The 2024 Turruk for community program was launched in Armagh, Melbourne on Saturday 23 March, with a ‘Forgiveness Circle’ led by seven Indigenous speakers. It was held in collaboration with Mana O Kahiko (MOK), followers of ‘traditional knowledge and wisdom within the context of Hawaiian Cultural Traditions and Practices’. After a traditional smoking and gift giving ceremony, participants were invited inside for a conversation about the role that contemporary global Indigenous perspectives can play in healing post-Referendum Australia. This reflection on the event is by Mike Brown:
Offering a way ahead
After the accusations, distortions and fear-fuelled exchanges of the Referendum campaigns, what we heard from seven First Nations people at a ‘Forgiveness Circle’ on 23 March felt like a door opening, offering a way ahead.
It was an Indigenous visitor from the Island of Molokai in Hawaii who set the tone right at the beginning. Kawika Foster, trained for eight years in the wisdom of 51 generations, said: ‘Forgiveness means to set to right our relationships with one another as human beings and with everything in the Universe. Every time we encounter anything that disrupts those relationships, that’s what need to be set to right.’
Though not many were talking about the Referendum debate, it feels like we’ve just been through ‘a national disruption’, as Warren Mason, Yuwaalaraay man from Tasmania, put it. ‘The systems of change have let us down… This is such a hard country. People who migrate to this country don’t know who we are. Can we forgive? Yes, but we need recognition of who we are – like here today, we have been given the space. Thanks very much for this opportunity… I feel privileged to speak.’
In fact, nearly every speaker thanked the audience ‘for letting us share with all of you deadly mob’, as one said. It means being heard – having a ‘voice’.
Uncle John Baxter is a cultural ambassador with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence, which ‘ran a very thorough YES campaign.’ Why didn’t it work? He didn’t offer answers, except to say that ‘going forward, we have to take on wholeheartedly to forgive. If we carry on being angry, I don’t think we have the understanding to gain the support of Australians… Are we having conversations with our elders? To forgive from the heart and be honest hopefully gives us the tools to be able to move forward. Through truth telling and treaty, we need to be having those conversations.’
Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Warrung woman Ruth Langford grew up ‘with a big mob of blackfellas’ in Tasmania. She joined protestors, fighting on the lines to protect the forests from destruction. ‘To support my anger I would drink, do drugs and fight, because I was so wild. I didn’t know about forgiveness. The school system just taught about revenge, taught that to get the power you gotta learn to oppress.’ She considers herself fortunate that ‘the system sent me some slaps to side of the head… I am grateful they didn’t pathologise me. I went to do inma (ceremonies) with women in Uluru. To be linked to country is a spiritual birthright.’
‘We are all waiting for the government to save us, or the church, or someone,’ she continued. But we know that the answers will be found ‘only when we come back into right relation with each other and with the land’. She had dug into her ‘white’ Australian ancestry, identifying with their anger at the killing of one of their own and a massacre which followed. Challenging us non-indigenous, she went on: ‘You have the capacity not only to forgive but to ask for forgiveness. Where is your responsibility? Take the burden off us to forgive first. We don’t have always be the only ones to talk forgiveness.’
Larrakia Salt Water musician Ash Dargan spoke to that two-way process: ‘Forgiveness is a way back to one another. Forgiveness just from one side is surrender. But when two people forgive together, truth comes into the centre, and something resolves. If completely forgiven, the wrong is not there anymore; it dissipates into the ether.’ He walked through the audience playing his Yidaki to give voice to the ‘primal scream’ coming through our mothers, through the earth.
Wearing her possum skin, Merilyn ‘Merm’ Duff is a Trawlwoolway woman living on Wurundjeri Country. She voiced forgiveness from her own personal perspective and then for what had happened to our whole people. The two are linked. Though raped as a young woman, she had decided not to ‘perpetuate the hatred through unforgiveness. Hatred spreads like wildfire. But forgiveness lets me stop it.’ From her work in schools, and with a youth group in the western suburbs, she believes ‘kids teach us to be open and forgiving.’ Reflecting on the missed opportunity of the ‘Voice to Parliament debacle’, she read the lament she had written on her artwork.
For Uncle Shane Charles, his visit to Caux, Switzerland, last year had brought him among people of 80 cultures, people who wanted to know the stories. ‘Forgiveness has a feeling… a forgiveness built on a foundation of never forgetting.’ As an elected member of the First Peoples Assembly in Victoria, he feels that a treaty is the future, and the way to it is through four values he was taught by his elders: Respect, acceptance, healthy relationship with mother earth, and responsibility for its people.
Could we begin to reframe our national debate drawing on this humble respectful dialogue?