meI am very grateful for the handful of days I spent with a knowledgeable Yuin expert. He taught many of us to live by three virtues: patience, tolerance, and respect. Simple to say, but hard to master and rare to see incarnate. The lessons of patience and tolerance were hard for me, because I am not by nature. But I’m getting better, Unk, I promise, at least on the good days when no one argues with me too much.
A few months before he went into his Dreaming, I called him. I was impressed with the way fire was used to reduce the risks of burning. The fires he was seeing were hot, exposing the Earth, making it vulnerable to erosion during rains, burning old trees and causing a flood of germinating shrubs and young trees that, ironically, would quickly replace the fuel loads of the forest.
During the call I talked to that old man about my knowledge of fire, traditional and western, about how I might imagine a better way to manage our forests. He let me go for a while. I suspect that was the longest he heard me speak in a single session, so possibly he was silent. My frustration could only have been too obvious to him.
When I stopped, he simply agreed with me and told me that he thought I was right. Our understanding of forests and fire aligned. “So we’ll share it, Unk?” She paused, then said, “No, you have that tradition, save it for now.”
I practiced my patience, tolerance, and respect that day, and have, for the most part, maintained it ever since. But only recently have I begun to understand why I was asked.
The State of the Environment report makes somber reading. Nightmarish stuff for those of us who care. But surprising? No problem. I hardly needed to read it, so evident is the anguish of the Earth. Throughout the report there is a call for indigenous knowledge to be used with respect, as one of the arrows in a quiver of options to better manage our environment. I totally agree.
And in every conversation I’ve had and everything I’ve read since then, there it is: incorporating indigenous knowledge into land management practices will be vital if we are to turn this ship around. Yes.
But I think that old man wanted more from Australians than to use the knowledge of his ancestors to take care of the country. He wanted more before he sent us out to share what has been ignored for too long. He wanted what I desperately want too. He wanted this society to not only value indigenous knowledge, but also truly understand the principles and values that First Nations cultures are based on.
Unk wanted Australians to feel like we do, that Mother Earth is our family. It is our responsibility to take care of it as if it were flesh and blood. In exchange for this care of the country, she will take care of us and provide for us as she always has.
Without all of us assigning this same value to the Earth, we can incorporate indigenous knowledge into the best land management systems we can conceive; however, they will almost certainly fail, because they will continue to lack surprisingly few resources.
But if we decide that it is important to our culture, as Australians, to care for the land of the Rainbow Serpent appropriately and with respect, we will not be able to tolerate their rape and plunder in the name of profit, nor will we accept the paltry bit of philanthropic currency or misery that our governments spend taking care of the Earth.
we will care
I thought you stopped teaching, Unk. But as usual, he was simply impatient to learn.