Keynote address #LowitjaConf2019

Cultural renaissance and the rebirth of our internal nationhood can only be achieved by economic independence – they are aligned and intrinsically connected and interwoven.

Ngayu nilawarl Peter Yu, Yawuru ngany wamba ngangan Rubibigab.

Gala mabu jalinyji gurranyan ngayu burungan junggarrayirr nyambagun.

Ngayuni ngabindan nyambagun.

My name is Peter Yu, I am a Yawuru man from Broome.

Thank you for welcoming me to your country here.

It is an honour to be here.

Can I begin by acknowledging the Larrakia people on whose country we meet today. And to thank Larrakia elder Mr Richie Fejo Junior for his very generous and warm welcome to country.

I’d also like to of course acknowledge Lowitja O’Donoghue, someone I have come to know in a number of capacities over many years and a great figure of Australian public life.

It would be an understatement to say she has been a trailblazer for Australian Aboriginal people because she has been that and many other things for the country and for as long as I can remember, and her life story is testimony to the strength of her will, and the kind of character she is.

Her contribution to progressing the interests and concerns of our people, over a long and distinguished career, has been of enormous value to us and the Nation.

Can I also pay a special tribute to June Oscar AO, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Social Justice Commissioner who has joined us this morning. June and I go back a long way. We have cultural and kin relationship and an enduring friendship grounded in our shared work.

I also would like to acknowledge Pat Anderson AO, current Chair of the Lowitja Institute, and a lifelong leader in human rights and social justice for our people.

I want to start by addressing an issue that we see raising its ugly head on a more frequent basis than we would all like.

The issue is of course racism and its detrimental and insidious effect on us, our health and our country.

In considering the dismal state of Aboriginal health in this country, and in our failure to address it convincingly, we must be mindful always of the shadowy presence of racism. At the same time we must not succumb or be lured to a false sense of security and comfortability in the incremental nature of relative change.

I would define racism up front in today’s context as all pervasive in its systematic exclusion and structural discrimination.

It is an agile phenomenon, characterised by how it turns, shifts shape and emerges out of unexpected shadows.

It has a capacity to coalesce and to find solidarity in poisonous people, to manifest where fear and disenfranchisement co-exist.

And we see it again on the rise in Australia, in new ways, and in response to different perceptions of threat.

It cannot be quelled by a singular policy statement, or an institutional response or even by an election result.

It has no universal prophalytic, no vaccination or immunisation or moment of extinction. It is like the influenza of social ills, constantly mutating and finding new hosts.

The racism I’m talking about is not the booing that Adam Goodes copped, although that is emblematic of the story. But it is deeply embedded in the Australian nation state which violently imposed a western world on 60,000 years of indigenous societies. The beneficiaries of that violence have never come close to compensating Indigenous people for that history.

Neither in the nation’s response to Mabo, nor in other national milestones, can we yet discern the dismantling of the systems of structural violence, nor the legacy of dispossession and genocide.

That structural violence is demonstrated by our continuing and appalling health profile; mass imprisonment, youth suicides, and economic and social deprivation.

Medical professionals and researchers do a great job at the front line with Aboriginal people – But as Pat Anderson once observed, in referring to why western medicine can only go so far.

“As Aboriginal people we need to have a sense of agency in our lives, that we are not stray leaves blowing about in the wind. In a word, we need empowerment”.

Discrimination is a potent enemy of empowerment.

The power of agency, of peoples’ capacity to act and to make change, cannot be ignored in any genuine conversation about Indigenous wellbeing.

In a western conceptualisation of health, once an illness has been diagnosed, a whole schema of medical interventions can be enacted to encourage a cure, be they hospitals, medicines, surgery and so on.

Aboriginal people do receive uneven access to these services, for a whole range of reasons, but to my mind, that observation zooms in on the tip, and ignores the iceberg.

The iceberg, the big submerged issue here, is that a western conceptualisation of health denies, or ignores, or even denigrates, the Indigenous one and in so doing, is incapable, despite the very best of intentions, of making much headway in terms of the wellbeing of First Nations people.

For indigenous people, a healthy life is fundamentally connected to our universal demands for self-determination, for freedom from discrimination and for autonomous economic foundations.

We know that our culture, that our languages and systems and practices are protective of our physical and mental health.  Not as an add-on, or after thought.

Not as a policy of ‘cultural safety’ pop-riveted onto existing programs.

Developing culturally relevant tools for the measurement of wellbeing is crucial because it enables us to tell a story of our progress in a way, and in a language, that we own. And according to our own values.

These tools are important because they can articulate differences between Aboriginal people and everyone else, but they can also capture differences amongst Aboriginal groups as to what matters most.

This important work has to be conceived by us, driven by us and developed by us.  The journey undertaken by my people in Broome, the Yawuru people, to develop just such a tool, and then apply it, is ongoing.

The development of a Yawuru-centric wellbeing measurement tool occurred in partnership, and after much negotiation and consideration, with a PhD student from the ANU, Mandy Yap. Mandy brought the technical knowhow, and worked closely with Yawuru people to develop a suite of indicators of the prerequisites of a ‘good healthy life’, what we call and also many cultural groups in the West Kimberley call, mabu liyan.

In the quest for Mabu Liyan, Yawuru stress the importance of family and community relationships and people’s connection to country, to natural resources and to traditional culture along with other critical elements of life such as financial security, decent housing and safety.

Prior to Western colonisation, mabu liyan was at the centre of our cultural and social existence, informing our obligations to family, community and country. The impact of colonisation on our people has been traumatic and we are now seeking to heal and work toward building “mabu ngarrungu”, meaning strong community and “Mabu buru”, meaning strong country.

We adhere to a widely held Indigenous view that the power of culture and country in healing Aboriginal people should not be underestimated.

Since the 2010 native title agreement with the State Government, Yawuru have developed a range of programs aimed at achieving Mabu Liyan including language revitalisation and cultural strengthening; best practice land and sea management; celebrating Yawuru cultural heritage; growing individual and family capacity; innovative home ownership approaches; and developing pathways for Yawuru and other Aboriginal people to participate in the local economy.

Next week we will launch Liyan‐ngan Nyirrwa – a state of the art wellbeing centre that will house many of these programs. At its core is the philosophy of integration: integrating NBY’s activities of language revitalization, our cultural immersion services, our Nurlu program which is our cultural practice renewal, the Mangara Program around cultural heritage, storytelling and archives, and our senior and youth services along with individual and family reconstruction and resilience building, and wider socio-economic development of our families.

The Liyan‐ngan Nyirrwa is a series of buildings – and spaces for the conduct of cultural activities – but it is also a monument to our commitment to the principles of Liyan Ngan.

These principles are the foundations that we can build a secure future on, a sense of common identity and inclusiveness. Of connection with each other, with country, and with the wider community with who we share the town of Broome.

But none of this is possible without us taking and owning our own risks, and we ask ourselves, how do we do this?

The reality of this has to be through financial independence. There can be no dramatic change and shift to our circumstances while we continue to expect and rely on public outlays and broken promises, no matter how well intentioned, good willed and yearning we all are for reconciliation.

Cultural renaissance and the rebirth of our internal nationhood can only be achieved by economic independence – they are aligned and intrinsically connected and interwoven.

I want to turn now to the importance of language diversity and why language is so important to Indigenous identity and to our wellbeing.

2019 is the international year of Indigenous languages.

Like many of my generation, I grew up in the mission era of assimilation. Language, in fact any form of cultural expression or identity, was severely discouraged, if not directly punished.

Like most kids of my generation, I was discouraged from learning my own language.

Assimilation was the policy imperative of the day, underpinned by arrogant notions of racial superiority, and the misplaced belief that the dominant culture could re-structure the entire mindset of Indigenous Australians. The means by which this was to be achieved was via shame, physical and mental intimidation and punishment.

I remember the distinct impression I had on leaving Broome and arriving in Perth to attend the mission and boarding school.

It was a bit of a rude awakening, because you’re coming from a very secure cultural and social environment as a kid growing up in Broome, but with a kind of peripheral awareness of political matters that our parents might have been involved in.

But then, coming to the big smoke to attend boarding school, you realise that you’re part of this official program that this policy is driving, that they are trying to re-structure your entire mindset:

“We can’t do anything about your skin but we’ll try to do something about your head”.

For all people, language is the expression of a worldview, and of a value system; it contains the signifiers of cultural difference.  It plays a crucial role for our people in expressing our social identity, in capturing family relationships, in speaking to connections to places and to country.

It is the vehicle by which cultural difference is communicated from parent to child – it is through language that children acquire the ways and world views of their culture.

This is why the speaking of mother tongues was not permitted in missions, and schools, during assimilation era in Australia. Why children who were taken from families were punished severely for speaking in language – it represented the most powerful expression of cultural identity, and a challenge to the colonial world view.

It can be difficult for English speakers, or single language speakers, to comprehend why other languages are so important – particularly where you are describing a system of knowledge that is orally based. Losing these languages equates to the destruction of the world’s libraries.

It is to human thought and creativity what destroying the Amazon is to biodiversity.

Language is not only a way of describing the world; it is in fact a way of knowing and comprehending the world, and of understanding oneself, relating to others and reading the natural world.

Cook benefited enormously from just such a set of knowledge systems on his first voyage of Pacific exploration, when he made use of the services of a Polynesian navigator, Tupaia, who drew a chart of the islands within a 3,200 km radius (to the north and west) of his home island of Ra’iatea.

Polynesians are considered “the supreme navigators of history”; their wayfinding techniques and knowledge were passed by oral tradition from master to apprentice, often in the form of song.

Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather; all of this information about a vast area of ocean, and how to read its changing patterns, was committed to memory.

I had a personal experience as a young fella working as a field officer for the West Australian Museum, with Bardi/Jawi people who live to the north of Broome, and are similarly extraordinary mariners. They navigate the very treacherous tides and conditions around the Dampier Archipelago on narrow rafts made from mangrove trees, timing their movements to precisely take advantage of the huge tidal movements to travel hundreds of kilometres’, to hunt, look after country, visit relatives and conduct ceremony.

For us in this country, language is the connection between people, the Bugarragarra (dreaming), well-being and country.

When I was involved in setting up the Kimberley language resource centre in the 1980s, my language, the Yawuru language, was considered severely endangered – and there were less than 10 fluent speakers.

When I became CEO of the Yawuru corporate group in 2009 – and in response to calls from the community – I invested in the Yawuru language and we formed the Mabu Yawuru Nan-ga centre.

In 2017, we began the Walalngga Yawuru Ngang-ga language program: this is a 2 year study program for Yawuru adults, and we aim to have 20 Yawuru language speakers by 2021. It increases the use of Yawuru language amongst family and friends, and has kick started the process of intergenerational language learning.

We focus on day-to-day terms – language you would use in your home to speak to your children, or on country – phrases relating to places and to cultural activities – tides, seasons, fish movements. The kinds of things that Yawuru people talk about.

We are aiming to create a community of adult Yawuru speakers, and we have a group of people men and women, who can speak to each other in Yawuru for an hour. This has not happened in my lifetime…

I want to read to you a testimony from my wuberjanu, my niece, Natalie Dean, a Yawuru woman who was one of the first graduates of our Walalngga Yawuru Ngang-ga language program in 2018. She said:

“I have made the best decision of my life in joining this language course. It has changed my life completely, culturally, emotionally and spiritually. I now know my connection to country through language, I have found my identity and I have re-connected to my great grandfather through language. My children learnt Yawuru language before me at their school and it didn’t seem right. So now I am teaching my children and grandchildren to speak Yawuru language. I am so proud to be able to keep my language alive.”

In 2019 the Yawuru language is taught throughout the Primary Schools in Broome, and it is reappearing appearing around the town – on buildings, organisations, helicopters, street names, conservation and housing estates.  The revitalisation of Yawuru language is an ongoing process, and one that I remain personally very committed to.

I want to conclude my address to you today by considering human connectivity in the 21st century and the wisdom that Indigenous people have in valuing connection to one another and to place.

Human beings are hardwired to be connected. Social isolation is one of our nation’s greatest, and growing social ills.

Indigenous people value social connection above all else. Being excluded from family was considered the greatest possible punishment in traditional times, and was reserved only for the gravest contraventions of traditional law. No physical punishment was deemed as severe as social exclusion – people will be familiar with the idea and concept of “being sung”.

For Indigenous people, both prior to and then after colonisation, our very survival as individuals and as distinct cultures has depended on our commitment to remaining connected to each other.

Being narrowly self-interested runs contrary to how we are hardwired. Connectivity is part of our identity, of how we think about ourselves as forming part of a constellation of responsibilities to a wider network of kin, and to country.

It seems to me that this is something that Indigenous people globally are very good at.

Staying connected to each other, staying connected to value systems that are under enormous pressure to change, and to country. That is our holy trinity if you like.

For us, this way of connecting to kin and to country has held out despite colonisation and the incredible pressure we have been under for generations to change, to individualise, to assimilate. We have resisted.

Yet we too belong to the twenty-first century, and like people from all cultures across the globe, we are being trampled with change, with flux.

We are running just to stay still, just to keep up.

We are entering the age of the fourth industrial revolution.

Technology, economics, politics, businesses and the very social fabric that connects us are all being transformed, and at a breathtaking rate.

Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, smart grids, robotics, the internet of things – where previously inanimate objects in our lives now communicate with each other, according to our direction, and suggested in our interest.

As individuals, as families, and as entire societies, are now more monitored more than ever in the history of the world. We are tracked, photographed, videoed, our purchasing choices documented, our online profiles mapped.

And we are busy. Our phones and computers and other devices keep us on time, alert us to impending meetings and appointments, and notify us of deadlines.  We carry our letter box, our camera, our diary and our desktop in our pockets.

This is the connection of today as we know it.

And yet, research tells us that more and more people are living alone, and that the prevalence of mental illness amongst our populations is on the rise.

So clearly not all human connectivity is the same – quantity does not equate to quality.

It is true that these technologies have brought some benefits to us, helping families stay connected across vast distances, and allowing users to keep up to date with cultural protocols and practices.

But there have been negative consequences also, and online bullying is repeatedly implicated in the appalling rate of youth suicide in the Kimberley.

It’s a relatively recent technology and perhaps we are all still learning how to manage it, and especially to manage its more negative consequence.

I identify a couple of dangers with social media.

The first is that people, for whatever reason, seem to be more trusting and open in their expression, than they might otherwise be.  Perhaps this is an attempt at genuine communication, but in this kind of domain, where relationships are multiple yet brittle, this seems to me to be risky behaviour.

The second danger that I see, and I see this across a whole lot of social life in the modern world, is that people tend to interact with others who hold the same points of view – so people are not getting exposed to the same diversity of viewpoints that they once would have had to.

I do think there is something fundamentally healthy for human beings about having to interact, reasonably regularly, with people different to themselves.  The absence of these kinds of interactions can lead to a lazy close-mindedness.

This is so for us as individuals, and it also applies to us as a nation.

To remain connected, we need to be able to sit comfortably with curiosity, to stay open to difference.

The danger with ‘online communities’ is that they represent increasingly homogenous circles which allow people to ignore their immediate, possibly diverse community, and connect only with ‘people like them’. This cannot end well.

In spite of our negative media profiling, non-Aboriginal people want access to us, and they want access to our culture.

Because we are a very small minority in Australia, being accessible to us is a very real problem.

When mainstream Australia does seek to engage with Indigenous Australia, the relationships that can occur are very positive and very encouraging. They can be an opportunity for growth.

Human beings are meant to learn, and in that learning, there might be opportunities for healing.

What might non-Aboriginal people learn in such an exchange?

They learn that difference is not a curse.

Difference is not a threat.

Difference is not a risk.

They learn that difference is a portal, it’s an opportunity to learn about yourself – you widen your understanding of the world and your place in it.

The best value learning requires risk – and a willingness to expose yourself to something that you are unfamiliar with – which requires courage, and trust and a kind of mental agility – that I’ll be alright, no matter if what I discover makes me uncomfortable.

It’s in this context that I want to reflect on the words – Thinking Speaking Being – and what might be authentic enactments of each of these for Indigenous people – and how that knowledge might be translated for the benefit of people more generally.

Recent trends show that people increasingly value material goods over relationships —but neuroscience and evolution say this goes against our nature as human beings. The importance of being authentically socially connected is an ancient wisdom that Indigenous people have fought to uphold, and to stay true to.

But it also seems to be a concept with a long tradition in Western thinking:

Aristotle asserted in his treatise on social life entitled ‘Politics’:

“Man is by nature a social animal … Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

For First Nations people the globe over, the struggle has been to hang on four things –our identity as a people; the territorial lands and waters of our people; our language; and our culture.

Any program or policy – or research project – that seeks to improve our lot, that seeks to address our impoverishment, but that denies the centrality of these values, will be doomed to failure.

My final word then is an encouragement towards partnership which enables indigenous people to be the architects of our own futures, and to enact our collective responsibilities to people and to places, and to future generations.

The extent to which these partnerships are genuine will determine the trajectory of First Nations people over the 21st century. I make this call of course to health services, and to research centres, and to all who work in the name of bettering the health and wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

The calls made in the Uluru statement – Truth, Treaty, Voice – are translatable at scales below that of the nation.

While we wait for the national agenda to progress, as I am sure it will, it is worth reflecting on your institution, your research project, your professional practice, and the extent to which the principles embodied in the Uluru statement are upheld in the work going on around you.

I will leave you with that Gordian knot to untie, and commend this conference to you.