Jerry Mander, Founder and Board Member of the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), and Senior Fellow at the Public Media Center, introduces the Teach-In on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization, A Celebration of Indigenous Sovereignty: Victories, Rights & Cultures, that took place at Hunter College, NYC, on November 18, 2006.

The event was jointly presented by the International Forum on Globalization and the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for Policy Research and Education). Tebtebba, a word used by the indigenous Kankana-ey Igorots of the Northern Philippines, refers to a process of collectively discussing issues and presenting diverse views with the aim of reaching agreements, common positions, and concerted actions.

The following article is a transcription of his talk at the event.

Thanks so much, Ralph [ed.: Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and Editor of Lapis Magazine Online], and thanks to Cooper Union, and thanks to all our co-sponsors. We’re so happy to be here in this place.

I’m standing at the Lincoln podium, where Abraham Lincoln announced his presidency in the 1860’s, his run for the presidency. Of course, that was at a time when everything west of the Mississippi, or many things west of the Mississippi, were still Indian country and, arguably, some people may feel that it should have remained that way.

I have the high honor of being able to kick this event off and set a context for the nine- or ten-hour marathon today, focused on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization.

This is an amazing, complex, multifaceted story with lots of fast-breaking news. It will be told by 35 of the leading players in local situations from most continents on the planet. We will get updates in the battle going on here in New York right now at the United Nations, over passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – a profoundly important document in my view – that has been the source of struggle for 13 years now. But it just may get passed this week. You’ll hear a lot more about it and Vicky [ed.: Victoria Tauli-Corpuz] will talk about it very shortly [ed.: see note regarding Declaration at end of article].

In these nine hours, we’ll only scratch the surface unfortunately, but we’d better get going. So, I’m going to start with some basic facts. No communities of people on this earth have been more negatively impacted by the world’s global economic system of today, than the world’s remaining 350 million indigenous peoples. And no communities of peoples have so courageously and lately, successfully, resisted these invasions and pressures. It is our central purpose with this event today to convey both the scale of the problem that they face and the successes and visions of the resistance, and to try to stimulate non-indigenous support for these movements.

Here’s the root of the problem: economic globalization, which some people see as the modern-day version of the old global colonialism of the past 500 years since Columbus, though a more “ramped up,” higher-speed version. But the economic model is of the global corporations and central globalization institutions, like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and others that drive this machine. These global corporations and institutions literally cannot survive without an always-increasing growth and profit. This growth itself depends on an ever-increasing supply of the world’s remaining resources, much of which, unfortunately, is on indigenous lands: oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, timber, minerals of every kind, from copper, zinc, lead to gold, and now coltan [ed.: the ore for tantalum, used for consumer electronic products] for our computers, fish from rivers and seas now in a very depleted state, genetic diversity from our wilderness regions for our pharmaceutical industries, fresh water (the world is fast running out of that), arable lands for massive export-oriented industrial agricultural experiments.

These resources are the basic building blocks for global corporate industrial activity in the modern world. Without them they can’t keep making more and more “stuff” for consumers and industrial markets. They can’t grow and the system starts to fail. A globalized corporate system also requires infrastructural development in pristine areas; new roads, pipelines, massive dams, electricity grids, airports, seaports are needed to take the resources and carry them across vast landscapes and oceans and factories and markets in still other countries – that’s globalization.

Without this growing rate of resource extraction, and modern global transport polluting the oceans, the macroeconomic model we call economic globalization really can’t live. In fact, the whole architecture of the globalization model is built upon a really rickety platform requiring never-ending exponential growth in resource use, which is actually impossible on a finite, quite-small planet.

The idea of constantly expanding this activity and doing it forever is absurd on its face and it takes the highest degree of denial and alienation and a lot of misguided economics courses (in universities like at Columbia where I went to school) to even imagine that it could work in timeframe but the very, very short run. But the corporate timeframe is the very, very short run. Short-term profits and growth are what keep corporate investors happy. In the long run it can’t continue. We already see the beginning of the end in such things as climate breakdown and peak oil and we’re also seeing other spectacular declines in many of the world’s key resources, leading to fierce global competition over the remaining supplies, even wars, as in Iraq over oil and elsewhere soon over water and land. The limits of the planet are becoming visible.

To stake the future of all life on Earth on such a clearly unsustainable model is ridiculous, ecologically disastrous and a little bit insane. But for indigenous peoples, the situation is particularly serious and very immediate, because in the world today, a very high percentage (some believe at least 50%) of the remaining critical resources in the world are found on indigenous lands, places where native peoples have lived successfully for centuries or longer. And so now, even more than in past colonial contexts, indigenous peoples are direct targets for corporate resource raiders. That’s one of the prime focuses of this event today and also this book Paradigm Wars that Vicki and I edited, that’s just been released as well. (Purchase Paradigm Wars here.)

These are the roots of some very serious conflicts: invasions, forced removals, cultural and political assaults and, very often, extreme violence. You could characterize all this as “resource wars.” But in our new report we’re calling it “paradigm wars,” deeply based in opposite understandings of how human beings should be living on the Earth. There’s a great and tragic paradox here: the very reason that native people have become such targets for corporate resource exploration is exactly because indigenous peoples have been so successful over millennia in maintaining traditions, cultures, economies, philosophies and practices that are not built upon some ideology of rapid expansion, economic growth or short-term profit-seeking or the gaining of individual personal wealth.

Generally speaking, intact indigenous cultures have not sought to mine every last square inch of the natural world where they live; nor do they ship mountains of resources like logs or oil across oceans to foreign markets. Indigenous peoples, even when generally very different from each other, have all tended toward philosophies and economic formulas that include such primary values as these:

• The central importance of community values, collective ownership, collective governance, above individualistic values and personal acquisition;

• Integration, rather than alienation from the natural world;

• Reciprocal relations with nature, economies of limits and balance.

Those traditional indigenous values and others are diametrically opposite to those of the dominant society – so even after millennia of living in one place, nature’s resources are still there. But to global corporate players these resources call like sirens as corporate existence depends upon them.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: native peoples are now strongly resisting and increasingly with great success. And so, in the Amazon jungles and the mountains of the Andes, where the issues may be oil or minerals or forests or pipelines and infrastructure development; in the tundras of the far North, where it’s oil, gas, minerals and climate change; or in the forests of Canada and the central plains of Alberta where oil is the issue; as well as in Siberia and Indonesia or on the small islands of the Pacific where militarism, ocean exploitation, tourism and climate change may be the issues; or in the agricultural lands of the Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico and the US; and in the grasslands of Africa, where diamonds are an issue (now unfortunately also where coltan is found); in all these places, we find native peoples facing grave threats to their lands, forests, wildlife, minerals, waters and themselves, but actively resisting and battling back and succeeding in many cases.

Remarkably, because of their growing convictions and with the support of amazing new collaborations among indigenous groups of different regions, as you’ll hear about today, and with added help of indigenous and non-indigenous organizations, indigenous peoples are actively trying to reverse this tide.

OK, what are they asking for? You’ll hear a lot about that today. I’ll just summarize by saying native peoples are demanding a few key things:

• Confirmation of their rights to full sovereignty, both internal and external, and the rights to self-governance in all cases;

• For the rights to collective ownership and processes;

• They seek protections for a recovery of the languages, cultural and religious practices and artifacts that may have been invaded;

• And for control of their resources and traditional knowledge and science;

• But arguably, the single most important demand of indigenous peoples of the Earth right now, is to globally codify their control of all decisions about their ancestral lands and the rights to determine when, and if ever, the resource removal or any other economic, cultural or political intrusion is to be allowed, and under whose terms.

This is the so-called “Right of Free Prior and Informed Consent,” presently denied in most parts of the world. This single issue is the basis for hundreds of struggles in domestic and international contexts. All of these points are extensively discussed in the book and will be discussed today, but they are also very important ingredients of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being fiercely debated up the street [ed.: UN headquarters are located less than two miles north of Cooper Union, the site of this forum].

The draft Declaration is a very profound document with remarkable political concepts including some of those that I named, such as collective governance, prior rights, free prior and informed consent. It has been thought about for thirteen years and now is on the verge of passage at the UN, except for the fierce opposition of guess who, John Bolton, as well as the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (that otherwise wonderful human-rights Mecca), as well as some of the poorest countries of the world who are in an unfortunate position of getting rapidly bought off or at least people are trying to buy them off. We’ll come back to this often in the discussion and I know Vicki’s going to talk about it.

Finally, there are also amazing stories about political successes, particularly in such places as South America. That’s where indigenous resistance has been one of the most important factors in a continent-wide political shift that is truly beginning to shake the world and we have some substantial delegations from throughout South America here with us today, as well as Central America.

In only the last five or six years, we have seen new governments elected on anti-globalization platforms in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay and, of course, Bolivia, where indigenous uprisings against water privatization and the export of natural gas to the US, and for recognition of their agricultural needs, has led to an indigenous farmer becoming the president, Evo Morales, and we have a representative of that government here on the panel today.

In Ecuador, several presidents have lately been overturned largely by actions of indigenous peoples and there are shifts taking place in Peru and in Central America. When George Bush came down to sell the FTAA, he was basically laughed off the continent. And of course, Mexico, where the Mayan Zapatista uprising changed the political culture in that country profoundly. It arguably led directly to the election of Mr. Obrador, a few months ago, though he was denied his election in the manner of Bush vs. Gore.

Not everything’s been solved for indigenous peoples’ interests in any of these places, but the first major steps have been taken. Indigenous mobilizations against the excesses of globalization have been key factors in the changes of political power that are growing in these countries – changes to regional and local political systems as opposed to global. The ideas of local self-sufficiency and local control – these have all been greatly influenced by indigenous uprisings and indigenous philosophies, albeit in some places more than others.

As the ecological limits of the planet become ever more clear, the alternative visions of self-reliant, localized land-based systems as provided by indigenous economic, political and cultural forums will become ever more persuasive and viable. So, in my personal view, judging from the great tangible shifts in the world lately against the institutions of corporate globalization, the handwriting is on the wall: South America is only the first continent on the Earth to begin turning away from a failing globalization model, but it’s not the last. Soon all regions will be seeking alternative sets of practices that stand a better chance for a sustainable social, political and ecological future.

The role of indigenous peoples in this process is crucial, and it’s a main purpose of this event to make that clear. My personal plea is that all communities of activists will recognize that their own issues will be benefited if the indigenous struggles are included as their own. We must actively support these movements, and we must help fight for the passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which sets a new high standard for international recognition and behavior. Some people say that declarations like that are not important as they have no real enforcement powers. If they are not important, why are John Bolton and the US Government and all these other governments fighting so hard to try to kill it?

So, thank you so much for coming and helping us to get this day launched. And now I’m going to turn it over to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Thank you so much.

+ + +

Note [the following statement is taken directly from www.iwgia.org/sw248.asp, where readers can find the final Declaration]: With an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favor, only 4 negative votes cast (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States) and 11 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007. The Declaration has been negotiated through more than 20 years between nation-states and Indigenous Peoples. Les Malezer, Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples' Caucus, welcomed the adoption of the Declaration in a statement to the General Assembly:

"The Declaration does not represent solely the viewpoint of the United Nations, nor does it represent solely the viewpoint of the Indigenous Peoples. It is a Declaration which combines our views and interests and which sets the framework for the future. It is a tool for peace and justice, based upon mutual recognition and mutual respect."

It was expected that the Declaration would be finally adopted by the General Assembly in November 2006. However, at this late stage it emerged that some African States had serious difficulties with the text of the Declaration and were not prepared to accept the recommendation made by the Human Rights Council to adopt the Declaration. Namibia presented an amending resolution, which called for the vote on the Declaration to be deferred to allow more consideration. To the great surprise of all this resolution was adopted, and the final vote on the adoption of the Declaration thus postponed.

Between Novermber 2006 and  September 2007, when the Declaration was finally adopted by the UN General Assemby, indigenous peoples and states supporting the Declaration have engaged in intense dialogue with African states in an attempt to clarify the doubts, and promote the adoption of the Declaration. In early September 2007, an agreement was reached between the co-sponsors of the Declaration and the African Group of States on nine amendments to the text as adopted by the Human Rights Council in June 2006. This agreement, and the amended text, formed the basis for the draft resolution on adoption of the Declaration.

John Mohawk was for many years editor of the seminal magazine, Akwesasne Notes. A strong voice for the Iroquois peoples, he is a university professor of Native American Studies.

Bear with me while I take some words that have established usage in English and bend them a little to make them fit where I want to go with this.

I'd like to begin by saying that if we were to put into English the philosophical tradition of the native peoples, especially the native people of the Northeast woodlands, we would probably have to call it a form of progressive pragmatism. The whole tradition of pragmatism actually found its roots in Native America, and the way it is practiced in contemporary America has lost its way from where it came from. But without going too much into how it lost its way, let me go back to where it came from. Why is it relevant today?

We don't know exactly where it came from; it goes beyond history, way beyond, actually. In the beginning of the story of the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was discussion about a time prior to the existence of states. Before there were states, there was war. In a way, we would probably describe it as blood feuding. What was peculiar about it was that people had the capacity to make war but did not have the capacity to make peace.

This is the case of warlords. A warlord can essentially initiate violence, but he can't guarantee the cessation of violence for the most part. He certainly can't guarantee it on the part of a nation. Before you could have peace, you had to have the formation of something larger than the unit capable of striking; you had to have some cohesion.

I was very struck with that because I think what happened in the prehistoric past of the northeast woodlands was that at one point there was internecine warfare going on everywhere. It was led by what we would call today warlords, although they were actually warrior chieftains. At some point people began discussions about how do you stop it once it gets started. I imagine that those conversations took quite a bit of time. In any case, they began developing a way of thinking about war and peace, which actually turns out to be quite relevant to our time.

Here's what they thought, roughly. They began by thinking that peace would be a positive thing if we could achieve it. But in order to achieve it, we would have to have a sort of critical mass, a number of people who were brought into the theory that violence could be brought to an end. And then they asked the question, what would take its place? There was no event that could be pointed at to say, "this is the event that started this violence." In some cases, no one could remember what started the violence. They had been at war, revenge war, for so long that some people were born knowing they had enemies and not knowing why they had enemies.

I propose to you that this condition of pre-state warfare has always existed, continues to exist and will always exist. There will always be people who have the capacity to organize violence, who work outside of a framework of states; who do this violence and adhere to no real coherent rules about when to end the violence. I propose to you that that has always existed in our lifetime and is taking place now and will take place in the future in cultures that find the idea of revenge to be very attractive.

How the Iroquois Made Peace

In the Iroquois culture, they found revenge to be very attractive and they had to find two routes to stop it. This is where things got to be on two tracks: the track of how to stop violence inside the groups that are committed to ending violence, and the track of addressing violence in those groups that are not. This is why one of the things that came out of this was entirely made up of what we call pragmatism. We only have a few quotes from the Indians. They were basically ignored from the time of the Puritans who assumed that the Indians were an inferior group and that the Indians didn't have anything to say.

By the time the British military came along and had to engage in the peace making conferences and truce making conferences, the British adopted some of the Indian protocol on how you have meetings and discussions. In the British adoption of that kind of protocol, you'll notice that in historical records, the British stand astonished at the quality of oratory that was set forth by the Indians. Almost all the Indians that they met exhibited a kind of oratory that left the British somewhat amazed. The reason, I propose, for that is that the Indians had devised a structure of how to think about the project that they were addressing.

Their structure required that the combatants, the people on opposite sides, had to acknowledge the other side. Whenever two sides came in contact with one another in some form of conversation, there was a protocol to it. The protocol was preceded by a condolence. This was an interesting idea. A condolence was a ceremony, usually short, in which the two parties who were about to have a conversation had a preliminary meeting, in which they acknowledged that each side had suffered as a result of the conflict they were in.

In short, they did a ceremonial acknowledgment of each other's humanity and of the losses and sacrifices that had been made on both sides. It's quite an elaborate conversation actually. When the two sides would meet, they passed strings of wampum to one another and each string of wampum carried with it a sort of preset message. And when you sent one of your sets of messages to your enemy, they acknowledged by repeating it back to you, what you had said. The idea of it was to set the stage for things that had to be discussed.

Here was a period of time when people made wars with clubs and bows and arrows and traps and not with so-called weapons of mass destruction. Actually at one time, a good solid club was a weapon of mass destruction wielded by the proper parties. In any case, there was going to be a lot of conversation going on when they actually got to the peacemaking part about the idea of casting their weapons beneath a tree and burying them. This is of course, entirely symbolic, just like modern disarmament is entirely symbolic. The next time you get a paycheck, you go out and buy some more.

The same thing was true with the Indians. They could always go home and whittle some more of those weapons. In any case, they couldn't give up weapons entirely because they depended on them for hunting and for food supplies. So when they say they are putting the weapons of war under the tree, the conversations is just symbolic language meaning that they are not going to use them on each other anymore.

They put together this idea of seeking peace and they had to make it practical. So there is an attention to practice, to what's pragmatic, to making promises to one another that are likely to be kept. So you're going to have a peacemaking process that begins with some principles, which are just symbolic, one of which is the destruction of weaponry. The second one is that we are now going to put our minds together to create peace.

Of the quotes you can think of about the Indians, the most famous ones are the one from Sitting Bull. "Now let us put our minds together to see what kind of world we can leave for our children." And the other one out of The Great Law, "Now we put our minds together to see what kind of world we can create for the seventh generation yet unborn." Both of these are pragmatist constructions. They lay out the idea that we are now going to put our minds together to create some kind of desirable outcome. And pragmatism is entirely about outcome. To begin with, you lay out the outcome and then you step back and negotiate the steps to go from here to the outcome that you want.

I want to point out that Northern America has only given one single philosophical tradition to the world, and that single philosophical tradition is pragmatism. But pragmatism, in order for it to follow the principles of the Iroquois Great Law, has to be progressive pragmatism as opposed to regressive. First, it lays out desirable outcomes that both sides can agree upon, and second, that these were going to be adhered to through a set of protocols. It acknowledges on some level that it is not possible to create peace by force. Peace has to be arrived at, and there's really some conversation here about what peace is in the first place. Peace is not the cessation of violence, it turns out.

The Meeting Between the Warring Parties

The two parties meet in the middle of the forest, and they address the first thing, which is each other's humanity. And they address it in a very interesting way. In the beginning, they set the stage by paying attention to the people. The one side says to the other side something like this. "Well we've been engaged in combat and you've come out of the forest and you're covered in the bracken of the forest; we see that on your clothing. So the first thing we do is brush your clothing off, and clean off all the stuff that shows that you've been in a war. The next thing they do is they brush off the bench that the man is going to sit on and make it clean and ready for that. Then they begin addressing a series of things.

These are symbolic. They say stuff like this: "With this wampum, I release the pressure in your chest. You're feeling tightened in your body from the struggle, so I release you from that. With this one, I take the tears out of your eyes that you've been crying because of the people you lost in your war. And with this one, I release your vocal cords. I release your voice so you can speak strongly." What they are basically addressing is that things have to be done symbolically to prepare both sides to talk. The first thing that is there in the tradition has to do with the concept of what conditions actually lead to peace.

According to the Great Law, peace is arrived at through the exercise of power, righteousness, and reason. I always thought these were interesting because translated into action, what does it mean? Power, your power to act, depends on your capacity to believe that what it is that you set about doing can be done. In other words, you won't do what needs to be done if you think it is a futile gesture. You can't acquire power to deal with an enemy unless you acknowledge that the enemy is a rational being who has wants and desires, who wants to live and who wants his children to live, who wants to live in peace. To acknowledge that they are human gives you the capacity to speak to them. If you think they are not human, you won't have that capacity. You will have destroyed your own power to communicate with the very people you must communicate with if you are going to communicate with your enemy.

Just to bring this into contemporary thinking, you can't say we don't negotiate with terrorists. They are the people who are trying to kill you. You have to negotiate with them, but to negotiate with them, you have to do something that is trickier: you have to acknowledge that they're human. Acknowledging that they are human means also acknowledging that they have failings. But you don't concentrate on the failings; you concentrate on their humanity. You have to address their humanity if you're going to have any hope of stopping the blood feud.

Second, remember, there is peace in which there is no state, no government. There is nobody on the other side who can actually surrender; nobody on the other side who can guarantee anything by law. We're looking to make peace between peoples in which the foundation of the peace is the tradition to which they agree and which they embrace, and it's held up by their honor and nothing else. This is important because the people who are at war now are not states and there is no way to stop them unless they agree to stop.

Power was the first word. Righteousness is the second. Righteousness is a very dangerous word in English. It's a very dangerous word in English history. But let me just give a sense of how it was used. Righteousness means that almost all of us agree that some things are right, correct, positive, which is to say that they might not all agree that some things are obviously right and wrong. But there are some things that they will agree on. So those are the things you start to build on. You have the conversation and your negotiations until you hit the rock hard things.

That takes us to the third and last section, which is reason. Reason means that you're going to do the rock hard things. You're not going to settle them really, but you're going to do the best you can with them. You're going to move them as far forward on as many points as possible. The Iroquois law of peace assumes that you will not achieve peace. You will not achieve a perfect agreement between two warring sides about how the world ought to be in the future. But it also assumes that you can reach enough of it to have something to work on so that you can take the conflict from physical warfare over to a place where, as they used to say, thinking can replace violence.

So the purpose is reach a place, where you can actually work on it and get it done. But you'll never achieve it because peace is not achievable as a static condition. Because relationships between human beings are not static. Relationships between human beings one might say, are left undone, unfinished. They continue to be unfinished business so it's assumed that peace can't be concluded. You can get toward a place where the conversation about peace is ongoing and continuous and continues to replace the violence.
Points of negotiation can be worked on. It is important to find out why the two parties continue to have conflict and try to remove those irritants that have caused the violence.

Now for the most part, the thing about blood feuding is that it's often built on injuries, damages, and things that happened to people in previous generations. It didn't happen to the people sitting at the table, it happened to their fathers or their grandfathers. It happened a long time ago. And they're still carrying that injury. They're bringing that injury with them as a real injury. And I propose to you that the world is full of this.

Relevance to the World Today

In the contemporary world, there is a certain dismissal of this. We look at these people and say, "Wow, sure. But that happened in 1952 and you were only two in 1952." The pragmatic people, however, think that you still have to address this. You may have done something that you can undo. If you can't undo it, at least you can address it. So the purpose of having the negotiations is to address old injuries as well as new ones.

The other reality is that revenge is very, very hard to address. Some people only live for revenge. They have no other purpose. In fact, the old Iroquois stories tell story after story about people who were like that. They lived for the purpose of revenge. The story of The Great Laws is the story of a guy who comes along and he does a certain amount of combing of their hair. He speaks to them and addresses their issues. And there is a constant and relentless conversation going on about the whole issue of righteousness, about what's right and what's wrong. What works and what doesn't work. What might work if we tried it or not work if we didn't try it. The point of the project is the process and not the end of the process because it is assumed that there will never be an end. It's an endless process and it wants to engage the next group. So they're setting the stage for the next generation to carry on the process.

Hopefully, the process of maintaining peace. Or actually, the process of talking and thinking instead of shooting and blowing each other up. Hopefully, this process will continue on long enough until it becomes normal that we don't blow each other up.

Which gets me to my final and last point. People are starting to talk about a war on terrorism. Well some cultures haven't realized that there's always been a war on terrorism. Forever, as long as human memory has existed, there have been assassinations and harm done from group to group, on and on, endlessly. And sometimes they had some sort of claim to a religious foundation, sometimes it was just things that happened as a result of battles. But whatever it was, it would have been an interesting thing, in my opinion, if the contemporary war on terrorism had been built on principles of pragmatism, of coming to ways of sorting out whatever it is that people are saying was done wrong to them, and making proposals about how to make it right. That would have been interesting.

There will never be an endgame to the war on terrorism. What we need to do is a beginning game in the process of peacemaking. As far as I can see in pragmatic terms, we haven't begun that yet.

Progressive pragmatism seems to have lost its strength in American culture. But I think it would be a good thing if we could have a conversation to bring it back. And bring it back in its full and complex glory because pragmatism, progressive pragmatism, is ultimately the most complex process devised so far by people who play politics.

“Never forget–everything’s a mystery. Once it stops bein’ a mystery it stops bein’ true.” - David Mowaljarlai, Aboriginal Elder (from Dreamkeepers by Harvey Arden)

I was cold. Very cold. Despite the daytime furnace heat of Australia’s outback, a numbing nighttime chill invariably settles across the vast, shrub-dotted plains of the interior sending most living things-myself included-into a somnolent stupor. The silence was tangible-a Zen like void-slowly filling with a delicious anticipation of dawn. The star-filled blackness of the night sky gradually eased into a purple-gray halflight and then…slowly–ever so slowly–the sun rose in a great golden yolk of light and heat and Ayers Rock emerged, red and wraithlike, from the vast flatness. Colors spread in a slow tide across the desert. I was here–I was really here! After a long flight and a switch of planes in Alice Springs, I had arrived at last in the heart of Australia’s Red Center, at its very navel, and was about to experience the daily rebirthing of the world’s largest 1142 foot high sandstone monolith, set in the middle of over two million square miles of flat outback on the earth’s most ancient landmass, eroded to a virtual peneplain over three billion years.

Years ago, Bruce Chatwin’s unusual book, The Songlines, touched something deep within me. He was describing the Australian Aboriginal’s “Dreamtime” creation-stories in which an unformed world had been shaped by ancestral beings-a myriad of giant-sized kangaroos, lizards, birds, snakes, caterpillars, witchetty grubs, even sea creatures, plants and cloud-beings-that emerged from the void and journeyed widely creating all living things and all the features of the landscape-waterholes, mountain ranges, scarps, rivers-everything. Ayers Rock and the nearby Olgas cluster of thirty-six smooth-domed hills (now known jointly as the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park) remain today as physical evidence of the ancestors’ feats enacted in the creation or “Dreamtime” period. The Anangu-or Aboriginals-who today number around 250,000 throughout Australia, are the direct descendants of these beings and have the eternal responsibility of perpetuating and caring for the land through “singing” the ancient rituals of stories, songs, dances, and “corroboree” ceremonies along the Iwara (the dreaming tracks or “songlines” reflecting the ancestor’s journeys). The secrets of these tracks are passed on by complex initiations from generation to generation in the form of the Tjukurpa or Aboriginal laws that rigidly define the relationships between people, plants, animals, and all the physical features of the land. Chatwin wrote of the ancient ancestors that: “They wrapped the whole world in a web of song”, which I found a wonderfully evocative description of Creation, and he emphasized the heavy duty placed upon today’s Aboriginal ancestors to maintain the songlines through constant rituals, as “an unsung land is a dead land.”

As I read deeper into Chatwin’s book I knew that one day I would come to the Australian outback and learn more of its mysteries. And voila!-here I was-watching the sun turn Ayers Rock into a towering crimson reality and walking with a few others around its five and a half mile base as a guide told us the intricate Dreamtime tales of its creation, showed us hidden waterholes and led us under rock overhangs to peer at ochre-painted rock art created by Aboriginal ancestors over 20,000 (some experts claim over 50,000) years ago.

Despite all the charms of Ayers Rock and its modern Yulara hotel complex, I found the place far too overcrowded for my “Earth Wanderer” tastes and felt a need to pull away and seek out something less tied to time and schedules and tourist pick up/drop off points. Something that would allow me to explore the underlying realities of this wild region, those tantalizing flickers of perception that came to me when I looked into the eyes of Aboriginal guides and sensed whole timeless realms of knowledge and understanding that seem so alien to our contemporary rush-rush, what’s-next, affluenza-plagued lifeways. So I left the rock and “went bush” with a guide, Lynne, on a long, bone-jarring drive south along red dust tracks. The scrub-dotted desert, flat and seemingly featureless, makes you constantly aware of the vast enormity of the sky. Below is a infinite rust-red nothingness, a place where distances are measured by the earth’s curvature and defined by shimmering heat hazes; above is that arching sky dome so pure-blue it makes your eyes ache. When the occasional cloud appears it is a singular event. I watched as a huge thunderhead evolved out of the nothing in the west and ballooned ominously into an imposing object thousands of feet high which gave the sky even greater vertical dimension and seemed, by its very enormity, to compress the already-flattened earth into even greater insignificance. A thought came: how small, alone and utterly frail seems man against all this enormity. To survive here, to find purpose and nourishment here, you need the company of Dreamtime creatures, and the security of dreaming tracks or songlines for navigation, water, and bushfood. You also need utter faith in your one-ness with everything around you, bound unerringly by Tjukurpa law, laid down and maintained in perpetuity, celebrated, sung, and resung to provide finite edges and realities in this otherwise unreal, edgeless infinity. Even if there wasn’t a God, a greater creative mind, you’d certainly have to invent one and learn to understand his ways, otherwise your ability to survive here and find daily nourishment would be destroyed and your rapid extinction guaranteed.

The next few days presented me with an experience I’ll never forget. With Lynne as my guide and interpreter I lived bush-style in a small campground set against high, red cliffs at the edge of a vast mulga bush plain, studded with thousands of red-mud termite mounds. At night I slept under dazzling stars in the traditional bushman’s swag (a hefty roll complete with pillow, mattress, and sleeping bag, all wrapped in sturdy waterproof canvas) and during the days spent most of my time in the company of two elderly Pitjantjatjara women, Nganyinytja and Tjulkiwa, their husbands, Ilyatjari and Mutju, and members of their extended families. Nganyinytja was the spokesperson and explained how she welcomed visitors to her remote homeland: “I want to teach all people, black and Gadia-whitefellas-about the land and our way of living with it. If people will listen to our way then they will understand why we, the Anangu, still live in this country-our country-and keep the old ways, the Tjukurpa laws, and sing the spirit of our land. We want to increase understanding and acceptance of each other. The wind that blows across our country talks to everyone and they begin to realize that we all share the same spirit. We are all of one same earth.”

Nganyinytja spoke softly and gently. “I do not talk badly of those people who do not understand,” she told me, even though the terrible stories of her husband, Ilyatjari, about the mistreatment of Aboriginals by early white settlers and pastoralists, made me squirm with outrage. “There is a revival-people will come here from all over the earth and see how we live and they will learn that it is good-they will learn to care for the land again; they will take something valuable back with them.”

My initiation into the “old ways” came slowly, but it did come. The apparent void of the land began to give of its secrets. I learned where to find witchetty grubs (deliciously crisp peanut flavored snacks when roasted-honestly!) under the ground among the witchetty bush roots; I began to spot bushtucker in the sparse desert fruits-small bush plums, tomatoes, peaches, and figs; I could tell the difference between old and new trails left by rabbits, kangaroos, lizards, and snakes, and distinguish the liquid pre-sunrise calls of the black-and-white pied butcherbird and the chiming wedgebill from the rich dawn chorus of mulga parrots, cockatoos, willie wagtails, bowerbirds, and cooing crested pigeons. I even learned the crafty ways of honey ants whose false trails and chambers eventually lead to a deep, subterranean cavern of delights where they hang in hundreds, their abdomens bloated like little grapes, ready to be sucked clean of their delicious life-giving nectar.

Family members showed me how to use simple but effective hunter-gatherer implements-the digging stick, the spear and spear-thrower, the boomerang, the piti and wira dishes carved from mulga tree bark, and the grinding stones for making bread cakes from grass seeds. They explained how ancient dreamtime laws create a cohesive framework for mutual support and order; they told me how the constant singing and walking of traditional dreamtime tracks (each initiated member of the family “mob” has his or her specific totemic ancestor that defines tracks and sacred places to safeguard) combined spiritual duty with pragmatic land-maintenance through scrub-burning and waterhole-cleansing. I learned of their bush medicines, the importance of secret male and female “business” rituals, the crucial initiation of young family members to perpetuate the Tjukurpa laws, and their delight in ancient ritual dances and in creating elaborate sand paintings. These exquisite dot-filled Dreamtime artworks are now produced on bark and canvas by scores of Aboriginal artists in outback communities and can be found in galleries and stores throughout Australia.

Despite all my experiences and insights, I still felt I was floating on the edge of Aboriginal Dreamtime, sensing vast timeless mysteries. At first my pragmatic western mind dismissed the idea of supernatural powers possessed by Aboriginals as merely the ramblings of overactive minds entranced by the enticements of half-understood myths and superstitions. But the families’ openness and unhyped honesty began to make me wonder about such abilities as bodily transcendence of enormous pain and near-starvation, the life-and-death power of “bone-pointing” rituals, the transmutation of form (from human to animal and vice versa), the possibilities of rapid-healing using ageless bush remedies, the existence of widespread mental telepathy between clan members, the ability to “go invisible” or appear in multiple form, even claims of levitation and instant bodily transference from one place to another.

My slow acceptance of these possibilities came, not in any hocus-pocus, drug-induced or magical sleight-of-mind manner but only after listening to the families and observing their quiet certainty, their matter-of-fact-acceptance of such actualities as a natural outcome of their ability to instinctively tap deeper energies and powers-powers that we have long since forgotten or replaced with more tangible and pragmatic realities.

I remember one small incident in particular. At night when the families decided it was time to sleep they moved away from the camp fire to different locations in the mulga scrub. Following the first coloring of dawn, when the birds began their liquid chatterings, they would ease up out of their swags and sit in silence for a long time. I could see all the families doing the same thing-just sitting in silence, no one moving.

After maybe twenty minutes of the strange stillness, Mutju rose to stoke up the fire. I followed him.

“Why all that long silence?” I asked him. He smiled-a little benevolently-on this uninitiated outsider.

“We were talking,” he said. “I didn’t hear any talking.” He sighed-a kind of how-dumb-can-you-be kind of sigh. “Not word-talking. That kind of talking is not necessary. We know each other. We understand each other…”

He could see I was still a little perplexed.

“I am me,” he explained slowly, “but I am also each one of them. They are they but they are also me. We hear one another quite clearly because we are all part of the same thing-the same person. The silence you heard was full of conversation…” Then he laughed. “Help me with the fire. You’re hungry.” And he was right. I was very hungry. Hungry for knowledge and sad that my time in the wild bush was drawing to a close.

On my last evening Nganyinytya suddenly announced it was “time for dancing” and supervised the elaborate body dot-painting of herself, Tjulkiwa, and young children of the family. She used her own white dyes and twigs whose ends had been pounded to fibrous paint brushes to create ornate whorls and spirals of dots on their chests, shoulders, and arms. Within the patterns were ancient symbols of Dreamtime creatures reflecting the different songs that each member of the group is obliged to “sing” throughout their lives to keep the land and the law intact for future generations. The children were silent and serious as their bodies were slowly and meticulously painted. Nganyinytya smiled at their stern little faces. “They know this is not a game,” she told me quietly. “They will do the same with their own children one day.”

Then she and Tjulkiwa stood and, humming rhythmic, drone-like songs together, they led long, shuffling dances with the children as dust rose from the dry earth and turned the sunset into a mystical golden-tinged haze. They continued for a long time as dusk crept across the mulga. The monotone sounds of their voices and their stately movements were mesmerizing and for a while I felt I was living in pre-history times watching dances that had been danced by family ancestors for thousands of years. Willingly, I became a passive participant, sinking deeper and deeper into the old ways…into the Dreamtime…

Much later, when the dancing had ceased and we were all sitting together roasting just-caught rabbits on the campfire, Nganyinytja leaned over and touched my arm gently. “You are a little part of us now,” she murmured quietly. I nodded and held her hand. My eyes were watering and it wasn’t just from the campfire smoke.