Indigenous Culture
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Posted by Tyson Woorama Apr 24, 2006 |
The notion of one uniform Aboriginal culture, unchanged for millennia, is a myth. Our diverse cultures amount to considerably more than some kind of exotic fossil.
Indigenous culture, like the land it is part of, is a complex adaptive system, self-organising and based on patterns that cannot be seen unless viewed from an holistic viewpoint. As a result, western reductionistic thinkers often have trouble understanding Aboriginal culture, and choose to portray it as a primitive system, unchanged for millennia and frozen in time.
But this is far from the truth. A culture that does not change is a dead culture, and our cultures are very much alive, and thus changing constantly as they interact with the world around. Here are some articles framed by my experience at the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures.
