Identity Of Indigenous Peoples Research Articles

In Australia, the gospel has been used for many years as a tool for crushing the cultural identity of indigenous peoples. In the hands of indigenous people, and those who are prepared to act in solidarity with them, it is also a powerful force for the strengthening of cultural identity. Yet it may not be used to strengthen cultural identity at the expense of the community of the body of Christ. The following account is written out of the experience of the Uniting Church in Australia (UAC), and its antecedent churches. Aboriginal cultural identity was systematically crushed When, in 1788, the British first settled in the continent that is now known as Australia, they determined to take possession of the land as if it were terra nullius - unoccupied land, land belonging to nobody. From their perspective there was no sign of the land being used, no apparent cultivation of crops, no permanent buildings, no fences - indeed, nothing that to their European eyes signified that the land was occupied. From an Aboriginal perspective, the whole land was occupied - not owned in the sense that European people thought of ownership of the land. But each family group had responsibility for a particular part of the land. It was the land that gave them sustenance. They could think of it as their mother. Each group was responsible for carrying out regular rituals to care for the land. Their whole way of life, culture and calendar was related to the land. Ancestral beings had given shape to the land. They were descended from those ancestors and were required to care for them and the land they had shaped. There are two groups of indigenous people in Australia. The Aboriginal people are a very diverse people, who originally lived scattered across the continent and Tasmania, spending most of the time in small family groups of ten to one hundred people, but gathering periodically for initiations and other rituals. Customs and languages varied, some five hundred languages being spoken. There was little material culture, but a wealth of intellectual culture. There were intricate laws about relationships and about land. A second, less numerous racial and cultural group live in the Torres Strait Islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea. They are known simply as Torres Strait Islanders, and have a culture quite distinct from that of the Aboriginal people. Little of this was understood by the Europeans, and none of it was thought important by any but a few. Aboriginal people were driven off their land as more and more of it was planted with crops or used to pasture the flocks and herds of those who had come from overseas. But the land was important to Aboriginal people. Without it they could not sustain their life, their customs, culture or identity. Because they were not free to carry out their responsibilities to the land under the new regime, as required by their links to the past and into the future, their cultural identity was under threat. So they resisted the takeover of their land. Their resistance was met with great violence and brutality, and with superior weapons. All across the country on each frontier there were massacres of men, women and children. Sometimes the violence reached to the depths of poisoning their water supplies and foodstuffs. Introduced diseases against which the indigenous people had little natural immunity also wrought havoc. So also did alcohol, when linked to the despair and frustration of those who felt powerless to preserve their land and culture. So the populations were decimated. Governments further assisted the takeover of the land by removing survivors to settlements staffed by government officers, or by missionaries who acted as agents of the government. Often people from a dozen disparate tribes were forced to live together on such missions or settlements, separated sometimes by hundreds of kilometres from the sacred lands to which their identity was linked. …

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