Being a defender of Indigenous Spirituality.
A story.
In the village where I lived,
‘we’ were a 50% White population and 50% Aboriginal.
‘We’ had this bar that had two sides to it – the ‘Black Bar’ and the ‘Non-Black Bar’, but of course
‘we’ did hang out in both. No boundary.
Most of the Whites in that village were/are
‘assimilated’ to Aboriginal Spirituality, which in practice means non-dualistic unconditional love/acceptance of
everyone and that also means having a good laugh at each other’s eccentrics, idiosyncrasies, neuroses – what have you.
I think that there was this fear among White Australians about land rights – like Aboriginals taking over your back yard, the image being fruit bats coming to roost on your ‘white icon’ hills hoist clothes line:
https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...ite-work-video
But in this particular community, the '
bats' had already landed (had always been there) and invaded our psyches and the ‘Whites’ had already surrendered to it and were being proud of it.
So somebody had put a sign up in the non-black-bar side – a sign pointing to the black-bar saying:
“Psychiatric Ward 10”.
Well, ‘we’
all thought it was soooo funny and ‘we’
all just partook in the mirth, the cosmic joke about ‘separateness’ ….. until one day when an urban, educated (conceptual identity) Aboriginal from a city, from somewhere down South entered the non-black-bar, saw the sign and went
‘all ‘indigenous on us’ – he was so deeply offended and started to spit these hate ‘sermons’ about Whites disrespecting Aboriginals, when
in fact he couldn’t have been further away from the truth.
My own ‘Indigenous’ upbringing was an Unconditional Space
aka “Psychiatric Ward”, so I was feeling very ‘back at home’ within that community.