Light at the Edge of the World (18 page)

LIKE THE CHINESE IN TIBET, THE EUROPEANS who colonized Australia were unprepared for the sophistication of the place and its inhabitants, incapable of embracing its wonder. They had no understanding of the challenges of the desert and little sensitivity to the achievements of aboriginal peoples who for over fifty thousand years had thrived as nomads, wanderers on a pristine continent. In all that time, the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, had never touched them. The Aborigines accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when earth and sky separated, and the original Ancestor brought into being all the primordial Ancestors
who, through their thoughts, dreams and journeys, sang the world into existence.

The Ancestors walked as they sang, and when it was time to stop, they slept. In their dreams, they conceived the events of the following day, points of creation that fused one into another until every creature, every stream and stone, all time and space, became part of the whole, the divine manifestation of the one great seminal impulse. When they grew exhausted from their labours, they retired into the earth, sky, clouds, rivers, lakes, plants and animals of an island continent that resonates with their memory. The paths taken by the Ancestors have never been forgotten. They are the Songlines, precise itineraries followed even today as the people travel across the template of the physical world.

As the Aborigines track the Songlines and chant the stories of the first dawning, they become part of the Ancestors and enter the Dreamtime, which is neither a dream nor a measure of the passage of time. It is the very realm of the Ancestors, a parallel universe where the ordinary laws of time, space and motion do not apply, where past, future and present merge into one. It is a place that Europeans can only approximate in sleep, and thus it became known to the early English settlers as the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. But the term is misleading. A dream by Western
definition is a state of consciousness divorced from the real world. The Dreamtime, by contrast, is the real world, or at least one of two realities experienced in the daily lives of the Aborigines.

To walk the Songlines is to become part of the ongoing creation of the world, a place that both exists and is still being formed. Thus, the Aborigines are not merely attached to the Earth, they are essential to its existence. Without the land, they would die. But without the people, the ongoing process of creation would cease and the Earth would wither. Through movement and sacred rituals, the people maintain access to the Dreamtime and play a dynamic and ongoing role in the world of the Ancestors.

A moment begins with nothing. A man or a woman walks, and from emptiness emerge the songs, the musical embodiment of reality, the cosmic melodies that give the world its character. The songs create vibrations that take shape. Dancing brings definition to the forms, and objects of the phenomenological realm appear: trees, rocks, streams, all of them physical evidence of the Dreaming. Should the rituals stop, the voices fall silent, all would be lost. For everything on Earth is held together by the Songlines, everything is subordinate to the Dreaming, which is constant but ever changing. Every landmark is wedded to a memory of its origins and yet always being born. Every
animal and object resonates with the pulse of an ancient event, while still being dreamed into being. The world as it exists is perfect, though constantly in the process of being formed. The land is encoded with everything that ever has been, everything that ever will be, in every dimension of reality. To walk the land is to engage in a constant act of affirmation, an endless dance of creation.

The Europeans who first washed ashore on the beaches of Australia lacked the language or imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and spiritual achievements of the Aborigines. What they saw was a people who lived simply, whose technological achievements were modest, whose faces looked strange, whose habits were incomprehensible. The Aborigines lacked all the hall-marks of European civilization. They had no metal tools, knew nothing of writing, had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. Without agriculture or animal husbandry, they generated no surpluses, and thus had never embraced sedentary village life. Hierarchy and specialization were unknown. Their small semi-nomadic bands, living in temporary shelters made of sticks and grass, dependent on stone weapons, epitomized European notions of backwardness. An early French explorer described them as “the most miserable people of the world, human beings who approach closest to brute beasts.” As late as 1902 , a member
of the Australian parliament claimed, “There is no scientific evidence that the Aborigine is a human at all.”

By the 1930 s, a combination of disease, exploitation and murder had reduced the Aborigine population from well over a million at the time of European contact to a mere thirty thousand. In one century, a land bound together by Songlines, where the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the next, from the future to the past and from the past to the present, was transformed from Eden to Armageddon.

Knowing what we do today of the extraordinary reach of the Aboriginal mind, the subtlety of their thoughts and the evocative power of their rituals, it is chilling to think of this reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition and insight that very nearly ran dry during those terrible years of death and conflagration. As it is, Aboriginal languages, which may have numbered 250 at the time of contact, are disappearing at the rate of one or more per year. Only eighteen are today spoken by as many as five hundred individuals.

Despite this history, the Aborigines have survived and, in time, may still have a chance to inspire and redeem a nation. Reconciliation and the building of partnerships between Aborigines and non-Aborigines, including serious efforts to resolve land disputes and address historical
wrongs, today dominate the Australian political agenda. The languages and cultures of the Aborigines are taught in universities, extolled in popular song, featured in films. Aboriginal notions of design and decoration, transferred to canvas in the 1970s, have given rise to an art form celebrated throughout the world. In a symbolic moment, charged with emotion, an Aboriginal athlete inspired the world when selected to ignite the ceremonial flame at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

 

BUT WHAT OF the other victims of European expansion? The people of Tasmania were exterminated within seventy-five years of contact. The Reverend John West, a Christian missionary, rationalized their slaughter: “Their appearance is offensive, their proximity obstructive, their presence renders everything insecure. Thus the muskets of the soldier, and those of the bandits, are equally useful; they clear the land of a detested incubus.”

Within a generation of Captain James Cook's landing in Oahu, only thirty thousand Hawaiians survived out of an original population of some eight hundred thousand. In the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola, the Arawakan population of well over a million was eliminated within fifteen years.

To take full measure of what contact implied for the peoples of the Americas, recall that the word “decimate,”
horrific as it is intended to be, means to kill one in ten. Within three generations of contact, over 90 per cent of Native Americans, people of hundreds of nations, each with its own vision of reality, living from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, had succumbed to measles, smallpox and other European diseases that spread like an evil miasma. In central Mexico, the population, densest in the Americas, collapsed from twenty-five million to two million within sixty years of the conquest of the Aztec. As late as 1800, California had an indigenous population of three hundred thousand; by 1950, their descendants numbered only ten thousand. Nine million died in Peru. Twenty-three million in Mexico. Another five million in the Amazon alone.

Echoes of this holocaust are still heard in every corner of the globe. Indeed, in many lands the carnage continues. Throughout this century, indigenous societies in Brazil have disappeared at the rate of one per year. In Colombia, as recently as 1974 , a group of white miners appeared in court charged with the murder of several Cuiva Indians. In their defence, they professed not to believe that the Cuiva were humans.

In the upper reaches of the Orinoco, a gold rush brings disease to the Yanomami, killing a quarter of the population in a decade, leaving the survivors hungry and destitute. In Nigeria, pollutants from the oil industry so saturate the floodplain of the Niger River, homeland of the Ogoni, that
the once fertile soils can no longer be farmed. A vortex of violence and famine in the Sudan claims the lives of tens of thousands of Nuer. The Efe pygmies, forest dwellers of the Congo, dwindle toward extinction as sexually transmitted diseases ravage the population. In Siberia, Soviet authorities, frustrated by their inability to control the nomadic Ul'ta, oblige the children of the reindeer herders to attend Russian-language schools, thus severing the bonds of family and violating a way of life. Today, only a single herding group remains, ten Ul 'ta men who still follow ancestral migratory routes so familiar to their animals that the reindeer lead the way.

These are not isolated events but elements of a global phenomenon that will no doubt be long remembered as one of the tragedies of this age. As essential to humanity as the environments they steward, indigenous societies throughout the world are under siege. Well over half are moribund.

The notion that these societies are simply fated to fade away is quite wrong. In virtually every instance, these indigenous peoples are being torn from their past and propelled into an uncertain future because of specific political and economic decisions made by powerful outside entities. The plight of the Penan in Sarawak, as we have seen, is the result of government policies that promote and reward the
unsustainable extraction of timber from a forest that was once their homeland. The case of the Rendille in Kenya reads as a parable for what can happen when, in the name of development, good intentions come together with bad ideas. Tibet is a tale of brute conquest. That all of these conflicts result from deliberate choices made by men and women is both discouraging and empowering. If people are the agents of destruction, they can also be the agents of cultural survival. Happily, there are examples of redemption that can inspire us all.

 

IN THE ARCTIC, one marvels at the art of survival. Bears hunt seals, foxes follow the bears and feed on their excrement. Inuit women cut open animals to feed on clam siphons found in walrus stomachs, lichens and plants in the guts of caribou, mother's milk in the bellies of baby seals. They store meat taken in August in skins and bladders cached in rock cairns, where it ferments to the consistency and taste of blue cheese.

In winter darkness, when temperatures fall so low that breath cracks in the wind, Inuit men leave their families to follow the open leads in the new ice; there, they kneel motionless for hours at a time over the breathing holes of ringed seals. The slightest shift in weight will betray their presence, so they squat in perfect stillness, all the while
knowing full well that as they hunt, they are being hunted. Polar bear tracks run away from every breathing hole. If a seal does not appear, the hunter may roll over, mimicking a seal to try to attract a bear so that predator may become prey.

The northern landscape is empty and desolate. On the horizon, islands, ice and sky meld one into the other, and the black sea is a distant mirage. But the Inuit seldom lose their way. In driving snowstorms, they watch for patterns in the ice, small ridges of hard snow that run parallel to the prevailing winds and reveal where they are. They study a map of the land reflected on the underside of low clouds: open water is black; the sea ice, white; ground covered in snow and traces of open tundra are darker than the sea but lighter than snowless land.

When the Inuit first encountered Europeans, they mistook their wooden ships with billowing sails for gods. The white men viewed the natives as savages. Both were wrong, though the Inuit did more to dignify the human race. The entire history of European exploration was coloured by a single theme: those who ignored the example of the Inuit perished, whereas those who imitated their ways not only survived but achieved great feats of endurance and discovery. In the end, it was the English who suffered most for their arrogance, dying by the score at the entrance to the Northwest Passage.

When the last of John Franklin's men died at Starvation Cove on the Adelaide Peninsula, their sledge alone weighed 650 pounds (295 kg). On it was an 800-pound (360-kg) boat loaded with silver dinner plates, cigar cases, a copy of
The Vicar of Wakefield
—in short, necessities for a gentleman traveller of the Victorian age. In the leather traces of the sledge were the frozen corpses of young British sailors. Scorning the use of dogs, the English had planned to haul this cumbersome load hundreds of miles overland in the hope of reaching some remote trading post in the vast boreal forests of Canada. Like so many of their kind, as one explorer remarked, they died because they brought their environment with them and were unwilling to adapt to another.

In dismissing the Inuit as savages, the British failed to grasp the measure of intelligence necessary to thrive in the Arctic with a technology limited to what could be made with ivory and bone, antler and animal skins, soapstone and slate and precious bits of driftwood. The Inuit did not merely endure the cold, they took advantage of it. Three Arctic char placed end to end, wrapped and frozen in hide, the bottom greased with the stomach contents of a caribou and coated with a thin film of ice, became the runner of a sled. A knife could be made from human excrement. There is a well-known account of an old man who refused to move into a settlement. Fearful for his life, and hoping
to force him off the ice, his family took away all of his tools and weapons. So, in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated and shaped the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife, he killed a dog. Using its ribcage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.