A central character in this book is a tribal man from the Northern Territory – an Elder. He is given the chance to be a passenger in a small plane. As the pilot steers them into the sky this old fella chuckles with absolute glee and satisfaction as he looks over his country.
The reader understands that although he has never been in a plane before, this old man knows what it is to see his country from the sky – to him the plane is another tool, in this case an excellent whitefella tool, that can give him access to knowledge he already has.
Years later it has struck me that this is an illustration of someone standing firmly within the framework of their own culture, using the tools of a completely different culture to complement and expand on knowledge they already possess. Using the language of today, this is a Cultural Interface, a dynamic and alive place where two cultures can meet.
I have to add that the non-Aboriginal characters involved probably didn’t understand that this was an intersect or that there was a place from which they could have found out something about high-end Indigenous knowledge systems – I can even make the assumption that the colonialists were intent on convincing themselves that there was nothing to know and nothing to learn from Indigenous thinking and that the reality of a plane was another example of the intellectual and technological superiority of European civilisation.
A missed opportunity.
TYSON AND ABORIGINAL PEDAGOGY
I was reminded of this story when I started exploring the work of Tyson Yunkaporta, member of the Apalech Clan (southern Wik, Wik Mung-kan language) in far north Queensland and an academic, arts critic, and researcher. I first encountered Tyson in his book Sand Talk, and then found research papers he has written that can be accessed online.
Part of a boomerang made by author Tyson Yunkaporta’s on the cover of SAND TALK (Text Publishing, 2019)
One of the papers I was looking at from Tyson’s work is about creating an Aboriginal Pedagogy – a way of learning that can frame (in this case) school curriculums, enabling a way to learn from culture, rather than about culture. To be introduced to a kinship and place-based system of thinking would be great for kids, for all kids – and would begin to help foster a language of relationship rather than separation to the natural world that we live in and the ecosystems that support our lives.
Tyson’s contention is that although cultural knowledge has been severely disrupted, Indigenous knowledge systems are still strong and have a lot to offer Western thinking.
He sets up a project in a rural town where ‘traditional local knowledge, non-local and contemporary local knowledge’ intersect in the space he calls the cultural interface. The project has bumpy moments, but the (mainly Indigenous) kids respond with real enthusiasm when given a framework that ties into cultural practise and the teachers are given a chance to expand the way they look at life.
A GREAT MEETING OF CULTURES
It is obvious to me that there are congruencies between what I am learning in my apprenticeship as an advocate for regenerative agricultural practises and what I understand of land management custodial practices common to First Nation’s people. How to bring them together?
School curriculums aside, my contention is, how can we frame advances in farming in a way that allows high-end Indigenous knowledge to move out of the shadows and take centre stage as a system of land management that is on a par with Western systems?
Well, respect and developing trust between all knowledge systems. And part of the way that could be earned is if collaborations across cultures were structured in a way that are not always framed within Western ways of thinking leaving Indigenous knowledge as a peripheral, side issue.
BURN
There is plenty of stuff to discuss:
Cultural burning for one. Can we really burn country as the Aboriginal people once did? In Agricultural country this doesn’t feel like the way to go – to me burning country feels like the agricultural version of the current medical regimes for cancer – first the surgery, then the chemo, then the burn where the concentration is on destroying diseased cells rather than supporting what is healthy and whole in the body. Are their places where burning country would work to reduce fuel load and trigger regrowth? Can we have this discussion please?
THE STORY OF THE SHARP FOOTED GRAZERS
And then there are the voices ranging around the latest iterations of intensive grazing - using mobs of animals as tools of landscape regeneration. So many of us – both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal have been used to thinking of sheep and cattle – the introduced stock – as destroyers of the land. It is hard to get one’s head around the idea of mobs of grazers as being the salvation of our brittle landscapes, but I have changed my ideas on this one. It is not about the numbers of animals, it is about the management of animals and the timing of grazing patterns. This is a discussion that really needs to be thrashed out in the public sphere.
THE DREAMING
Tyson defines the Dreaming– a term he prefers to The Dreamtime: The Dreaming refers to the continuous act of creation in the present as well as the past, a dynamic interaction between the physical and spiritual worlds. The action allows us (First Nation’s people) to innovate and is the source of our immense adaptive capacity and ingenuity.
During the long research period that was the basis for this thesis, Tyson describes a car ride with an elder where they talked about bringing Aboriginal ways of thinking into a school curriculum.
On this particular day, Tyson recorded this in his field notes: ‘and we talked for a while about the way the Dreaming does not change, how we just keep discovering more about it ‘ and goes on to say that ‘the key is to understand (western) curriculum knowledge as undiscovered aspects of the Dreaming, and so own it and use it.’
Knowledge as something that is unchangingly there and is there for us to uncover. This way of understanding knowledge is not hierarchical; it doesn’t privilege one way of thinking over another – but provides a pathway to understanding and incorporating cultural difference. In Tyson’s case, he looks at the Western intellectual perspective as it plays out in the school curriculum - while standing firmly in his own cultural understanding of the world. Seeing both he is able to adapt strategies and tools to help bring new understandings to the fore.
Indigenous knowledge then stands as strong as the Western philosophical framework. Indigenous people have had to learn everything they can about non-Aboriginal systems to survive, as is always the way for people struggling for a voice within a dominant culture – it is time Non-Aboriginal systems learnt to listen to First Nation’s people. I anticipate it will be the making of us!
WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING
The Dreaming doesn’t change, we just keep discovering more about it – the old man’s words match what I have learnt over the last three years of involvement with land management systems. The biological approach to farming is taking up a lot of space in Western Agricultural thinking, we can know acknowledge that the diversity and health of microbial life in the soil is the key to well-functioning soil.
I have grown to understand that soil is to the earth as the gut is to the human body and have been playing catch-up in microbial science and eco-system understanding. The thinking that is emerging around the role of mycorrhizal fungi and the huge underground networks that support forests of plants is turning science and land management practice on its head. Or it should be.
We don’t know. We simply don’t know the half of how ecosystems function at their deepest levels. Science, like me, is playing catch up to the best of the regenerative farmers – and the regenerative farmers now have much more in common with the old man in the car than they do with the powers that be in the Agricultural institutes.
These mavericks can’t explain it all: and listening to people like Dianne and Ian Haggerty, successful WA regen farmers, that is part of the learning. Di suggests not understanding it all and remaining humble in the face of nature’s intelligence and power is a part of the deal.
By trial and error and painstaking experimentation, regenerative producers are discovering deep realities about how ecosystems function, uncovering knowledge that has always been there.
MAGICAL SCHMAGICAL
And the untold mysteries of nature are not a place where we need to go all mystical or start talking about magic. It is enough to say there is a lot we don’t know – and dismissing Indigenous knowledge as ‘instinct’ or ‘magical thinking’ won’t cut it anymore. We now know that Indigenous systems are geared to practical actions and maintenance regimes that strengthen the relationships between all living things.
From where I am looking, the place where high-end knowledge from an Aboriginal elder might meet the best mavericks in the farming and Ag scientist zone is not a place of magic – it is a place of about bloody time.
TIME WILL TELL
Eventually science will catch up. Ships will turn. New orthodoxies will arise that will become baked on institutional certainties that will need, in their turn to be overthrown in the light of new knowledge uncovered by the mavericks to come.
Here’s a quote from Tyson’s thesis: “When higher order knowledge from Indigenous systems is brought alongside the equivalent from Western systems – the deeper the knowledge, the more common ground is found across cultures”. (quote from thesis by Tyson Yunkaporta, Aboriginal Pedagogies at the cultural Interface) https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/10974/2/01thesis.pdf).
And I should add at this point, that the corollary to this statement is: ‘The shallower the knowledge the more difference is found between cultures”.
That should inspire us to challenge our cultural assumptions, you know, the one’s we took in with our rusks and don’t even know that drive our actions, and start uncovering what other perspectives we can hold up to the light.
