Getting to know Australia

A telling piece of dialogue from the film, "The Man from Snowy River":

Jessica: One minute it’s like paradise, the next it’s trying to kill you.

Jim: …if it was easy to get to know it, it’d be no challenge. You’ve got to treat the mountains like a high-spirited horse, never take them for granted.

That is Australia! What better place to describe its character than in one of its great classic films. This is indeed a fierce continent. Everything that is indigenous – plants, animals and people – is incredibly tough, having accomplished the difficult task of making a living here. Geologically, Australia is one of the earth’s oldest continents. I don’t mean that it’s been here longer, I mean that there is no recent volcanic activity here. So Australia has had millions and millions more years of erosion without having new soil replaced, compared to other continents. Everything about Australia’s life forms are influenced by this fact.¹ The oldest river on the planet runs through the center of Australia. The deepest top-soil anywhere on the continent is only a foot thick. Australia’s soils are nutrient-poor; its oceans along the continental shelf are aquatic deserts, because so few nutrients wash down to its rivermouths. That’s why we have such crystal clear, blue, beautiful oceans, some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It’s also why Australia’s rainforests, western plains, and coral reefs are so rich in biodiversity. It’s one of the paradoxes of ecology, that tough circumstances are one factor that can lead to biodiversity. I guess the harder it is to make a living in an ecosystem, the more different ways of making a living DNA will have to take on to be successful in replicating itself. The other pervasive selection pressure in Australia is long and severe drought cycles. Parts of Australia can go for years without ever seeing significant rain, and geology shows that it has been like this for a long time. In fact, Australia’s climate has been more stable over millions of years compared to other continents, because as the planet has cooled since the warm, lush days of the dinosaurs, when even Antarctica had no ice, Australia has been drifting northward, keeping its average temperatures relatively constant over the past 60-odd million years. This means that some very ancient forms of life have survived here.

Once DNA figures out a way of making a living in tough ecosystems like Australia’s, man, are those good designs! All the indigenous plants and animals are resource-efficient, able to thrive on fewer nutrients than their counterparts living cushy lives on other continents. Everything is designed to conserve energy. That’s why many of Australia’s animals are nocturnal – thermoregulation takes less energy at night here. That’s why the brains of marsupials have shrunk over the course of evolution here – brain tissue uses a lot of energy. That’s why Australian snakes are so extremely venomous – the quicker you can drop your prey, the less energy it takes to chase it down. Forests are incredible in Australia. It takes a lot of resources to grow a tree. Being a tree in Australia is an accomplishment. Being a tree in North America? They have it so easy. If Australian trees could talk to American trees, and if Australian trees were obnoxious and macho, they would say, "Man, you guys are wimps. You sit there in your nutrient-rich ecosystem, on all that deep top-soil, and you call that being a tree? You don’t even know what it takes to be a real tree. I’d like to see you try to grow in Australian soil." Trees here are powerful. If Australian snakes could talk to rattlesnakes and copperheads and water moccasins, they would say, "You call that venom? Ha! That’s just a light aperitif. We’ll show you venom. Step outside." To which the American snakes would reply, "Um, we don’t have legs."

OK, leaving aside the barroom brawl between Australian life forms toughened by adversity and North American life forms softened by easy living, this is what makes connecting to the land here a challenge. At first glance, I don’t find Australian forests as beautiful as North American or European forests. They’re not as lush, not as deep a green, they’re more dry and spare. But there is power and resilience there, and a different kind of beauty. Pale eucalyptus trunks lit up by the fierce Australian sun, etched against the blue sky like bleached bones, reaching up with their leaves, pulling up with their roots, drawing together sun and soil to keep the cycle of life going. That is power. Aborigines, the traditional owners of the land, have learned to live here over the past 60,000 years. An urbanite lost in the outback sees a harsh, unforgiving landscape with no food and no water, and will probably die in a few days. Outback Aboriginals see a landscape rich in food and medicine, and keep the knowledge of where to find water alive in song and story. That is power.

I respect Australia, and I am developing a fondness for the land. Will I ever love it, and feel connected to it, as I do to the land in North America? It’s a challenge.

¹ A lot of the information here is from Tim Flannery’s book, The Future Eaters, the first part of which details the role of nutrient-poor soil and drought on Australia’s natural history.

Conclusion to God is Red

"The lands of the planet call to humankind for redemption. But it is a redemption of sanity, not a supernatural reclamation project at the end of history. The planet itself calls to the other living species for relief. Religion cannot be kept within the bounds of sermons and scriptures. It is a force in and of itself and it calls for the integration of lands and peoples in harmonious unity. The lands wait for those who can discern their rhythms. The peculiar genius of each continent -- each river valley, the rugged mountains, the placid lakes -- all call for relief from the constant burden of exploitation.

Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals, the voices of the places of the land? As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red."

Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003

This land is our land, it's not George Bush's land

Another of Vine Deloria’s central tenets in God is Red is that spirituality cannot be divorced from place. When a people have spent long enough in one place, dependent on – perhaps I should say interdependent with – an ecosystem for water, shelter, and sustenance, the specific places in that land, and all the animate and inanimate features of that land come to be vested with sacredness. This is my experience of North America. North America is the land that nurtured me and sustained me for 40 years. I love its forests and mountains and rivers, its fields and deserts and coasts. Here in Australia, I miss the natural world in North America the way I might miss a good friend or a romantic partner or a family member. And while I can keep in touch with my human connections by phone and email (though it’s better to visit in person), I can’t connect with a pine forest in the Rocky Mountains that way. Forests aren’t good at sending emails! Although Australia is very beautiful and exotic, I simply don’t feel that kind of connection here yet, not after just two years.

Ironically, one of the things I am discovering by being an immigrant here in Australia is just how much I was connected to the land in North America, regardless of which horrific administration is running things there. I don’t like the economic, domestic or foreign policies of the Bush administration. I think those idiots are ruining the U.S.A, the nation. So I left for a country that I hoped had better policies, wanting to have a chance to live in a real democracy. I am wondering if my deepest loyalty isn’t to the nation of the U.S.A. but to the land of North America. I am quite certain that Native Americans have been more unhappy than I am with many presidential administrations over the years, and just as certain that the U.S. government was ruining this country. But do Indians leave and go live somewhere else, hoping that the government there will be better? No, they don’t abandon the land that is sacred to them. They fight, and feel angry and frustrated, but they maintain their connection to the land that matters to them, and they wait. Because all empires wither in time. I could do the same. I could go home. My land is now colonized by a horrific empire in the form of the current U.S. government, but that empire is showing signs of crumbling. I need to make my loyalty to the land and the ecosystems more than to the particular government. I love the land of North America.

Hostility to science

About Deloria’s bizarre chapters called “The Spatial Problem of History” and “Natural and Hybrid Peoples”: Velikovsky and Sitchin, whose work he is so caught up with, have been thoroughly disproven by any number of astrological, biological and geological observations. He does what I've seen New Agers and creationists do time and time again -- selectively cite evidence that is consistent with an idea, while ignoring huge bodies of data that are completely contradict the idea, lambasting "scientific elites" for being close-minded. It is actually doctrinaire folks like Velikovsky and Sitchin and, sadly, Deloria, who act most close-minded. They show no understanding of the necessity of scientific predictions being internally consistent and accurate across a range of empirical data. It's a real shame, because he wants to make a valid point: the Western-centric view of history is not the correct view, and other views of human history are possible. But the most effective way to make that point is not to advance bizarre ideas that are at odds with evidence. I have found many times that indigenous people can be very hostile to science and see it simply as another form of colonialism in the domain of knowledge. One can hardly blame them for that! Still, it’s frustrating to see a book that could be one of the most important books of hte 20th century ruined by these wacko arguments, throwing out the good of science along with the bad. The relationship of science to indigenous knowledge definitely needs work.

Sort of a book review: God is Red

I've been reading God is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria Jr. It's been interesting, a little frustrating in places. My overall experience in reading it is that he has articulated clearly most of the things that have bothered me about Christianity for years, and also given a clear picture of one alternative, the indigenous spiritual view of the world.

With the exception of pages 108-133 and pages 155-163 (which are a bit whacked! pure science fiction, but more on this anon, click here), I find this to be a very cogent critique of Christianity as practiced over history and of the Judeo-Christian (& probably Islamic) worldview. One can easily see how an outsider listening to what public Christian figures have said, watching what they do, reading some theology and noting the international behaviour of predominantly Christian nations would come to his view. One can always look at the misbehaviour of a group of Christians and say, "Well, they weren't really acting in accordance with the religion," but when such not-in-accordance actions are writ large across the history of the world, of course an outsider would think that the religion must not have a lot of power to shape human action: "…while Christianity can describe what is considered as perfect human behaviour, it cannot produce such behaviour."¹

He properly calls into question whether religions can ever truly be divorced from the physical lands on which they arose and thus become applicable to all peoples, in all places, at all times. He argues that religions derive their form from the sacred relationship of a people to a particular geographical place and ecosystem, and contrasts this to the Western view that religion is a universally applicable system of ethics and morality. He questions things I always questioned: views on death and the afterlife, how the emphasis on the "next world" seems to go hand in hand with not taking care of this world, why doctrines and interpretations of salvation have changed over history, so that somehow the saved are always the high-status people in a society, and why early Christians might have been bamboozled into thinking that the stories and legends of a desert people who are not their ancestors would be relevant to them. He also questions why any indigenous person would convert to Christianity, noting several Indian leaders who noted the divergence between the "Good Book" and the practices of the people trying to convert them. Yet some indigenous people do convert to Christianity, something I have always found deeply disturbing.

He shows the deep hypocrisy inherent in the way that missionary work and colonialism go hand in hand: at the same time that Western missionaries were desperately trying to convince indigenous peoples around the world that Christianity is the one true religion which alone provides a correct moral code for behaviour, the governments of the nations in which Christianity was the dominant religion were carrying out the most un-Christian practices of exploitation, forced removal of indigenous people from their lands, literal genocide, and cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is accomplished by policies (carried out in the U.S., Canada, Africa and Australia, at least) of forced adoption so that young indigenous children were not raised in their own culture, residential schools in which physical abuse was rampant, and willful destruction of a people's language by using physical force to punish young people who spoke their indigenous language.² He also points out the hypocrisy involved when Christian theologians and scholars within the same dominant culture that insists that indigenous people must convert to Christianity because it is the only correct religion back off from defending as literally true anything in the Bible. Obviously Christianity is diverse, and often missionaries do not belong to the same sects of Christianity as those scholars who deny the literal truth of anything Biblical. Still, one can understand the frustration of an indigenous person over this apparent contradiction. He does acknowledge that most fundamentalists defend the Bible as literally true, and rightly derides their credulity. (He gets into trouble when he tries to interpret parts of the Old Testament as literally true, but more on that later.)

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003, p. 201.
² See page 168 for some particularly chilling examples of missionaries baptizing and thereby "saving" Indians while killing them.

America's Achilles' heel

I have the flu, so I've been reading God Is Red by a Native American author, Vine Deloria. It's riveting! One of Deloria’s key points is that the way Christianity is practiced in America (and by extension, Europe) has made it the U.S.' fundamental weakness – that with the kind of Christianity that includes certitude that it is the "right" religion comes the inability to recognize and tolerate different worldviews and cosmologies¹. It also leads to the sense of entitlement that has engendered U.S. exploitation and colonization of lands throughout North and South America (and elsewhere – he doesn't mention Africa, but obviously we have done the same thing there): manifest destiny, feeling entitled to the resources of these continents, a sense that the white Christian nations have the right to do this. I think he is right to point to a parallel between feeling that one's own religion is the only "true" one and a sense of entitlement to help oneself to others' resources. He says this sense of entitlement has doomed the U.S. to internal and international conflict since its founding. (He doesn't say this, but Americans aren't alone in this: the English felt they were entitled to their empire because the Victorians were sure that "God is an Englishman." We were just following in our big sibling's footsteps. And it isn’t even just a Western thing – China justified its empire somehow, as did Japan.)

This touches on one of my major reasons for leaving the U.S. Our foreign policy since the 1800's has been a long series of covert and overt military actions on behalf of U.S. economic interests, and continues to be so. It is appalling to me to pay taxes to a government that topples democracies chosen by the people (e.g., Chile) to put authoritarian regimes in place that they think will remain friendly to U.S. corporate interests, a government that runs the School of the Americas, where we train foreign military and police forces from those authoritarian regimes, teaching them interrogation techniques and ways of controlling unruly civilian populations. If only there were a line-item veto on our tax returns where I could say that I don't want any of my tax dollars going to support such an operation. One thing I truly like about being in Australia is that I am not paying a single dollar in tax revenue to the Bush administration (John Howard is a subject for another post!). These military operations have been around for a long time. In a speech in 1933, Major General S. Butler said the following about gangsters and the military, which is chillingly still applicable today:

"There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger-men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle-men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations…. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. …. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. I helped to make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."²

Is it any wonder I couldn't stomach continuing to be a part of the U.S.?

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003.
² Adbusters, Vol. 12(3), No. 53, May/June 2004. Details of the genocidal impact of these military actions on the indigenous people of South America are in Wade Davis, One River. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.

"Western" culture isn't the problem

When you're trying to diagnose a problem, it's important to have the right cause. When I lived in America, a lot of lefty political diatribes that I heard were full of references to "Western culture does [insert bad thing here]", "people in Western culture are taught [insert bad belief here]." Particularly around indigenous issues, what seems to be meant is "those modern, industrialized cultures which have oppressed indigenous people around the globe, especially if the people in those cultures had dark skin." Now that I live in Australia, however, the term "Western culture" doesn’t sit as well with me. Which cultures and nations have traditionally colonized others? Though it mostly colonized the Americas in its early days, for the past century the U.S. has been a strong global force for colonialism. The nations of Europe have been colonized and have colonized others many times over. Australia and New Zealand are now separate nations, with mainstream cultures born of European backgrounds, but they are not geographically "Western." The Chinese have a long history of imperialism, colonizing many indigenous peoples of Asia. Ask the indigenous Ainu of Japan if colonialism is a disease only of Western nations. In fact, the colonizers and the colonized are spread throughout Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa, Australia and the Pacific, so "Western culture" just doesn’t capture it. Furthermore, materialism and alienation from the natural world are just as rampant in urban Asia as in urban European-derived nations. I think a more accurate way to put it in today’s world would be "modern industrial technological" culture, but it’s a bit unwieldy. And indigenous cultures have plenty of technology, it’s just different technology. What to do, linguistically? Perhaps we should say "modern industrial culture." MIC, that's it. I'm from a MIC.

What is scarce is precious

An anthropologist went to a Hopi elder to ask to record some of the Hopi songs. The old man sang him song after song. After each song, the anthropologist would ask, "What was that song about?" The old man answered: one was about a thunderstorm bringing rain, another was about his wife going to get water from the spring, another was about a river. Every time the old man would sing a song, the anthropologist would say, "what’s that about?" And the old man would answer that it was about rain, or a spring – water. Eventually the anthropologist got impatient, and asked, "Is water all you people sing about down here?"

And the old man said, "Yes." He explained, "For thousands of years in this country we've learned to live here. Because our need for this water is so great to our families and to our people, to our nations, most of our songs are about our greatest need. I listen to a lot of American music. Seems like most American music is about love."

* Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities, I Will Die an Indian, 1980, Institute of the American West, formerly a division of the Sun Valley Center, Sun Valley Idaho. Reprinted without permission.

Who are recognized "experts" in different cultures?

What distinguishes a payé from others is that he is an intellectual....he is immensely curious; he is always interested in animals and plants, the weather, the stars, diseases -- anything that to others is unpredictable....A Tukano payé ... develops his personality slowly and steadily, the driving force being a truly intellectual interest in the unknown; and that not so much for the purpose of acquiring power over his fellow men as for the personal satisfaction of "knowing" things....

G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 1975

This reminded me a lot of scientists when I read it. (See entry on 22nd May 2005.) From what I’ve read, indigenous cultures recognize their healers as men and women of knowledge, experts in their culture on how the world works, and how to deal with the natural world in which their people live: finding cures for disease, predicting weather, finding food in hard times. These healers are seekers after knowledge and understanding. Their techniques for finding knowledge -- intuition, communication/communion with nature in altered states -- are quite different from those of science, being both more ecstatic, and more demanding of personal insight, with science being more replicable and controllable. (Repeatability and controllability being hallmarks of industrial culture.) However, some of the underlying motivation is the same. Curious.

The traps are the same, too. What distinguishes a good scientist from a bad scientist? Often, it's ego and pride, vs. being open to what nature has to show you.