Interweaving Fibres: Relational Dynamics in Indigenous Australian Thought and Performance

Weaving

A prefacing dialogue between senior Warlpiri elder and scholar Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu and Samuel Curkpatrick

Samuel:

Interweaving fibres. It’s about the ways our different lives twine together. Why is this an important theme? Does it resonate with aspects of Warlpiri culture?

Wanta:

Yes. Ngurra-kurlu (home-having).¹ It’s a pattern for living from the walya-jara ‘ancestors’. Ngurra-kurlu shows us how everything is related. It has a lot of names. One of them is sacred – only men call that name in the initiation ceremony. But that name has to do with weaving. That name is also a name for the Southern Cross. Those stars are weaving together to make the diamond shape, which represents the whole ngurra-kurlu.

S:

Ngurra–kurlu as 'weaving': you have also called it an ‘ecosystem’ in which different family groups and country are pulled together into a greater body – north, east, south, west – held together through ancestral songs and stories?

W:

That’s a gift from the kangaroo, from this country. All these people and places have to come together.

S:

The gift of law?

W:

The gift of being really. And the wellbeing of everyone. All five stars of the Southern Cross must be in their place.

S:

You could say that participating in traditional Warlpiri ceremony is like going to school, isn’t it? It’s being schooled in complex relationships of people and place. Through ceremony, we learn to become responsible to one another and celebrate our differences – that’s how we are woven together.

W:

I always say this: it’s not you trying to do the weaving, this country is trying to weave you – to make you adapt, make you fit in. So, you become your ngurra (home). Already inside, all this kurawarri (law) flows within. You have to be the whole ecosystem of Jukurrpa.

We talked about this today (see Pawu and Curkpatrick 2022). I was drinking two drinks: tea and orange juice. I’m not trying to mix them together; I’m trying to keep them separate. The tea has to be itself; the orange juice has to be itself. That way, your identity is still intact. But because our body is a vessel, a container – he does the mixing.

S:

You could say that the body is made up of different generations, places, histories. These all mix together in who we are and how we relate to others.

W:

Your body knows what’s good for you … 

S:

What to absorb? How to grow?

W:

How to bring it in, all those different things. And it knows what’s bad for you and throws it out.

S:

It takes out the sugar, the carbohydrates, which all have different functions to keep us alive and healthy?

W:

Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. Your body restores the goodness in you. So, in that way, you have to make sure your walya-jarra – your ancestral identity – is intact with you. That’s your character.

You might be orange juice; you might be a cup of tea. You might be the sky; you might be the ground. I belong to the earth moiety; my son and my father belong to the sky moiety – my wife too. So, I have to marry across: that is the drinking.

These relationships sustain our communities. In ceremony, we come together and celebrate each other. We feed each other.

*  *  *

Knowing, Relating, Becoming

Opening to a vast array of human knowledge outside the traditional purview of the university, the term Indigenous knowledge relates to epistemologies and knowledge practices developed by Indigenous peoples through countless generations. Indigenous knowledge is ‘characteristically holistic, relational, and rooted in a strong and continuing connection with the land, sky and waters’ (Corn 2021). Passed through the generations by participation in traditional forms of life, Indigenous knowledge is typically embedded in customary practices, social structures, land management and the cultivation of resources; nuanced understandings of people and place are also conveyed through bodies of ceremonial law and performance, which integrate storytelling, song, dance, design, and language.

Focussing on these different practices can generate valuable conversations about what knowledge is, its sources, and how we engage with it, helping us to appreciate diverse epistemic values and the forms of life within which meaning and purpose are generated (Agrawal 1995, Curkpatrick 2023a, 2023b). Such focus on diverse knowledge systems seems naturally aligned with decolonial methodologies, which affirm the cultural autonomy of Indigenous peoples in pursuit of alternative modes of discourse, and the disruption of dominant intellectual and institutional frameworks (Dei 2008, Alfaisal 2011) by reference to differences between non-Indigenous and Indigenous ways of knowing. Contemporary anthropological methodologies are similarly concerned with localised ‘sociocultural processes that produce and reproduce differences’ (Morphy and Morphy 2017: 3).

This methodological emphasis on cultural and epistemic difference can play an important role in shaping more equitable cultural and institutional structures. However, it also redoubles an assumption of ‘ontological discreteness, towards a perspective that envisages societies whose presuppositions about the nature of the world are fundamentally different’ (Morphy and Morphy 2017: 3). Knowledge comes to be conceived of as that which distinguishes and separates, rather than something that can help us build relationships across differences. Culture is interpreted as an outworking of autonomous knowledge systems, ostensibly, those discrete and hidden grammars that generate social, political, and artistic practice.

Many of the articles in this volume are concerned with a careful and considered articulation of Indigenous forms of knowing in their differences – as knowledge expressed through song (Curkpatrick 2023b, Curran and Gallagher 2023, Wilfred and Curkpatrick 2023), kinship and language (Blakeman and Burarrwaŋa 2023, Pawu and Curkpatrick 2023), art and personal reflection (Assoulin 2023, Mulholland and Bacaller 2023), healing, sound and movement (Palmer 2023), in both Australia and among our near-neighbours to the north in Timor-Leste. These expressions are considered not only equivalent in value to western intellectual traditions and forms of knowledge – such as words on paper – but as sufficient to sustaining rich and complex ontologies. Such multifaceted expressions have been a primary mode of intellectual enquiry in Australia for millennia (Langton and Corn 2023) and are held to enliven original patterns of ancestral creativity that have sustained communities for generations (Curkpatrick, Corn et al. forthcoming).

While focussing on what these different Indigenous traditions and practices offer prevailing academic, cultural, political, and ecological discourses, we also seek to highlight the essential relational dynamics at the heart of these traditions. That is, in our varying fields, we find it necessary to gain an appreciation of the ways these traditions generate knowledge relationally, through the interactions of diverse peoples and places. Many of these articles also represent long-term research projects grounded in deep sensitivities of friendship and collaborative endeavour between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, in which traditions of thought and performance form the crucible of healthy and respectful relationships across diverse experiences.

Addressing reductive modes of identity politics within Australian culture that can entrench difference, anthropologist Amanda Kearney invites academics engaged with Indigenous communities and traditional forms of knowledge to take up ‘a more expansive engagement with modalities of relating across cultures’ (2022: 28) as a potential corrective for the rigid assertion of self-contained or even oppositional identities. Where decolonial approaches rightly problematise the naïve and paternalistic universalism originally inherent in academic approaches to Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems, to entrench autonomy as a primary focus or value is to risk reifying culture and political difference in a world where identity is often intractably complex and multi-faceted.

While this volume responds to Kearney’s challenge in a methodological sense, our impetus is also visceral and pragmatic, grounded in the friendships and connections through which authors actively seek to understand one another. Through our work, we seek to amplify those living relations which are constitutive of human life: knowing is approached as a relational activity present everywhere within and across cultures, even as knowledge also represents vastly differing approaches, values, norms, and social mores.

A key figure in the development of our ethos has been senior Warlpiri elder and scholar Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu, from Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert. Pawu’s teaching and research develops from classical ceremonial forms like the Jardiwanpa ceremony (Curran 2019, Langton and Corn 2023: 63–68), demonstrating how Warlpiri identity is responsive to contemporary forms of life and can inform identity and belonging in contemporary Australia (Curkpatrick, Bacaller et al. 2023, Pawu and Curkpatrick 2023). For Pawu, knowledge is energised and dialogically informed by new encounters and relationships, while simultaneously grounded in responsibilities to the land, law, and ancestors, which stand beneath and around us. A similar perspective is provided by Curran and Gallagher (2023) in relation to Warlpiri women’s yawulyu, and the ways in which song performances at contemporary festivals allow Warlpiri women ‘to assert and reshape their intimate links to Country and to broader social networks of others’ (2023: 1).

Pawu invites all those who seek to learn – through academic work and collaborative performances – to become part of an interdependent palka (body), working together to nourish and sustain one another. As in his work as Artistic Director of the Milpirri Festival,² he envisions a future for Warlpiri society in which traditional knowledge, processes, and values continue to thrive in the contemporary world. This is a reciprocal process of celebrating one another’s identities that begins with yitaki-mani – ‘hunting’ for knowledge to better understand who we are and our place among all others. The purpose of our hunting is to ‘bring it back in’ – to gather and share knowledge with others in ways that also nourish them.

In this way, knowledge is considered meaningful when it sustains variegated communities and shapes healthy relationships (Curkpatrick, Bacaller et al. 2023). For Pawu, it is the dynamic confluence of diverse people and places – of hot air rising and cold air falling, of ground meeting sky – where pulyaranyi, the ‘winds of change’, unleash the potential for us to grow together. Through the intermingling of different pressure systems, the negotiation of differences, and the turbulent movement this can involve, our differences produce lifegiving rain in the desert (Corn and Patrick 2015, Curkpatrick, Bacaller et al. 2023).

This pattern of interactivity and mutual formation can also be read in the many wantarri-tarri (travelling or trading routes) that crisscross the Australian continent, connecting different people, language groups, and country through networks of trade, ceremonial obligation, and narrative lines. Spreading like the veins of the kangaroo, these connections carry nutritious, lifegiving blood across the land. Through these connections and activities that sustain them, we are not merely constructing (or deconstructing) our identities. Rather, ‘this country is trying to weave you – make you adapt, make you fit in’. Pawu explains:

You and me – we can’t be Australian; we are Australia itself. This is taught through a cooking method, cooking the kangaroo. It’s how you cut the kangaroo, how you clean the guts out and get the blood and urine out. And bile. Be careful of that one. Cut it and try not to spill it in the kangaroo. So, you get that out and put it around the kangaroo, on the ground: you tip a drop out on each of the four corners.

It’s like a dog, claiming the tree. Yep. Marks its territory. In this case, you are marking yourself to be this country. So that’s the research I want to do. To look at the ways other language groups are doing their version of the wantarri-tarri, the gift road. It’s a pathway that goes right across this country, from the west to the east and the east to the west. And it’s all in the cooking of the kangaroo.

I hope that one day you will come and learn. This is your ngurra (home) as well, this whole continent is you. One day I’ll reveal that. (Pawu 2022)

Understanding song, kin, language, country, and law – including the correct ways to cook and apportion a kangaroo – is essential to discovering who we are together, and the very real differences that underpin our responsibilities and obligations to one another (Curkpatrick, Bacaller et al. 2023). Knowledge also entails the possibility of transgression – ‘skinning the kangaroo: you shouldn’t do it wrong; it can be dangerous’ – and therefore the need for reconciliation, a major theme of the Jardiwanpa ceremony. To be in relation is therefore to recognise our innate limitations, which law and culture help us to navigate. If, as Kearney suggests, ‘it is in the relational that we might find ourselves most keenly aware of our partiality’ (2022: 20), then attentiveness to relations can generate responsiveness to the experiences of others. In the relational, we also discover creativity, in looking to how our limitations meet with others’ limitations, generating something new.

Many Strands: A Collaborative Approach

Malka dil’yun marrayi bulunyirri

Rrr, rrr, rakirri; Rrr, rrr, gawudju

That string bag – now we are painting up

Rolling that string; rolling and making it longer

(Text from the Wägilak manikay (song), ‘Malka – String Bag’, as sung by Daniel Wilfred)

Raki’ (string) is an important narrative theme found within Wägilak manikay (public ceremonial song) from northeast Arnhem Land (Curkpatrick 2020: 5–6, 86–89). Dance actions accompanying the song ‘Raki’’ (String) and ‘Malka’ (String Bag) imitate the Wägilak ancestor Djuwalpada making string from the djirrpal (bark fibres) of the balgurr (Kurrajong tree). Djuwalpada pounds the bark to separate its fibrous strands before twining them together by rolling the fibres on his thigh, a movement imitated by the dancers. The song text for ‘Malka’ (above) tells of the string growing longer; the preparation of this string is an important part of ceremony, in which the raki’ symbolises connection between the present generation and their ancestors (Curkpatrick 2020: 86–89; Curkpatrick and Wilfred forthcoming). Blakeman and Burarrwaŋa also explore raki’ as ‘ties of kinship that bind people together through mutual obligations and responsibilities, and draw people together through mutual ties of affiliation and affection’ (Blakeman and Burarrwaŋa 2023) – a theme that permeates all articles within this volume.

Raki’ is therefore about ancestral connections that sustain present community. Dhalwaŋu ceremonial leader and artist Paul Gurrumuruwuy describes how Yolŋu sometimes identify mobile phones as raki’ which, like ‘a vine, or a string, or a cable’, connect kin across great distances: ‘You can easily contact someone far away through the raki’ (Gurrumuruwuy 2019). Beyond a fitting metaphor for the technology itself, the interpretative layers of this description expand to show us an epistemology that thrives on a network of tangible hyperlinks, embedding the conceptual (or ancestral) within everyday experience. Gurrumuruwuy explains further layers to his description of mobile phones as raki’:

Manymak [good!]. So far, so good. With this picture, with what I’ve just told you, you can see the outside part of what I’m talking about. But if you look underneath, if you look deeper in a Yolŋu way, then you can see that we are talking about something more than the connections that Telstra [telecommunications company] can give you. Raki’ means that the phone can be the connection to your wäŋa [land], your gurruṯu [family], your culture, your rom [law].

We use raki’ in ceremonies. It shows deep connections through gurruṯu; that means family, what anthropologists call kinship. That’s how the old people see it. That’s what they mean when they talk about the phone as raki’. But young people can get confused by that. So if I tell a young person, ‘Bring me my raki’’, they might bring back a fishing line. Because they don’t see the phone as raki’. They’re floating on the top of the vine, they’re not rooted to the soil and where it goes and what it means. (‘Call and Response’ in Gurrumuruwuy 2019)

Song narratives concerning raki’ also convey important aesthetic considerations for ceremonial performance as a means of shaping healthy and purposeful communities – many voices entwined like the fibres of raki’ (Curkpatrick, Corn, et al. forthcoming). For Yolŋu, ceremonial performances give expression to madayin, the deep beauty of the world as shaped by original ancestors (Langton and Corn 2023: 92–93). In manikay, singers improvise simultaneously, utilising rich vocal timbres to create a thick and brilliant texture that enlivens the lifegiving connections of people and place (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023a). In vibrant, energetic performance, märr (ancestral efficacy, power) can be felt as a force that sustains vibrant community. It is a feeling of happiness that comes about when everyone is involved, and a sense of resolution that any antipathies are put to rest and relational harmony restored. For Wilfred, this concept extends to his collaborative teaching and performances as a singer with the Australian Art Orchestra. To invite others to perform within the thick, heterophonic textures of Wägilak manikay is to extend hereditary responsibilities, to care for one another and for country, to non-Indigenous Australians (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023). These social textures – concerning the lifegiving connections of people and place – are essential to understanding concepts of health and wellbeing described by Assoulin (2023), Mullholland and Bacaller (2023), and Palmer (2023), through creativity and healing modalities that utilise sight, touch, smell, and hearing.

Wilfred explains that, as we sit together to respectfully listen to one another, our different string lines of story and song are mutually enriching, shaping who we will be together – even as our different raki’ remain connected to distinct ancestral luku (foundations; see Blakeman and Burarrwaŋa 2023). His approach extends from an interpretation of manikay as a place of gathering in difference:

Manikay means song. Everyone has different manikay, different songs, with different sounds and different languages. But they are sharing with that language, coming to the same ground to perform. On that sand, they’re all a big family. They all meet up and they all share their story and their song and their country and their dreaming: they’re all sharing on the ground, where they meet up together […]

You listen to many different songlines coming in […] these are different tribes, different songlines, different stories. This one comes from here, that one comes from there, and another comes from down here. They are sharing their culture and law – different languages, but not against each other. As these stories come, they form together. This is the law: it’s not [competitive], like challenging each other, racing, or making money: it’s there to show the new generation how to learn.

When they meet up on that lovely sand, they respect each other; on that lovely sand, they gather up and make this ceremony happen. They’re there to sing and share how this law is still in their lives. (Daniel Wilfred, interview with Samuel Curkpatrick, 1 April 2022, Alice Springs)

Conceived through the interweaving fibres of raki’ – braiding diverse peoples, songs, languages, places, and environments – knowledge is recognised as that which reveals those interdependences that sustain us as vibrant communities; relational and intellectual growth requires careful attention to these diverse stringlines that constitute present experience.

The tonality of these observations is very different to the language of scientific description deployed by Australia’s earliest ethnographers. Ethnomusicologist Clint Bracknell has considered nineteenth century descriptions of emotion in Noongar song which, while providing irreplaceable documentation of earlier practices, are often the product of the observers’ own imaginations (Bracknell 2020). Seeking to enliven song traditions within Noongar communities, Bracknell has explored how legacy recordings might revitalise ‘cultural, genealogical and geographical connections between the people’, thereby transforming present relationships (Bracknell 2020: 150). Similarly, Blakeman has explored Yolŋu concepts of connection and reciprocity that produce positive emotions, such as ‘making well’, ‘high spirits’ and ‘collective vitality’ (Blakeman 2015: 107).

Collaborative research approaches can show how the validity and efficacy of Indigenous knowledge is evinced not through its scientific documentation and subsequent adaptation, but in the feelings of vitality, respect, and togetherness our collaborative knowledge-activities can produce. Or, as Wilfred understands our research, ‘We’re feeding each other: when we talk, you’re making me stronger, giving me more power, to share this knowledge, to understand – this is my story, I’m keeping it. And we grow. This story is giving we [us] life’ (personal communication, 2023).

On Conversation

If knowledge develops and is consolidated by attending to relational coordinates, interdisciplinary approaches become essential to our academic endeavours. Rather than seeking a conceptual synthesis of disciplines, the novel connections of linguists, musicians, anthropologists, geographers, teachers, film makers, artists, and other storytellers, allows hybrid forms of enquiry and dissemination to emerge. Through our various interactions – in conversations, writing, teaching, singing, painting, travelling, fishing – we come to recognise interdependencies that can enrich our otherwise disparate activities. Like the many functions of the body that open the world to us through movement, touch, thought, and emotion, experience is nourished and enlivened by interactivity. Within ourselves, we are an entwinement of diverse, sometimes contradictory, threads; how much richer this tapestry becomes when we are interwoven with one another’s stories through friendship, collaborative projects, and meaningful ventures.

Additional to the articles presented in this volume, and in order to allow further creative expression of the relational themes in focus, this volume includes three dialogues (Pawu and Curkpatrick 2023, Mulholland and Bacaller 2023, Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023). These dialogues are an experiment in collaborative critical engagement through conversation, a format that preserves distinct voices and ways of speaking, while allowing new branchings of insight to emerge and be explored; through the iterations of conversation, our relationships invigorate and sustain a desire to understand one another.

Teamwork develops through hard work towards shared goals; listening and responding to one another; taking on critique; continually seeking to get to know, encourage, and honour one another; honing antiphonic communication skills and empathy – and we believe that this collection of articles represents the effort of all contributors to do just that. The diverse contexts explored are held together by a common desire to express a particularly Australian relational ethos, in the shared spaces of Indigenous and non-Indigenous thought and performance. Each contributor reflects a profound commitment to the understanding that knowledge develops relationally, and that truth, rather than reflecting a bind between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, is best understood by the shape of our relationships, as we engage with one another truthfully, that is, with integrity and trust – qualities with the potential to reshape academic enquiry across cultural differences for the better.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Divinity.

Notes

1 Pawu has explored ngurra-kurlu in numerous publications and presentations, including Corn and Patrick (2015), Pawu and Curkpatrick (2022, 2023), and Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu et al. (2008).

2 See ‘Milpirri Home Page, Lajamanu’, accessed 29 October 2022, https://tracksdance.com.au/landing/lajamanu-milpirri-home-page.