Aboriginal Oral Traditions Research Articles

The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, continuously, for tens of thousands of years. Over that time, they developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed to successive generations through oral tradition. The length of time oral traditions can be passed down while maintaining vitality is a topic of ongoing debate in the social sciences. In recent years, scientists have weighed into the debate by studying traditions that describe natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, which can be dated using scientific techniques. Here, we bring together a trans-disciplinary team of scholars to apply this approach to Tasmanian Aboriginal (palawa) oral traditions that were recorded in the early nineteenth century. These traditions describe the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia and the presence of a culturally significant “Great South Star”, identified as Canopus (α Carinae). Utilising bathymetric and topographic data of the land and sea floor in the Bass Strait, we estimate the Bassian Land Bridge was finally submerged approximately 12,000 years ago. We then calculate the declination of the star Canopus over the last precessional cycle (26,000 years) to show that it was at a far southerly declination (δ < −75°) between 16,300 and 11,800 years ago, reaching its minimum declination approximately 14,000 years ago. These lines of evidence provide a terminus ante quem of the Tasmanian traditions to the end of the Late Pleistocene. This paper supports arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia, providing critical information essential to the further development of theoretical frameworks regarding the archaeology of orality.

Sharing stories: The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling project

The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling project is a month-long event in Saskatchewan, Canada, which celebrates the lives, histories, practices and cultures of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and non-Status peoples through storytelling. The Library Services for Saskatchewan Aboriginal Peoples committee oversees the project and employs a coordinator, who applies for grants, coordinates the project’s guidelines, and is the contact for site funding and event reporting. Since its launch in 2004, the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling project has grown significantly and has effectively promoted traditional storytelling, supported a network of Aboriginal storytellers, and helped to create stronger relationships between Aboriginal peoples and libraries. The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling project is a dynamic methodological and theoretical model for decolonizing library spaces, programmes and collections through celebrating Aboriginal oral traditions.

Volcanism in Aboriginal Australian oral traditions: Ethnographic evidence from the Newer Volcanics Province

This article collects and presents nineteenth-century ethnographic evidence from the Newer Volcanics Province of Australia and explores how volcanism was recorded and understood in Aboriginal oral traditions. It investigates whether Aboriginal Australian oral traditions can be understood as persistent eyewitness accounts of volcanic eruptions in the Newer Volcanics Province, how and what kind of geological and volcanological knowledge was embedded within Aboriginal Australian oral traditions, and considers what value the ethnographic evidence has for understanding both the socio-cultural and geological histories of the Newer Volcanics Province.

Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanoes

Abstract In Australia, the onset of human occupation (≥65 ka?) and dispersion across the continent are the subjects of intense debate and are critical to understanding global human migration routes. New-generation multi-collector mass spectrometers capable of high-precision 40Ar/39Ar dating of young (&amp;lt;500 ka) samples provide unprecedented opportunities to improve temporal constraints of archaeological events. In southeastern Australia, a novel approach to improving understanding of occupation involves dating key volcanic eruptions in the region, referenced to stone artifacts and Aboriginal oral traditions. The current study focuses on two monogenetic volcanoes in the Newer Volcanic Province of southeastern Australia: Budj Bim (previously Mount Eccles) and Tower Hill. Budj Bim and its surrounding lava landforms are of great cultural significance and feature prominently in the oral traditions of the Gunditjmara people. Tower Hill is of archaeological significance due to the occurrence of a stone tool beneath tephra. 40Ar/39Ar eruption ages of 36.9 ± 3.1 ka (95% confidence interval) and 36.8 ± 3.8 ka (2σ) were determined for the Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanic complexes, respectively. The Tower Hill eruption age is a minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria, consistent with published optically stimulated luminescence and 14C age constraints for the earliest known occupation sites in Tasmania, New South Wales, and South Australia. If aspects of oral traditions pertaining to Budj Bim or its surrounding lava landforms reflect volcanic activity, this could be interpreted as evidence for these being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence.

Observations of red‐giant variable stars by Aboriginal Australians

Aboriginal Australians carefully observe the properties and positions of stars, including both overt and subtle changes in their brightness, for subsistence and social application. These observations are encoded in oral tradition. I examine two Aboriginal oral traditions from South Australia that describe the periodic changing brightness in three pulsating, red‐giant variable stars: Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), and Antares (Alpha Scorpii). The Australian Aboriginal accounts stand as the only known descriptions of pulsating variable stars in any Indigenous oral tradition in the world. Researchers examining these oral traditions over the last century, including anthropologists and astronomers, missed the descriptions of these stars as being variable in nature as the ethnographic record contained several misidentifications of stars and celestial objects. Arguably, ethnographers working on Indigenous Knowledge Systems should have academic training in both the natural and social sciences

The Alps, high gods, and the great flood: stone axe exchange and cosmology in Aboriginal south-eastern Australia – a response to Hiscock’s ‘Beyond the Dreamtime’

There is historical evidence for the belief among Aboriginal communities of pre-colonial south-eastern Australia that the sky was in imminent danger of collapsing, and all of humanity perishing in an epic flood, unless stone axes were bestowed upon a powerful deity that dwelt in the Australian Alps. Previously, I have argued that this ‘falling sky’ story provides insight into the elaborate symbolism associated with stone axes in Aboriginal societies of the southeast, particularly with regards to cosmological dimensions of the vast axe trading network centred on the renowned Mount William quarry. Recently, however, Peter Hiscock (2013) has proposed that this entire incident is more parsimoniously interpreted as a response to the disruptions created by British colonisation, and hence, this notion of an impending apocalypse has no bearing on our understanding of the long distance exchange of stone axes in the pre-contact history of this region. Here, I provide a more detailed analysis of the falling sky story and its wider context in historically known Aboriginal societies of the southeast. I reject the argument proposed by Hiscock (2013) that the beliefs underpinning it contain Christian motifs. Aboriginal oral traditions from throughout the southeast refer to deity-induced floods that destroyed an ‘antediluvian’ world of humans and marked the beginning of a new cultural epoch. While these flood myths superficially resemble biblical notions of a world-ending deluge, I argue that they are probably oral histories of post-glacial sea-level rises, and thus, distinctly ancient. The falling sky story, I conclude, offers hints at the extent to which religious knowledge and symbolic belief were integrated with economic dimensions of the stone axe exchange system in south-eastern Australia.

Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics (2008) Renée Hulan and Renate Eigenbrod, editors

Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics (2008) Renée Hulan and Renate Eigenbrod, editors

Painted shark vertebrae beads from the Djawumbu–Madjawarrnja complex, western Arnhem Land

In Europe and Africa, fine grained use wear and residue analyses of various organic bead technologies have provided remarkable information about specialist artisans and their affiliate communities. Ethnographic research suggests that personal ornaments represent one of the best ways to explore past human interactions and ethno-linguistic diversity. The study of material culture featured in rock art is now well established in Australia, but few detailed analyses have concentrated on personal ornaments recovered from the archaeological record. Fewer still have assessed the potential of this medium for assessing regional variations, despite rich ethnographic histories which point to the significance of these objects for self-differentiating communities and/or clans. This paper examines a collection of painted shark vertebrae beads recently discovered during archaeological survey in Arnhem Land. Detailed morphometric and use wear analysis is presented for these ornaments, alongside Aboriginal oral traditions, and assessment of similar artefacts held in museum collections across Australia. The potential of this combined approach within the Australian context is discussed, including how these studies add to our understanding of group signifying behaviour.

ABORIGINAL ORAL TRADITIONS OF AUSTRALIAN IMPACT CRATERS

In this paper we explore Aboriginal oral traditions that relate to Australian meteorite craters. Using the literature, first-hand ethnographic records and fieldtrip data, we identify oral traditions and artworks associated with four impact sites: Gosses Bluff, Henbury, Liverpool and Wolfe Creek. Oral traditions describe impact origins for Gosses Bluff, Henbury and Wolfe Creek Craters, and non-impact origins for Liverpool Crater, with Henbury and Wolfe Creek stories having both impact and non-impact origins. Three impact sites that are believed to have been formed during human habitation of Australia—Dalgaranga, Veevers, and Boxhole—do not have associated oral traditions that are reported in the literature.

AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN RECORD OF THE GREAT ERUPTION OF ETA CARINAE

We present evidence that the Boorong Aboriginal people of northwestern Victoria observed the Great Eruption of Eta ({\eta}) Carinae in the nineteenth century and incorporated the event into their oral traditions. We identify this star, as well as others not specifically identified by name, using descriptive material presented in the 1858 paper by William Edward Stanbridge in conjunction with early southern star catalogues. This identification of a transient astronomical event supports the assertion that Aboriginal oral traditions are dynamic and evolving, and not static. This is the only definitive indigenous record of {\eta} Carinae's outburst identified in the literature to date.

The Marriage of Mother and Father: Michif Influences as Expressions of Métis Intellectual Sovereignty in &lt;em&gt;Stories of the Road Allowance People&lt;/em&gt;

The Marriage of Mother and FatherMichif Influences as Expressions of Métis Intellectual Sovereignty in Stories of the Road Allowance People Mareike Neuhaus (bio) In an article discussing the textualization of performance, J. Edward Chamberlin has noted with reference to the work of Renato Rosaldo and Julie Cruikshank that "we need to get back to that simple discipline of looking at (and listening to) texts, rather than always looking through or around or behind or underneath them" (86). I agree; as literary critics, we need to reexamine the question of language and language use in Indigenous literatures—for a number of reasons. Firstly, even if, as Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) has argued, language "is not the main" but "one means of expression of culture" ("Ramparts" 169; emphasis added), the way in which language is used creates meaning and implicates modes of being and thinking. Secondly, to echo what Margery Fee observed in the 1990s (31), ancestral languages and discourse conventions are far more central in Indigenous writing and storytelling than is generally assumed or acknowledged by Euroamerican academics. As Andrea Bear Nicholas (Maliseet) observes in "The Assault on Aboriginal Oral Traditions," the colonization of North America not only implied the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples but also involved breaking these peoples' connections to the land. Since these connections were ultimately expressed in and performed through the oral traditions, Bear Nichols writes, it is the latter that needed to be eradicated; hence the establishment of the residential and boarding school systems in Canada and the United States. There is thus, according to Bear Nicholas, a direct "correlation between the destruction of oral traditions and the colonial project [End Page 20] of dispossession" and consequently also between the destruction of the land and that of Indigenous languages (19). Indigenous mother tongues in North America have suffered immensely through colonialism; many of these languages have become extinct in the past five hundred years, and many others are threatened to become extinct in the very near future. Thus, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese have become the first languages for most Indigenous people living in North America today.1 When, in the face of this vast linguistic loss, Craig Womack (Creek/Cherokee) argues that English is "an Indian language," this observation makes sense when seen from the point of view of parole. For, as Womack rightly points out, English is used by many Indigenous people in large parts of Canada and the United States (404). In their use of this language, however, Indigenous people have "Indigenized" English more than it has altered Indigenous ways of expression. In fact, as I will argue here, Indigenous uses of the English language mark one of the means available to Indigenous storytellers and writers to preserve and celebrate their tribe's intellectual sovereignty, a prerequisite for other kinds of sovereignty. For this purpose, I will discuss the use of language in Maria Campbell's Stories of the Road Allowance People, which—to apply Pamela Sing's description of Michif to the Métis variant of English used in this collection—is all of the following: "non-normative, anti-institutional, perhaps anti-State, interrelational and relativizing" ("Intersections"). In Stories of the Road Allowance People, Maria Campbell marries Mother (symbolizing land and grammar) and Father (symbolizing story and lexicon) to weave a narrative that reflects not only the genesis of the Métis People and their language but also the importance of "membering" as a performance of Métis peoplehood. Campbell's motivation for translating the stories of her own Métis community in northern Saskatchewan into a Michif English code may not originally have been to create and claim intellectual sovereignty. Instead, she seems to have followed mainly her feelings, her sense of community, and her ear for her people's storytelling when working on this collection. And yet, every single reading of Stories of the Road Allowance People is ultimately a "performance" of stories that create meaning and function outside [End Page 21] the norms of standard English and Euroamerican thought, and may thus be regarded as an expression of intellectual sovereignty. I believe, therefore, that the manner in which the voices of the Road...

Inconstant companions: archaeology and North American Indian oral traditions

Ronald J. Mason explores the tension between aboriginal oral traditions and the practice of archaeology in North America. That exploration is necessarily interdisciplinary and set in a global context. Indeed, the issues at stake are universal in the current era of intellectual decolonization and multiculturalism. Unless committed to writing, even the most esteemed utterances are inevitably forgotten with the passing of generations, however much the succeeding ones try to reproduce what they think they had heard. Writing shares with archaeological remains a greater, if unequal, durability. Through copious examples across academic and ethnographic spectra and over millennia, Mason examines the disparate functions of traditional ways of knowing in contrast to the paradigm of science and critical historiography.

Subject or object? Shaping and reshaping the intersections between aboriginal and non-aboriginal records

This paper considers the shaping and reshaping of, and intersections between, aboriginal and non-aboriginal communication, information, and documentation processes in British Columbia, from the mid 1800s to the 21st century. It suggests that when two cultures come into contact with each other, the relationship between them is inevitably transformed, along with each culture’s traditional methods of communication, information management, and memory making. While it is often assumed that one technology might dominate the other, more often the different technologies and methods blend together to create a new hybrid approach, a cross-cultural integration, though the less powerful culture often does most of the accommodating. By considering the relationship between aboriginal people and European settlers in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, particularly over the ownership of and rights to land, this paper suggests that the two societies have intertwined their communities, their cultures, and their documentary systems to the point that today neither society exists in isolation. Each culture is inextricably linked with the other, a fact that calls into question the idea that aboriginal oral traditions are “pure” or separate from non-aboriginal methods of documentation, as well as the notion that written forms of record keeping about aboriginal–non-aboriginal relationships are not influenced by oral evidence from aboriginal sources.

Who Wants these Stories? Reflections on Ethical Implications of the Re-publication of a Missionary Work

This paper discusses ethics in the context of Aboriginal Studies. Taking the example of a late-nineteenth century missionary work, a collection of out-of-print Mi’kmaq stories, it examines the ethical implications of the potential re-publication of such a text. It is argued that the Baptist missionary Silas T. Rand, who translated and transcribed the narratives, did his work from a Eurocentric perspective. The biases of a colonial ideology built into his translations/interpretations which are often quoted as authoritative would be further perpetuated if his work is republished without critical commentary. As Aboriginal oral traditions generally form the basis of Aboriginal cultures and contemporary Aboriginal literatures but have been demeaned for centuries thereby further colonizing the peoples, an edition of Rand’s work informed by a postcolonial ethics is crucial. The paper therefore concludes with the suggestion that the stories collected by the missionary should be repatriated in the respective Mi’kmaq communities in a way that the people can decide how to go about their publication (if they want them published at all). A non-Aboriginal scholar may facilitate the process but should follow the directions of the communities.

Book Review: Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions

Book Review: Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions

Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Danièle M. Klapproth, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2004, xiii & 456 pp., paperback, €32.95

Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Danièle M. Klapproth, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2004, xiii & 456 pp., paperback, €32.95

The Perfect Disguise: Frank Speck's Pilgrimage to Ktaqamkuk—The Place of Fog—in 1914

Introduction: Who Was Frank Speck? There have been many European visitors to Turtle Island and they have been shaped by both Aboriginal people and places. This is one such story, a story of European science, racism, and the perfect disguise, a story of Frank and the Mi'kmaq of Ktaqamkuk. It is also a story of a transformer in history, one who was chosen to keep alive the remarkable history of survival of the Mi'kmaq of Newfoundland, and of the Beothuks and their relationships as neighbors of the Mi'kmaq. There is no biography or critical study of his life or career (Chute 1999, 481-540). In Marvin Harris's study of the history of anthropological theory, published in 1968, is referred to only in passing as one of Boas' students (Harris 1968). Ed Rogers, who followed Speck's fieldwork into Mistassini in the 1940s and 1950s, always spoke very highly of and of his ethnological work. [1] Rogers edited a sourcebook of the Northeast Algonkian people that included some of Speck's publications (Rogers 1985, Introduction). Yet, overall, Speck's legacy has not been highly regarded in the twentieth century. For most of his professional career, except for one brief dalliance in 1931, he eschewed anthropological theory with a passion in a century in which academic theories have become something of an obsession. Rogers noted that Speck's objective and his achievement were rather in the area of salvage ethnology, particularly in northeastern North America. In truth, Rogers' career, at least in part, mirrored, in its emphasis on oral testimony and fieldwork, that of Speck. It cannot be denied that Speck's half-century of scholarship was both prodigious and remarkable. He worked with more than twenty-five distinct Aboriginal groups. His field research faithfully recorded Aboriginal oral testimony from his First Nation informants whether the written record agreed with it or not. His writings saved these oral traditions, which dated back at least to the time of contact, if not well before. was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 8 November 1881. His father's name was and he was German and Jewish. The word Speck in German means lard. For Aboriginal people (and for other cultures) lard is a transforming agent in the preparation of food. Speck's surname, intentional or not, was certainly apt. The convergence of Aboriginal oral traditions with the German Jewish tradition of remembering and memory is also a significant family juxtaposition worth exploring, along with his professional connections with Boas and Sapir, whose families were also German and Jewish. As a youngster, was sickly. His parents sent to rural Connecticut to recover his health among Mohegan-Pequot descendants. Since it was his mother who had the Aboriginal descent in her family, it is likely that she was the decisionmaker in sending her son to be raised by the Mohegan-Pequot Elders. It may also be assumed that the Elders with whom spent his youth in Connecticut were women, since Aboriginal women are alwa ys the guardians of Aboriginal languages and the cultures. To be sure, he may also have learned from other Elders. However, this experience left with an inordinate command of languages, one which became invaluable in his university and scholarly career. By the time entered Columbia University at the turn of the century he had the ability to speak a number of Aboriginal languages, notably Mohegan and Pequot, and had a fascination with the natural world, including a particular lifelong interest in snakes and birds. His linguistic skills gave access to the Elders. As Chute has observed, in his research merely listened and wrote down what the Mi'kmaq told him (Chute 1999, 516). The time in rural Connecticut was Speck's formative influence. And like many of his age, was also a collector of Aboriginal artifacts. Completing his B.A. in 1904 at Columbia, followed with an M. …

Archaeology and Native North American Oral Traditions

AbstractArchaeologists today are being urged from within and outside their profession to incorporate aboriginal oral traditions in reconstructing culture histories. Such challenges usually ignore or at least drastically underestimate the difficulties in doing so. Not least among those difficulties is that of attempting to reconcile inherently and profoundly different ways of conceptualizing the past without violating the integrity of one or the other or both. The pro and con arguments are examined theoretically and as actually employed in discrete instances. These raise such problems of incommensurability as to severely limit the fruitfulness and even desirability of making the attempt.

Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The Story of Prehistoric Australia and its People.

This text explores how the first inhabitants reached Australia over 50,000 years ago. Using archaelogical evidence and aboriginal oral traditions, the book tells the history of these people. It examines the ways in which the Aborigines adapted to and modified their environment, and how their art and culture developed. This revised edition incorporates information on recent archaelogical discoveries. It features a revision of the chapters on Pleistocene rock art and the extinction of the megafauna.