Magical Medicine Men

Learning about the process of “smoking the baby” made me curious about other Aboriginal medicine practices. An article I found online talked about the traditional Australian bush medicine. The author said that although the Indigenous Australian people had been relatively cut off from sources of disease, they were still, at times, in need of medical treatments. Occasionally, Aboriginals suffered from burns because at night they slept in close proximity to fire. Headaches caused by some foods or prolonged exposure to the sun and upset stomachs caused by the consumption of rotten fruit or spoiled meat were other common medical dilemmas. The indigenous people often suffered from eye infections and for some, the consumption of gritty food could wear teeth down to the nerves. Fighting and hunting was also known to at times lead to severe injuries requiring treatment. Aborigines also had to worry about a bite or sting from a native, poisonous species; which included snakes, spiders and jellyfish. Aborigines used a wide variety of remedies to treat these ailments. These treatments included the use of: wild herbs, animal products, steam baths, clay pits, charcoal and mud, massages, string amulets and secret chants and ceremonies.

Many aboriginal tribes have medicine men who they believe have a magical ability to cure ailments with special stones spirits placed in their bodies. The medicine man is not only responsible for removing the Ullinka (a pointing stick with a hooked end that they believed was placed in an individual’s body by a spirit that wanted to annoy them), but also for determining the person responsible for another’s death.

I thought the Aboriginal medical practices were fascinating. The processes involved are really intricate. The large involvement of spirits in Aboriginal beliefs clearly reaches into every element of their lives. The differences between Western Society and Aboriginal Belief is substantial in this area of culture. The biggest and most surprising difference that I found was the practice of assigning blame to another for a death. In America, the doctor is the first person the family of a person who passed away wants to blame for the death their particular sickness caused. Although this response is mostly out of grief, it shows the value Aboriginals see in medicine men, believing they can do no wrong, and that any negative outcome is directly caused by spirits or a person practicing sorcery.

Works Cited:

Spencer, Baldwin, and F.J. Gillen
1968 The Native Tribes of Central Australia.
Dover Publications, Inc.

Unknown Author
2000 Traditional Aboriginal Bush Medicine. Electronic document,
http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/medicine.php, accessed Nov 20.

Image Source: http://media.canada.com/idl/edjn/20060807/87393-32320.jpg

Pregnancy and Smoking

After reading about Aboriginal children being taken away from their families, I began to wonder what their lives would have been like if they had stayed. I wondered about a lot of aspects of what it would be like to grow up Aboriginal. While researching the Dreamtime, I came across the Aboriginal belief in a Spirit-Child. The belief is that a Spirit-Child will appear in a man’s dream and express desire for birth; At that time, the man tells the spirit where it can find his wife. One story describes a man who dreamed of his son six years before he was born. In the dream he saw a plane shot down by an enemy. The pilot of the plane emerged, with a wounded arm and leg, and told the man that he was his father, but he must go to America to get good medicine and would be born in six years. When his new baby boy was born with a crooked arm and leg, the man immediately recognized him from his dream. It is also believed that a Spirit-Child can find his father if he is in a semi-dream state, such as when he is hunting, and he will ride home on his chosen father’s shoulder. Spiritual belief even triumphs science in Aboriginal Society, where in some groups, a man will not accept paternity unless he had dreamed of his Spirit-Child. In other cases, men will accept a child that is not biologically theirs, as was the case with one Aboriginal man who accepted the child his wife bore during their five year separation. The opposite situation has also occurred; some men haven’t accepted their biological children because they did not meet the Spirit-Child in a dream, in which case the woman must find the man who dreamed of the child she bore.

Another interesting piece of Aboriginal culture involving children that I found was a practice called ‘smoking the baby’. This ceremony is performed by the group’s ‘healer’ and is considered the start of a child’s ‘real life’. It’s a pretty simple ceremony to perform; a pit is dug and a fire is started, the fire is then partially put out with water and the smoky embers are covered with konkerberry leaves. The baby is rubbed down with water to prevent burns and is then held in the smoke for about twenty seconds. The smoking serves as a cleansing or purification for the baby, but smoking itself is not reserved solely for babies, it is considered a great honor to be smoked, it serves as a medical ‘cure-all’.

These two Aboriginal beliefs are extremely different from what one would encounter in Western Society. Here in America we are all about finding the biological father of a child, the process can even be found on popular television shows; (Maury Povich any one?) Although when televised its usually for the drama involved if the boyfriend/husband is not the father. You would also be hard pressed to find a new mom that would allow you to immerse her baby in a smoke pit in Western Society as most would consider inhaling smoke to be an unhealthy thing for a baby to be doing. Although I find the belief in a Spirit-Child interesting and see the spiritual ties within the Aboriginal beliefs, I personally would not want to give birth only to have my husband tell me that I did not have the child of his dreams and would therefore have to find the man who did dream up my child. I suppose this wouldn’t be as big of a deal in Aboriginal society because of their different form of mapping kinship; after all, most of the children have more than one ‘mother’ and ‘father’. And, children are raised by their community as a whole, so they would probably not feel rejected. Another thing I thought about is that if the Spirit-Child really chose his father, then he or she came into this world already knowing who his or her parents were and would therefore probably expect for their birth-mother to find the man they chose.

Works Cited:


Elizabeth Carman and Neil Carman
Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication. Electronic document
http://www.birthpsychology.com/lifebefore/concept10.html, accessed Nov. 11

Arden, Harvey
1994 Dreamkeepers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Image Source: http://www.footprints.org.au/uploadimages/Indig_kids_large.jpg

Family Ties?

After learning a bit about the Stolen Generation, I wanted to find more information about the importance of family in Aboriginal Society to gain an understanding of just how the loss of their children effected the rest of the family. In class we discussed ‘relationships that matter’ and learned how to map out kinship. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia defines kinship as a socially recognized relationship between people who are or are held to be biologically related or who are given the status of relatives by marriage, adoption, or other ritual. In order to understand the importance of different relationships in Indigenous culture, it is necessary to understand how they map kinship.

The Indigenous Australian system of mapping kinship, while focusing mainly upon marriage, governs all social interaction. The main element is the division of clans with the same language into skin groups. It is considered taboo to marry into your own skin group, which avoids incest while creating bonds across clans though exogamous relations. Although this system makes it possible to determine who will marry whom at birth, love marriages are also acceptable, so long as it’s within the skin system. This system also dictates certain names for a person’s relatives; much different from the method generally accepted by western civilization. ‘Father’ and ‘mother’ refers any relative of the speaker’s parents, including aunts, uncles, and in-laws, ‘Brother’ or ‘sister’ then refers not only to the speaker‘s siblings, but the children of all of their ‘mothers‘ and ‘fathers‘. The actual classification of skin group changes with each new generation; Because of this, one might hear an Aboriginal speak of their ‘daughter’, while they are referring to their great-grandmother.

The broadness of Aboriginal relationships means children are cared for not only by their biological parents, but by the entire community. The responsibility of raising, educating and disciplining children falls upon everyone in the group, regardless of age or gender. An online article I found quoted Carol Kendal’s description of the impact of the Stolen Generation. She said: “In Aboriginal Society the family unit is very large and extended, often with ties to the community... Having that family unit broken down has just opened the floodgates for a lot of problems, a lot of emotional problems, mental and physical turmoil. If you want to use a really hard term to describe the impact that removal of Aboriginal children has had on Aboriginal families, 'attempted cultural genocide' is a good phrase.”

Kendal’s description provides further understanding of the opinions of the Aboriginal man from my last post. Because of the community’s value in their children, the removal of these children would have had substantial negative effects on not just the children and parents, but on every single member of the Indigenous group. The white Australian’s lack of cultural understanding led to a melt-down within Aboriginal Society. This new knowledge made me wonder why the Aboriginals I encountered during my stay in Australia had allowed us to peak at their cultural; then I realized that maybe in these Indigenous Peoples’ opinion, giving the Westerners a glimpse of their culture was a way to give them the understanding I’m seeking in order to prevent any other epics of extreme discrimination.

Kinship Maps: Western vs. Aboriginal
(EGO is a term anthropologists use to refer to the speaker or the person whose kinship is being traced)

Kinship Map - Western Society

Kinship Map - Western Society

Works Cited:

Australian Museum Online
2004 Family. Electronic document
http://www.dreamtime.net.au/indigenous/family.cfm

Laurent Dousset
2002 Kinship: an introduction
(part 4: Australian Aboriginal kinship and social organization). Electronic document
http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/kinship2.php

Unknown Author
2008 Australian Aboriginal Kinship. Electronic document
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship, accessed Oct 15.

Image Source: http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/part3_files/image001.gif,
http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/part3_files/image004.gif

Dreaming Continued

In order to learn more about the complexities of the Dreamtime, I began searching through other books about the Indigenous Australians. In the beginning of Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia, the author encountered an Aboriginal man who was angry because of the ‘Whitefellas’ desire to hear and re-tell the Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories. He said: “It’s like… I’m wearing the gold watch my father gave me and you ask me the time. So I tell you the time. But I don’t give you the watch, too, do I?” He felt that by listening to stories and then selling them off we were ‘taking the watch‘. He also said the he didn’t have to power to give away the story because it belonged to his people, not just to him.

This man’s opinions surprised me because in Western Society it is not uncommon to encounter a missionary who’s desire it is to convert you to their religion. In the Aboriginal society, it seems they are not so eager to share, wishing to protect their culture by keeping it to themselves. The man continued to say that this was just his opinion, and that others felt differently. In class we learned that a cultural is dynamic, not static, which means it is always changing. Although this man seemed to accept some aspects of the changes occurring in his culture, he was angered by others.

The forced assimilation of Aboriginal children from 1910 to the 1970s probably contributes to the Indigenous People’s mistrust of ‘Whitefellas’ with their culture. The victims of the forced assimilation, referred to as the Stolen Generation, were children who were taken from their families and put in orphanages and told that their families either didn’t want them or had died. These children were then placed in white Australian society, never learning about their own culture. The policy makers behind this decision believed ‘the color could be "bred out of them" [the mixed children]… while the fully black population, regarded as irredeemably primitive, was expected to simply die out.’ (quoted from the Times article)

I have significantly more understanding for the Aboriginal’s mistrust; especially now that I know what the Dreamtime is and how large a part of their culture it is. As I learned before, each member of Indigenous Society holds a special place in the group, performing certain ceremonies etc. to maintain the balance between humans, life, and non-life. If these children never were able to fill their place in the group, then I would think the Aboriginals would have felt the balance was lost. I see now that the man isn’t against sharing his culture, he is against having it taken away from him.

Works Cited:

Arden, Harvey
1994 Dreamkeepers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

McCarthy/Sydney, Terry
2000 The Stolen Generation. Electronic document,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998067,00.html, accessed Oct 7.

Image Source: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~pledgerp/Image42.gif

Dreaming

Intrigued by the idea of ‘Dreamtime’, I decided to search for further information about how this belief governs the Aboriginal lifestyle. According to Sabbioni, each person in traditional society is assigned their own Dreaming story and a responsibility for that particular Dreaming. Their participation in ceremonies as keepers of the stories reestablishes the relationship between the people, land, and spirit world as they bring the world into being through their bodies, songs, and actions. The Dreaming is what determines the system of values, behaviors, relationships, and beliefs that combine the natural world, humans, and the spirit world into an interconnected entity. Social order, concepts of law, political claims, visual representations, song, and environmental ethics are other aspects which fall into the jurisdiction of the Dreamtime. An article I came across online describes other elements of the Dreamtime. The author, Tony Crisp, explains that there are four aspects of Dreamtime: the beginning of all things, the life and influence of the ancestors, the way of life and death, and sources of power in life. Aborigines believe all four aspects occur at the same time, where the past present and future coexist; they call it ‘all-at-once’ time. Although the stories vary between tribes, all accounts of the Dreamtime have the same or a very similar theme. Different themes and topics form a complex network of faith, knowledge and practices that derive from Dreamtime stories, informing all spiritual and physical facets of an indigenous Australian life.

To me, Dreamtime is a bit hard to understand because of how much it involves. The idea of a belief governing how one lives their life almost in entirety is a concept I would guess many members of Western Society would have trouble grasping. Although some people are extremely religious and live their life as closely to the Bible (or other religious texts) as they can, we all have another higher power that sets rules for life, which is the Government. In the United States we have a separation of church and state meaning laws are not written in accordance with any religion, although both the Bible and Common Law instruct us not to kill one another.

Works Cited:

1998 Indigenious Australian Voices: A Reader.
Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer, and Sidonie Smith, eds. Pp. xxi.
Rutgers, The State University: Rutgers University Press.

Crisp, Tony
Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs. Electronic document,
http://www.dreamhawk.com/oz.htm, accessed Oct 12.

Image Source: http://rawheaven.org/gallery/albums/album03/Didjeridoo_Dreamtime.jpeg

Who Are The Aboriginals?

The first question I wondered to myself was who are these so called ‘Aboriginals’? What aspects of their lifestyle are different from my own and why? Numerous questions filled my mind, I believed that answering them would let me understand this culture in entirety. Then I learned in class that the only way I could ever fully understand a culture would be to share their same web of meaning, something that would now be borderline impossible because I have already built my own. Instead, I will hunt the answers to my questions and hope to understand how the Indigenous Australian web was woven.

I picked up a book called Indigenous Australian Voices from the library. One of the editors of this book is a Nyungar woman, which I found out is a Western Australian based group of Aboriginals. In the Preface, she gives a brief account of the origins of the Indigenous People. Although scientific studies provide evidence that the Aboriginals inhabited the Australian continent for about 175,000 years and experts say the culture has the longest continuous cultural history in the world, Aboriginal People reject this approach. Instead, the trace their origins to what they call the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. This belief encompasses the period of creation in which it is believed that mythical beings came out of the earth, water and sky and created the mountains, water holes, rivers, flora & fauna, and the Indigenous People; who were given the job of caretakers of the world that surrounded them. In order to maintain a balance between humanity, life, and non-life, the Aborigines created a system of rules and regulations.

I find the clash between scientific evidence and Indigenous belief to be interesting because a very similar conflict exists between those in Western Society who believe God created the earth and all its inhabitants in seven days, and the scientists who support the Big Bang theory. I personally am not religious nor heavily into science, so I find it easy to have an unbiased view on this concept. In my opinion, a belief in a God constitutes a belief in an after life which is probably quite appealing to some people, whereas a scientific approach would suggest death is the absolute end of life. I’ve never been one to dwell heavily on the idea of death, but the guarantee of an after life would probably be a great motivator to life your life ‘by the rules’ so to speak. This idea is most likely the reason the Aboriginal cultural did survive all those years, when so heavily influenced by a belief in spirits.

Works Cited:

1998 Indigenious Australian Voices: A Reader.
Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer, and Sidonie Smith, eds. Pp. xx–xxi.
Rutgers, The State University: Rutgers University Press.

Photo Source: http://www.crystalinks.com/dreamtime.jpg

A Quest For Understanding

Back in 2001, my mom took my dad and I halfway across the world to Australia. We lived there for six months while my mom was on sabbatical. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to see something new, my mom dragged my dad and I around the country to take in all that we possibly could given out ‘short’ amount of time there. (To my mom, you only have spent enough time once you have literally seen every corner of the countryside.) On one of our little excursions, we encountered the Indigenous Australian people, now commonly referred to as the Aborigines. At the time I was only 11 years old, so I didn’t stand to gain very much from this first encounter, I only remember watching them perform a traditional dance and having some of them teach me how to play a Didgeridoo. Now that I am old enough to appreciate it, I want to further my knowledge and understanding of the oldest culture on the earth, the Indigenous Australians. My current knowledge tells me that they are a hunter-gatherer society, living mainly in the bush. The have a belief system consisting not of gods, but of spirits, for which they perform different ceremonies and dances. This of course may not be fact, it’s just what I remember learning during that experience. For this cultural blog, I want to clear up any of my own misconceptions, and learn as much as I can about all facets of an Indigenous life. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the time or budget to return to Australia to re-encounter this People, nor do I know any Aboriginals here in Massachusetts, so the majority of my quest for understanding will be through the works of others.

Image Source: http://student.britannica.com/comptons/art-90561/Australian-Aboriginal-boys-dance-in-a-festival-held-in-northern