Symposium envisions ‘better, more just and beautiful world’
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
Last week, I was very privileged to attend the inaugural National Indigenous Ecumenical Council in Australia (NIECA) Symposium, held on the lands of the Kaurna people/Adelaide with the theme ‘Holders of Our Knowledge and Keepers of Our Stories’.
I was one of two of us from The Salvation Army who attended, the other being Auxiliary-Lieutenant Matt Cairns, Student Support and Higher Education Lecturer at Eva Burrows College. Matt is currently completing a PhD project on decolonisation of The Salvation Army under the supervision of the Salvos’ Reverend Professor Glen O’Brien, and Australian theologian and NIECA Chair Professor Dr Anne Pattel-Gray.
I spent the two days at the symposium listening to perspectives from scholars studying the theologies and storytelling histories of Indigenous peoples across Oceania – from the Pacific, Myanmar, Taiwan and India, as well as, of course, Australia.
As a non-Indigenous person with coloniser blood, it feels disingenuous in some ways to report on an event like this from the first person. But the reason I’m writing this from my own experience is that to attempt to present this experience without personalising it is also disingenuous.
At the heart of the conference, and as I have reflected since – at the heart of our theologies – is story. The story of our communities, our families, and of us. As we sit and take in knowledge from those of other cultures, we are passing it all through the lenses of what we already believe, and what we treat with suspicion.
As I sat and listened, I became innately aware of how much disbelief I held as not just an acceptable response, but a reasonable one. Why would my perspective, largely shaped by scholars of European and Anglo-American descent, which holds no room for creation stories that involve male and female emerging from pumpkins as in the ancestral accounts of the Kachin people of Myanmar, or views waves and oceans as barriers, rather than pathways as many Pacific islander people groups do, be the correct one? Why might we be tempted to view some of these perspectives as absurd or off-base, and our own as inherently reasonable?
Both of these perspectives were shared at the conference and later discussed in groups that included those from Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Episcopal, Anglican, Quaker and Uniting church backgrounds, and what was apparent to me was that at an event like this, what we hear of another cultural perspective is simply the tip of the iceberg. It is knowledge, shrunk down to be palatable and comprehensible in a short matter of time, but it speaks to worlds within worlds. How can we, as coloniser Christians, so easily regard ourselves as multicultural, as educated? How, when we truly know so little of another’s experiences?
Another failing of non-Indigenous people like myself is to view cultures for whom the past is central to the present and future as somehow stuck, unmoving.
In his talk on day two of the symposium, Uncle Reverend Ken Sumner, a Kukabrak Ngarrindjeri man and Uniting Church minister, stated that Indigenous stories were not merely memories of the past.
“They are living wisdom,” he said. “They invite us into restoration.”
This was echoed by Professor Dr Anne Pattel-Gray, who spoke on Aboriginal matriarchs as story-keepers. She spoke of how Indigenous knowledges were encapsulated in language, songs and stories, visual arts and expressions of art, rituals or ceremonies, and management and use of land, including flora and fauna.
“It’s important that non-Indigenous people understand that when we refer to Indigenous knowledges as traditional, it is not confined to the past. It is also the here and now. It continues to shape our understanding today, within contemporary society,” she said.
This invitation to restoration and the wisdom of the past is very tangible, and multifaceted.
As Reverend Canon Dr Garry Worete Deverell, a trawloolway man from northern lutruwita (Tasmania) said in his presentation titled ‘Theological Conversation on Country’ that this wisdom acquired by Indigenous peoples through their own long experience with living respectfully and sustainably in this land was precisely what was required to address our national crisis with ecological degradation and mass extinctions of species.
“It is precisely what is missing in a church theology which focuses only on the ancient far West or Europe or North America,” he said.
Garry also challenged those like me, and you – to a truthful kind of living. A kind that is open and transparent about the ways in which we both willingly and unwillingly participate in what he described as “the fundamentally unjust structure of our society and country”.
“Insofar as we are able and have the power to do so, we should certainly do what we can to make a better, more just and beautiful world,” he said as part of his conclusion.
This was the challenge to all of us in attendance. It was an invitation to work together, alongside one another in fairness and equality towards a future where our cultural faith and beliefs are not seen as better or worse, but complementary.
The Salvation Army’s Shirli Congoo, General Manager Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Team is part of the NIECA Wisdom Council. To find out more about NIECA and the Symposium, see here or to follow NIECA on Facebook, see the QR code.
