Aboriginals are Inspiring.
I was first introduced to the term Aboriginal Australians when I was assigned to edit a documentary for my film class. Before this, I had no idea what definition or culture came behind that term.
Let me educate you a little bit about Aboriginals before I begin to discuss my first interaction with an Aboriginal. Aboriginals had lived in Australia for about 60,000 years before the European settlement. When Captain James Cook discovered Australia, he claimed it as unhabituated, when in fact it already was by the Aboriginals. Following his discovery in 1770, the first fleet came in 1788 with the mission of taking control of Australia, pushing aside all the Aboriginals. The Europeans saw Aboriginals as poor creatures and in a way saw the Aboriginals as a waste of land. It was hard for the Aboriginals to maintain a lifestyle after the settlement and many went through hardships, such as being infected with diseases and even being “stolen.” Today, 3% of Australia’s population claims to be Aboriginal, although they are still looked down on.
So what’s so unique about the Aboriginals, you may ask?
On Monday of this week, we had a guest speaker, Mary Graham, who is a Kombu-merri person (Aboriginal clan) and also a professor who teaches about Aboriginal history, politics and philosophy in Queensland. She started off the lecture by introducing herself in the proper manner as they do belonging to the Aboriginal culture, “Hello my name is Mary Graham and my father’s country is the tribal of the gold coast and my mothers country is Waka Waka” (Country is referred to a home region). She then followed this statement by saying, “When you introduce yourself, you don’t say your role, you say your mom’s and dad’s country or the language…that’s what people want to know, it means our identity is embedded into the land and a locality.” She kept repeating that last phrase and also saying that, what every Aboriginal has in common is the importance they have for land and how much they value it.
In the states, how do you introduce yourself? You never really mention land, you more as mention occupation. “Hello, my name is Alejandra Gomez and I am a student” and judgment begins from there. “Oh, she’s a student, she must be in debt,” is usually what is thought after that, because in the states, how you identify yourself always has to do with your social capital. Our identity is not embedded into the land; it’s embedded into our pockets.
If only we cared about how sacred our land was and identified ourselves as Aboriginals did, climate change would be a little less severe. We could protect it, preserve it and love it, just how we protect our identity from society by buying certain brands or having a certain amount of money and friends. Why do we have to take advantage of land? Why does it always have to be about money? I understand that money makes the world go round, but without a world, what value does money have? Why not protect what keeps up alive and treat it correctly?
When our world is crumbling, will we worry about the little polo logo on our clothes? Will we worry how hefty our bank account is? Will we worry who has who on Facebook? Hell no. We will sit there in regret and wish that we could have built an identity embedded in our location and cared for it. Just give it a thought and understand what is occurring and look into the Aboriginal culture for inspiration.
