The most publicised event of NAIDOC Week this year has been the meeting of Indigenous leaders with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. It initiated a process that all hope will lead to the recognition of Indigenous Australians and their relationship to the land.
For the Indigenous leaders the process raises contentious issues, and particularly how the freedom of Indigenous people to be involved in the decisions that concern them is to be given institutional form. It is about agency, not simply recognition, something important for all Australians, not just Indigenous Australians.
NAIDOC week itself embodies Indigenous initiative and decision making. The initials stand for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’. After the institution of Australia Day, Indigenous Australians recognised that they needed a day of the own to celebrate distinctive aspects of their own culture and history that Australia Day obscured. Each year the Committee names the theme for the week.
The theme of NAIDOC week in 2015 has been distinctively Indigenous in flavour, but it offers much for all Australians to reflect on. ‘We all stand on sacred ground: Learn, respect, celebrate’. It evokes the attachment to land so central to Indigenous peoples, and the corresponding injury people suffer when they see their land violated or they are excluded from it. The theme calls on Indigenous Australians to value their inheritance and to nurture it. It also challenges other Australians to be curious about the heritage of their Indigenous brothers and sisters, and to respect it in the uses to which their lands are put to.
But more deeply, the NAIDOC theme reminds us that we all stand on sacred ground, and that we lose much if we lose touch with it. Our lives, our connections with place and with our forefathers are sacred and matter deeply. In a culture that is so much about instant gratification we are at risk of losing sight of the great gift that these deep connection are. The more we treasure and respect our earth and the places that are sacred to us, the better our society will be.
To be asked to consider the ground we stand on as sacred invites us to reflect on how we walk on it. We need to learn the ways in which we can cultivate it in an enduring way, the connections between the ways we exploit it for food or for minerals,