‘ Calling our Spirits Home ’ Indigenous Cultural Festivals and the Making of a Good life

In a discussion about the problems affecting young people of Cape York, a local community health worker told me: ‘their spirits have wandered too far. We need to call them back to them’.  In the last five years mainstream notions of wellbeing have changed dramatically, but still there is little room for spirits and ancestors. It is now considered that the critical goods of health and wellbeing are leading a life with purpose, having quality connections with others, possessing self-regard and experiencing feelings of efficacy and control. For decades now Australia has demonstrated difficulty, if not failure, to construct appropriate responses to entrenched social problems within Indigenous communities. In this article I examine two Cape York festivals aimed at improving the wellbeing of Indigenous youth – Croc Fest and Laura Dance Festival. The former is driven by government agendas of enhancing education and health outcomes for Indigenous youth, while the latter’s purpose is to maintain and develop strong culture for the Cape and surrounding communities and respect the country’s spirits and ancestors. Why do mainstream and Indigenous responses to social problems continue to diverge so greatly, and what does each achieve and have to offer the other? In examining these festivals what can be seen is mainstream Australia’s failure to understand culture as a material expression of a vital life force, thus integral to wellbeing. I argue that a fundamental failure in mainstream responses to the ‘crisis’ in Indigenous Australia is to enable a life force derived from another sovereignty. In examining these festivals, mainstream and Indigenous, the disjuncture becomes clear. I propose that it is not only Indigenous youth whose spirits have wandered too far from them, but secular, neo-liberal Australia is lost in a world void of spirits, the ephemeral, and the power of country, forsaken for progress, individuality and the drive for statistical equality. How can we call our spirits home whilst respecting different sovereignties? What might Indigenous cultural festivals have to teach us about the making of a ‘good life’?

As we are well aware, recent governments have acted on the growing number of reports and voices detailing the social distress in too many Indigenous people'slives.Thecurrent'crisis'inIndigenousAustraliaislargelyrespondedtoby government agencies through the reinforcement of mainstream values and experiences-as can be seen in the 'Close the Gap' campaign and the Northern Territory intervention. 5The prevalent government approaches to improving the healthandwellbeingofIndigenousAustralians,asJonAltmanwrites,areaimedat socioeconomic equality, and often ignore colonial history and the diversity of Indigenous circumstances and sociocultural distinctiveness.In Altman's words, Indigenous affairs 'looks for mainstream solutions to deeply entrenched nonmainstream problems'. 6In so doing, there is an assumption that what constitutes theverylifeworldsthatarenotbeingvaluedintheraceforstatisticalequality.
-BEING WELL How health and wellbeing is understood and defined has far-reaching effects on policyanditsimplementation.Indeed,dominantdefinitionscouldbebadforsome people'shealth.Wellbeing,IanAndersonwrites,'impliestheacttobe',whichhasa particular emphasis on the social aspects of being. 9Thus social, cultural and historical differences will produce differences in what it is tobe a healthy, capable personandwhatconstitutesagoodlife.Wehaveallbenefitedfromdevelopmentsin medicalscience.However,itisbaseduponanideologyoftheWesternconceptofthe self:aself-contained,independentindividualseparatefromfamily,communityand country. 10In prioritising individual health over social health, the individual is abstractedfromtheenvironmentinwhichtheyliveandhowtheymakemeaningof andintheirlife.Furthermore,itisassumedthatthereisasharedunderstandingof, desire for, and primacy of a specific 'healthy' body, which takes precedence over cultural,spiritualormoralinterests. 11Thisisonlyonewayofconceptualisinghealth andwellbeing.DanielaHeilbelievesthereisaneedtounderstandthepersonnotas a monadic individual but as always in the process of being constituted in social relations,andthusrelationshipsbetweenpeopleandtheirongoingreconstitutions andaffirmationsiswhatmakeslifeworthliving. 12ke Heil, I do not want to pit essentialisms against each other-the dehumanising biomedical world against a benign Aboriginal cultural world. 13ather, following Lenore Manderson, I want to suggest that wellbeing is not the state of individual bodies but of bodies in society. 14This is not to deny personal history or circumstances that affect our wellbeing, but rather, as my colleagues write, 'to recognise that our social and communal life-world is not simply the contextual background to our wellbeing but fundamentally constitutive of it'. 15To improveIndigenoushealthandwellbeingrequiresnotonlyaconcernforbiomedical healthbutalsoanexplorationofwhatIndigenouspeoplebelieveconstitutesa'good life'andtheimmediateandbroadersocial,culturalandpoliticalcircumstancesthat enable and disable a state of wellbeing.What is too often omitted, but should be centraltogovernmentaimsandpolicies,isarespectforhowIndigenouspeople,in all their differences, are shaping their own lives in accordance with their sociocultural values and experiences of what makes life meaningful. 16Wellbeing, healthorhealthybody,isnotaneutalconcept,butasmuchasitisahighlyethical projectitisalsopolitical.
-GOVERNING DIFFERENCE Notably, government responses such as the Northern Territory intervention are concerned with the Indigenous social body; however, Indigeneity is too readily presented as dysfunctional and in need of rescuing and recuperating into the 'healthy' civic body. 17In Australian public discourse the Indigenous population is almost always characterised as disadvantaged or deficient compared to the non-Indigenous.Indigeneity is structured through comparison with non-Indigenous population data across a range of socioeconomic indicators like health status, education and employment levels, income and housing.These comparisons have awakened mainstream Australia to vast inequalities, but the discursive frame continues to disable an engagement with Indigenous lived experience, values and aspirations.Imaginatively relocating Indigenous people from the margins to the centrehasmaterialeffectsonlivesthatareoftenoverlookedintheraceforequality.
Recognition of gross social inequalities can prompt urgent action by the state and community.Italsoimplicitly,ifnotdeceptively,foregroundsthekindofsocialideals state and community organisations should aim for: social norms based on non-Indigenous, national ideals of experience and wellbeing.In the pressing moral and political objective of achieving statistical equality, as John Taylor observes, Indigenous people's own life projects can be obscured. 18If the critical goods of healthandwellbeing,asiswidelyaccepted,areleadingalifewithpurpose,having qualityconnectionswithothers,possessingself-regardandexperiencingfeelingsof efficacy and control then the inability of the state to accommodate and value multipleinterpretationsofa'goodlife'severelyimpedesgoalsforpositivechange. 19e forces that nourish many Indigenous lives, such as country, kinship sociality,spiritsandlaw-whatbroadlycouldbereferredtoasculture-areseenas an encumbrance to, or outside, the healthy national sociopolitical body and thus incommensurate with the goals of government policy.The vision of Australian modernity, Kerry Arabena writes, has a resolutely white construct of the 'modern citizen'.TheprocessesofIndigenousaffairsaremakingIndigenouspeoplefitforthe modern nation, she argues, by resisting and minimising the recognition of cultural and historical differences. 20I would add that this is because the 'inheritors' of modernity,andthuspoliticalsovereignty,enactaparticularmodeofcitizenshipthat cannot capture the specificity of Indigenous subjectivities.Yet it is this mode of citizenship that is invoked as the benchmark for statistical equality and practical reconciliation.The modern is secular, disembodied and separate from the nonhuman world. 21The social/public is the space for a particular performance of subject-citizenandbyembodyingthis positionone is 'taking their rightful place in the social realm'. 22To be otherwise is a demonstration of not yet being modern.
There are too few public spaces that foster alternative performances of healthy citizens.Indigenous spirituality and cultural heritage is tolerated in mainstream politics as a lingering anachronism or accommodated as an ancient and worthy culture,butitisrarelyunderstoodasfundamentaltoIndigenouswellbeing.
-KICKING UP DUST Festivals and community celebrations have longed been vehicles for important communal functions-a part of the process of creating community and nourishing belonging-and in so doing defining and making connections between people and place: including and excluding. 23Throughout the history of the Australian nation, Indigenous people have participated in festivals commemorating nationhood and have staged counter festivals to protest against colonisation, to celebrate survival andtoshareandkeeptheirculturestrong. 24Festivalsareameansofenteringinto dialogue with mainstream Australia and testimony to ongoing political struggles, and for both Indigenous performers and their audience these settings provide an importantcontextforthecontemporarynegotiationandtransmissionofIndigenous people's identities. 25Cultural festivals, as Rosita Henry asserts, allow Indigenous peopletomakethemselvespresenttotheworldandtochallengeahistorythathad rendered them absent. 26To be 'rendered absent' from history is to be made marginaltothecivicbody,whichreinforcesthevaluesofthesettlercolonialculture.
When this happens, the sociocultural differences that are life sustaining and Carl said that he felt the pride of the kids, and they were not subject to the shame they feel in the mainstream, which allowed them to reconnect with their 'internal compass'.
Thomas spoke eloquently and poetically of cultural gatherings, such as the Dreaming Festival, providing a stable platform for the next generation.He emphasised the festival's important role in maintaining the structures of life.We need, he told me, to attend to the foundations of life and he saw the Dreaming Festival as contributing to creating places people can 'take off from': a generative force that enables young Indigenous people to participate in broader Australian life. 34Performancesofculturalheritage,inallitsdifferentmodes,reassurepeopleof theirpermanenceandthelegitimacyoftheirworldview, 35   -NOTES 1 ThemeetingtookplaceinAurukunon3October2008aftertheKempMin,KuchekMinfestivalheld byQueenslandForensicHealth.
dysfunctional and deficient compared to mainstream Australia, which reinforces white, settler colonial values and experiences of wellbeing.Indigenous health requires creating public spaces in which Indigenous reality can be asserted over mainstream culture.Performances of cultural heritage and identity are vital elementsinlegitimising,sharingandchallengingworldviews.Theyenableprocesses of creativity and renewal.People gather to not only celebrate Indigenous cultures but also to tend dynamic living cultures; in this sense the festivals are spaces for performing,discussingandnegotiatingcontemporarycultureandidentity.Festivals, such as Laura and the Dreaming, are sociocultural spaces in which people are affirmingworldsofmeaningandtheconditionsofagoodlife.-Lisa Slater is a Research Associate at the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia.This article is an outcome of her previous project undertaken at RMIT (an ARC Linkage, partner organisation Telstra Foundation), which examined theimpactofIndigenousculturalfestivalsonyouthandcommunitywellbeing.Her research seeks to understand and define the processes of neo-colonialism, contemporary Indigenous identity formation and settler-colonial belonging with a particular focus on the role of cultural production-especially Indigenous festivals-as sites for the expression of Indigenous sovereignty and ethical interculturalengagement.
What is evident in contemporary Indigenous affairs, and public discourse in general, is Indigenous people and communities are characterised as