March 21 is the UN ‘International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’. In Australia we call it “Harmony Day”
Reflect with some new viewing and reading from our Black Lives Matter link library
You can access the BLM link library directly at www.brightanddark.net/blmlinks or via the [CATEGORIES] menu above. You will land on featured items, but if you scroll through the dropdown menu you can view all items or select to view by topic or category: books, movies, articles etc
Contributions are welcome here or email curlytrees@gmail.com
Enjoy! () Oonagh
The 2020 Narrm Oration with Assoc. Professor Michael Shawn-Fletcher
Australia is in the midst of both environmental and social crises. With the highest rate of biodiversity loss on earth, the country is facing an ever-increasing barrage of massive catastrophic wildfires that wreak untold environmental damage.
Embedding the Aboriginal world view and notion of Country into mainstream Australia has the potential to benefit the lives and livelihoods of all Australians and our Country. Associate Professor Fletcher is a descendant of the Wiradjuri and a geographer interested in the long-term interactions between humans, climate, disturbance, vegetation and landscapes.
ABC RN broadcast a shorter podcast version of the oration here
Nurturing Country: We Need to Talk About Fire
In this Bundanon Trust Short Film, Vanessa Cavanagh (University of Wollongong) discusses the role that women and children have played in caring for Country through the use of fire. Cavanagh discusses the importance of intergenerational knowledge transfer as a way of ensuring responsiveness to the needs of the environment, highlighting its significance as an ecological resource we are dependent upon for our own nourishment and survival.
Historian Prof. Grace Karskens with Darug knowledge holders Leanne Watson, Jasmine Seymour, Erin Wilkins and Rhiannon Wright have been exploring Darug place names along Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River recorded in the 1830s by Rev. McGarvie
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
2 replies on “BLM Link Library Update”
Dear Oonagh,
Thank you for posting this very thought provoking address by Michael Shawn-Fletcher. He offers me a new way of thinking about both fire, and wilderness, and about my own humanness as a fire-being. I recognise the invitation to embrace this country (I am on Boonwarrung country) with all it’s biodiversity, including the human diversity, and to pay my respects to those who have managed this land for at least 60,000 years with fire. And I vow to assume responsibility here, as best I can, as the present unfolds
A truly educational address. Thank you. ( )
Thanks Deborah, our Roshi put this forward so our thanks go to Susan.
I also found his ideas on our understanding of the separation of “wilderness” and people as compelling… a continuation of dispossession. People are part of country, pray we may understand!