MK rang me last week. She is my oldest Arrernte friend from Alice Springs and the inspiration of the educational program I came to Alice in 1988 to work for.
The Ntyarlke Unit at the Catholic High School was designed to provide secondary education for Aboriginal kids from Alice Springs Town camps who had little effective primary education and were already in trouble with the law or were heading in that direction. What MK taught me was that my role was to 'look after' these kids and assist in a process of guiding them to become strong Arrernte young men and women, effective students within a western education system and good Catholics, as she is.
I recently read again MK's book Iwenhe Tyerrtye — What it Means to be an Aboriginal Person where she talks in both Arrernte and English to her mixed audience about the process of growing up in two worlds. A most important concept that she says come from the Altyerre ('Dreaming') is found in the Arrernte word arntanrte-aremele, which means looking after, holding, nurturing or caring for.
She says: 'To go hunting for animals, to care for our children, for husbands to care for their wives, and wives care for their husbands. To share everything and to look after the ones who are sick. These are just some of the things we were created for.'
MK rang me after the 4 Corners program on the treatment of children at Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre. She wanted to talk about how the government people in that place were not 'looking after' the kids who were put there.
In western lingo we talk about a 'duty of care', but for MK and Arrernte people it is more fundamental than that. Altyerre teaches that we must care for everybody, even the people who do wrong. This is not about western, whitefella law, it is about the fundaments of how it is, from creation.
Fr Brian McCoy SJ, the Provincial of the Jesuits in Australia, has written a wonderful book titled Holding Men. He recounts his experiences as a young priest working at Balgo Hills Mission in Western Australia and ruefully admits that the effect of the mission was to sever the essential connection between the generations within Aboriginal society by taking the children and placing them in dormitories.
He says: 'One of the practices that the mission heavily influenced was kanyirninpa [holding, looking after]. As kartiyas [Europeans] took responsibility