Is religion and culture in our DNA?

The symbiotic relationship between Indigenous Australians and their land is often discussed in this country as being axiomatic. So much so that it has almost become something of a platitude glibly stated, often forgotten, acknowledged with tokenism and not really deeply understood. But if this is the case, and has become a platitude, it does not necessarily make it either untrue or irrelevant and I’ll explore this a little later.

I am not a practising Christian, though I’m gen­erally not opposed to Christianity or any religious or spiritual belief. I was raised a Catholic while at the same time I was taught about my Aboriginal heritage and spirituality and belief systems.

My life circumstances and exposure have directed me to follow my Aboriginal heritage and over decades I’ve been charged with the responsibility of holding ceremonial information and knowledge on behalf of Kungarakan people.

I’ve enjoyed the privileges of working and living across the width and breadth of Australia, India and Vietnam.All of these life experiences have exposed me to a plethora of different religions, belief sys­tems and practices.

There are just over half a million Indigenous Australians comprising both Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. We represent about three percent of the population and our numbers are only about sixty per cent of what they were estimated to be prior to colonisation in 1788.

We comprise over a hundred distinct language groups and sixty per cent of our people live in urban or regional areas. We now only manage roughly twenty per cent of the Australian land mass, and archaeological evidence identifies that we’ve lived in Australia for upwards 40, 50, 60 – it varies – thousand years.We are the longest surviv­ing continuous culture in the world.

In traditional Aboriginal society and for many Indigenous peoples the world over, spirituality is a part of every aspect of life. The Dreaming is commonly used to describe Aboriginal spirituality within the English language.

While the activities of the Dreaming occurred at the beginning of the world, in a sense they are present now. It is not possible to talk about Dreaming without talking about land or country. Land, sea and sky are the core to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spirituality and relationships. The whole of the landscape is conceived as having been formed through the activities of ancestral spirits.They laid down the roles to be undertaken by men and women in matters such as sacred rights, economic affairs, marriage, child-bearing and burials.

we are the longest surviving

continuous culture

in the world

The landscape shaped by the ancestral spirits is therefore the source of life and of law and that’s both the law and the lore. Traditional Aboriginal spirituality does not distinguish between the physi­cal and the spiritual realms.The country is dotted with significant sites associates with stories where the spirit-being first emerged, where they per­formed their ceremonies, or where they died and re-entered the earth. The entire Australian conti­nent is criss-crossed with the tracks of ancestral spirits and in one sense all the land is a sacred site.

Christianity has influenced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spirituality in a variety of ways since the first missionary presence in Australia, the Wesleyan Missionary Society who arrived in 1821.

Some Aboriginal people rejected Christianity and maintained their own traditional practice and belief and many others took the new and combined it with their traditional knowledge and spiritual practice thereby synchronising beliefs.

From this basis the missionary practices spread throughout the whole continent so that by the middle of the 19^th Century there were church settlements throughout Australia. Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and Pentecostal Churches all established missions in Australia and have attempted to convert Indigenous communities and peoples to their religious beliefs.

Missions,in cooperations with government,con­trolled the language Aboriginal people spoke, their housing, their labour, their wages, their education, their movement to and from their communities, their relationships, their expressions of sexuality, their religious practices, their marriages and their children.

spirituality is threatened

if land ownership

is not secure

A number of strategies were prevalent in the missionary era during the 19^th Century to convert Aboriginal people to Christianity and these included the translation of the Bible into Aboriginal languages and restrictions on the speak­ing of Indigenous languages.

The mission schools became the centre of Christian indoctrination and was the focus around which much missionary work revolved. However on many missions the missionaries brought a sense of clarity, a sense of certainty, a sense of order, direction, security and discipline as well as the practice of expectation and reward.The missionar­ies were, and some are still, regarded warmly and with loyalty by Aboriginal people. I should also include Torres Strait Islanders there.

Yet nearly all missions established in the 19^th century or the first half of the 20^th Century actively participated in the separation of children from their families. Some missions were used as a repository for children said to be neglected. But while children often were in need, they were more frequently removed simply because they were Aboriginal children of mixed descent.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia today exhibit a diversity of religions and spiritual beliefs.What is most clear is that it is misleading to try and separate Indigenous religious experience from other aspects of life, culture and history. In traditional Indigenous religion the sacred and the profane are not separate. Indigenous economic, physical, social and emotional well­being are interconnected with spiritual well-being. Spirituality and culture are not separate entities and an assault on one is likely to impact upon the other. Therefore freedom of religion and spirituality is threatened if land ownership is not secure, if Indigenous culture and language are not preserved, and if good health and well-being are not achieved.

Now how this might best be achieved is at the heart of reconciliation in Australia today, both symbolic and practical.

Let me now turn to another of the perspectives I mentioned at the outset – that what science tells us about the age of our planet and human evolu­tion is fundamentally true. Now, while I believe it is unlikely that there are any creationists amongst us here today, I’m conscious that this speech may later be read by those who are or might be con­templating creationism.With this in mind I want to observe that such a view is not, in my own opinion, antithetical to religion. Indeed I’d argue that such a view is irrelevant as to whether God exists or of the rightness or wrongness of various religious traditions and beliefs.

Noted palaeontologist Teihard de Chardin was a Catholic priest who, in simple terms, held that faith and human physical evolution are not or were not incompatible. Indeed that faith and science could be reconciled.

As many of you may recall at the parliament of the world’s religions held in Melbourne late last year, some delegates defended the sciences by stating that since, in their view, God is eternal, omnipotent and benign, any passage of time even billions of years, is irrelevant. That is, time is a meaningless concept to an eternal deity who uses natural powers of planetary formation and subse­quent human evolution to effect agency in human lives and to achieve their ultimate purpose.

If, then, we are able to accept that the sciences are generally true, what does this actually tell us about what it means to be human? In answering this first question I draw on a recently published paper by Nicholas Wade, ‘The Faith Instinct: How Religion Survived and Why it Endures’. Now, this work and particularly in the early chapters is really an extensive literature review of the current evi­dence about humans, evolution and ethics.

Wade makes no claim about whether religion is true or false or whether some religions are good or bad or whether God does or does not exist. I par­ticularly want to emphasise that point. I don’t have time, of course, to discuss this in detail but there are two issues in the book that are particularly interest­ing and relevant to me in terms of our discussions here today on why Indigenous belief systems and relationships to Mother Earth are so important.

First, that humans did not evolve socially in the same way as the ape society functions – that is, that a group is led by an alpha male. On the other hand, over millions of years, humans evolved in complex, increasingly sophisticated, hunter-gatherer social groups that functioned, and survived, collectively.

In the long process of natural selection, the better the group functioned as a group the more likely it was to survive.This group functioning was ensured by a shared sense of loyalty and identity. The better the individual members could protect and contribute to the collective, the more likely the group would survive and adapt.

Many bonding behaviours evolved as a result. But amongst the most important were the shared cultural beliefs, rituals, language and moral practices that are often entwined and inseparable. Indeed some cultures, beliefs and rituals came from enor­mous costs in terms of time,effort,knowledge,even self-harm to which its members were expected to contribute.

So this begs the question: why bother? The answer seems clear.The beliefs and rituals are bind­ing. They provided a powerful group coherence that gives its members both an unbreakable sense of belonging but also a willingness to sacrifice everything to group survival.

morals and religious belief have,

over time, become genetically

encoded

Many scientists and anthropologists now believe that morals (and this can also be understood as incorporating religions) became integral to natural selection. In short, the more efficient and effec­tively the group or tribe could be held together the better its survival chances. Morals, values, became necessary in this process and indeed the more moral or religious the tribe, the greater their collective survival advantage.

•     Our fundamental grouping and binding in close social relationships.

•      Our necessary attachment to the in-group with which we relate and which gives meaning to our lives.

•      Our correlating rejection of out groups to which we do not belong and that threaten our survival.

•      Our inherent, if not genetically determined, need for culture, faith and morals.

•      Our inevitable connection to the environment in which we have evolved.

Although Wade does not discuss this, I ponder about where this science may ultimately take us. For example while natural science theory may offer many explanations about group survival and the moral impulse, are there any important gaps that science is still to fill? Now I’ll give you a quick example of what sits behind this question.

Indigenous peoples such as the Yaghans of Tierra Del Fuego have distinct physiological features but they’ve only lived, and therefore adapted, to that remarkably cold climate in the southern tip of the Americas for approximately 10,000 years or so. That’s just not enough time for natural selection to shape a variant human physio-genome. If that’s the case, does a form of neolanarckism occur, meaning, can physical change within a single human life actually establish inheritable characteristics?

If this proves to be true evolutionary theory may have significant consequences – moral, political and legal consequences for the indigenous peoples of the world. But even if we only consider the works of scientists interested in cultural and evolutionary anthropology and psychology, there are particularly important issues for indigenous peoples.

Firstly, even if we leave aside the critical human rights issues, the Indigenous peoples of the world have a particular collective value as holders of liv­ing heritage about the planet, humanity’s relation­ship to the environment, and the actual meaning of what it really is to be human in relation to the natural world.This is known as “intangible cultural heritage.”

There is a legally binding international treaty that protects this form of special knowledge and heritage as well as the non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples.

Secondly, and this moves to the realm of my personal hypothesis, understanding human evolu­tionary origins may offer critical explanations as to why and how Indigenous peoples feel the way we do, and how we relate to the land even if there has been a long period of dispossession or even across generations or through mixed marriages or mixed parenting.

If humans are shaped by long, long histories of collective social adaption to an environment, and this is a genetically imbedded process, then it seems logical to me that Indigenous peoples may well also have genetically imbedded associations with land and to all the cultural, moral and religious connec­tions to that land.

As we now know, humans are not born as blank slates. We do have inherent knowledge, intuitions and values and this applies to all humans. Given this is equally the case with Indigenous Australians, our religions, our culture, our association with land and our social networkings may be much more than the issue of politics, of control of assets or our inherent human rights.

Indigenous peoples may well

have genetically embedded

associations with land

These may be connections so profound and com­plex that there is needed – as so many Indigenous activists have claimed without evidence and in the face of contempt from Indigenous rights-objec­tors – a genuine connection of spirit, morals and symbiosis between being an Indigenous person and our land.

We have an evolving scientific evidence base to illustrate this is not fictional, it’s real. Not only does this have significance for Indigenous peoples because it is significant to us, it is therefore also significant for all humans.

As argued by UNESCO over many decades, humanity cannot be separated from the total ecol­ogy. Human culture and human development is reliant upon sustainable heritage and sustainable growth and population maintenance. Not only have cultures evolved and formed around environ­ments so, it would seem, have religions.This means that if we destroy an environment, we destroy a culture and if we destroy a culture we are com­mitting a form of genocide. This is a moral and a human rights issue.For example,as the World Bank has recently reported, Kiribati will disappear soon because of climate change. Indigenous peoples in south-east Asia have lost their traditional lands due to man-made flooding particularly from dam building, and traditional lifestyles are disappearing as the Amazon rainforests are cut down.

In this sense as environments are lost, cultures are destroyed, the quality and the meaning of human lives are devalued. It is likely that we will see this happen again and again across the world but on an even grander scale as anthropogenic climate change escalates.

a hybrid… undeniably consistent with core Christian beliefs

These are critical moral issues of our age and they are also issues that can be illuminated and amplified by understanding what we are discussing today: land, faith and future directions for humanity.

So, what of Indigenous Australians’ human rights and the contemporary church? As I’ve illustrated, Australia settlement history illustrates a fascinating history of engagement between Indigenous faith and Christian faith and I’ve already alluded to it as being a story of the good, the bad and the ugly. Many missionaries gave their lives to work in the community in what was often described as remote and alien locations, sometime a surprising tale of endurance, commitment and compassion.

On the other hand many Indigenous Australians accepted the message from the Christian mission­aries and converted to the new faith. But as we so often see around the world, when new Christian communities are established, there are founded new unique expressions of Christianity. Often it’s a hybrid,and a reconstructed belief that is undeniably Christian and consistent with the core Christian beliefs and principles yet may do so through the maintenance or, if you prefer, transmogrification of other beliefs of ancestral spirits, forces or spirits of creation of meaning of connection with land.

So the final observation:what can the experience of Indigenous Australians, their flexibility, adaption and special relationship to land and the experience of the Christian pioneers, their determination, idealism and pragmatism, both say? What can they both say together to us today? This is a rhetorical question. I know few if any, of either missionary or convert background, who intend literally to say something to future generations of Australians.

But there is a legacy, a history, a new heritage, if you like, forged from these relationships, and we should always cherish the past, the labours of those who went before us, as well as their sacrifice for right or wrong causes, and what they learned through trial and tribulation.

In many ways if we don’t respect and learn from the past or even learn from what exists today, their toil will have been in vain and we’ll be destined to repeat the same mistakes they may have made.

I believe that what they speak of through a leg­acy we live with today, is this (not only can people learn from the past, they must) the importance of how humans relate to each other and find a place, a kind of social, cultural and ethical equilibrium, is critical to peace and reconciliation.

Human rights are vital.They are a contemporary way of conciliating between the conflicting beliefs, desires and expectations of peoples and groups functioning in society and they offer practical and ethical solutions to conflict.They are not a source of conflict.

Finally, land is everything.Whether you call this an inspired place, real estate or a fragile ecosystem, our relationship to the total environment is who and what we are. It is our future. It has, and will, shape us. It is culture. It is faith, and it defines our humanity.

Dr Tom Calma is currently the National Coordinator of the Tackling Indigenous Smoking project, a consultancy to the Department of Health and Ageing. His task is to lead and mentor the project’s workforce and provide strategic guidance and policy advice on the initiative.