Indigenous Relationality: Women, Kinship and the Law

Abigail Bray,Patricia Dudgeon

doi:10.3390/genealogy3020023

Abstract

Strong female governance has always been central to one of the world’s oldest existing culturally diverse, harmonious, sustainable, and democratic societies. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s governance of a country twice the size of Europe is based on complex laws which regulate relationships to country, family, community, culture and spirituality. These laws are passed down through generations and describe kinship systems which encompass sophisticated relations to the more-than-human. This article explores Indigenous kinship as an expression of relationality, culturally specific and complex Indigenous knowledge systems which are founded on a connection to the land. Although Indigenous Australian women’s kinships have been disrupted through dispossession from the lands they belong to, the forced removal of their children across generations, and the destruction of their culture, community and kinship networks, the survival of Indigenous women’s knowledge systems have supported the restoration of Indigenous relationality. The strengthening of Indigenous women’s kinship is explored as a source of social and emotional wellbeing and an emerging politics of environmental reproductive justice.

Highlights

Strong female governance has always been central to one of the world’s oldest existing culturally diverse, harmonious, sustainable, and democratic societies
Inter-connected axiologies, ontologies and epistemologies of kinship are at the center of the complex knowledge systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, knowledge systems which supported the governance of one of the earth’s oldest harmonious, culturally diverse democracies
To talk of Indigenous genealogy, is to talk about kinship with all forms of life, Indigenous governance and therapeutic knowledge systems. It is to talk about reciprocal connections with the land, or Country which express reverence and above all, love

Summary

Indigenous Kinship Systems

Indigenous kinship systems are recognized as fundamentally different from western genealogical systems, encompassing complex relationships with place, with the land (earth, waterways, sky), and the more-than-human (animal, plant and spirt) which express culturally specific gendered obligations and laws, or forms of Indigenous spiritual governance. These sophisticated relationships weave the ‘kincentric’ (Salmon 2000) fabric of Indigenous culture, ‘shaping their stewardship ethics and practices’. One purpose of this article is to highlight the role of women in creating and maintaining kinship

Kinship and Women’s Law

Grandmother’s Law and Birthing on Country

Conclusions