Indigenous Cultural Study Research Ethics

Myself and two other Australian Indigenous people have been participating in an American native peoples' forum on the web. We have all been shocked by the extremely intrusive inquiry of non-indigenous academics and new-age seekers entering the forum.

For example, recently a man asked us for details of spiritual rituals and ceremonies for a book he is putting together.

When we declined to share such information (which we'd never be allowed to share outside of family anyway!) the man responded that we need to share this with westerners so they can record it and thus ensure the survival of our culture.

I responded with the following comments:

"Native peoples have been more damaged, more colonised by anthropologists "recording" our ways than we have by pastoralists with guns. Our willingness to share, a big part of our identity, has been our downfall here. So much is stolen, raped, destroyed, in the name of "preservation". Don't forget, the stolen generations were perpetrated by the "protector of aborigines!"

We're not dying out, you know. Our cultures have survived for longer than any others on the planet through our traditional methods of recording and preserving information.

Western ways of recording information don't last this long. The notion that we need our culture rescued from us by western academics is incredibly insulting! And naive. We can preserve it ourselves, thanks.

Every time a piece of sacred law is torn out of our communities, every time sacred designs are printed on a tea towel, every time this happens a piece of our culture dies.

So really, our reticence here is the way we ensure our culture's survival. Our culture will not "die out" because we refuse to put it on flimsy paper and impermanent digital technologies dependent on non-renewable resources. If we invested in this temporary western fool's paradise, then we would truly risk annihilation.

The only hard-drive that lasts is the ancestral mind carried through kinship. Our oral histories and cultures will endure when western "civilisation" has blown away as dust on the wind.

I tell you what - you tell us all your secret business and we'll record it in our oral tradition. That way, your doomed, unsustainable culture can be preserved and handed down for future generations."