Aboriginal Spirituality Research Paper

Source 1 displays a Indigenous prayer ceremony to prepare for Christmas. The ceremony is influenced by Aboriginal culture such as their connection with the land and the spirits of the First Peoples. For Aborigines “all objects are living and share the same soul and spirit as them”. Spirituality is heavily incorporated into the everyday lives of Aboriginals. Spirituality can be defined as the sense of a connection to something bigger than yourself and involves a search for the meaning of life.

Traditionally, Indigenous people pass on cultural traditions from one generation to the next. This includes rituals, performances, language and knowledge of sacred site and cultural objects.

A great sense of trust supports this mutual ‘give-take’ relationship. ‘If you take care of country, country will take care of you.’ These beliefs are totemist and animist, which basically means Aboriginals perceive all natural objects to possess a spirit or soul. While totems are quite significant within Aboriginal culture as they act as symbols in a system of beliefs, signifying a relationship between an individual or group and an animal or plant. Thus, creating a link between the human, natural and supernatural worlds. As the word ‘totem’ comes from a Native American language where it represents group membership; and literally means is ‘he/she/it is a relative of mine’.

spirituality. Aboriginal spirituality is passed on orally by elders through myths and rituals. Without knowledge of their traditional languages, young people could not learn about the spiritual beliefs of their people. This spirituality was all encompassing, affecting not only their thoughts about the spirit world but also their knowledge of places, plants and animals and traditional skills such as fishing, trapping, and tanning (Blair et al., 2002, p. 96). As Steckley and Cummins have pointed out, without access to the elders’ knowledge of nature, young people lost access to the beliefs and practices their people had developed over thousands of years (2001, p. 17). Therefore, the loss of language led to the loss of traditional spiritual beliefs and

"Aboriginal people are a steady beating heart at the centre of our Australian spiritual identity."

Spirituality often can be classified to an ultimate or immaterial reality or inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. This can be true for the aboriginal people, whose concept of spirituality is derived from the concept of the Dreaming, where the roots lie in a variety of stories, ceremonies, values and structures. In the beginning many people held on to what ever they could, holding on to their idea of themselves a connection to the families that they left behind. However, in order to wipe away any thought or lingering feelings “many masks, regalia. And ritual artifacts were confiscated and burned as pagan works of the devil- or simply held and later sold for profit.”[7] This was devastating as many lost whatever connection they had to the outside world, their families and their spirituality. While in residential schools “Children were taught that the beliefs of their

"For Indigenous Australians the land is the core of all spirituality." (www.dreamtime.net.au, 2003, p.1). All land is important in some way, but some places are more sacred than others. These 'sacred

Spirituality for Aboriginal people is more than the Christian concept of religion or the word "Dreaming" as applied by non-Aboriginal anthropologists. For Aboriginal people, "Dreaming" is not a dream, but a reality embodying Aboriginal "thought" or state of mind where people were one with the land and all that moved upon it. In this worldview humans and the natural species were all part of the same ongoing life force.

To better understand Aboriginals as a Dream Culture I want to give more insight into Aboriginal Australians general culture and their conceptions of “Dream Time.” In his discussion of religion, Mircea Eliade describes a concept of Cosmos vs Chaos (Eliade 1957). In this notion an unordered world is chaotic only until is it transposed during a sacred time: “By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos though a ritual repetition of the cosmogony” (Eliade 1957:31). In other words until a land is tamed or created it is considered unordered. This can be applied to Aboriginal’s understanding of the world prior to their current presence. Aboriginals believe that in a time before the Dreamings, the land and world was a featureless earth. It was not until the dreamtime, or time of creation: “where there is contact with appearances from both realms of inside the earth itself as from ill-defined upper region” that the earth began to have its composed landscapes (Cowan 1992:26). The Dream Time is not only a period but more of a dimension where ancestral beings moved across the earth and created not only land, but every aspect of the earth including animals, plants, and man. It is important to realize that the ancestors created the natural earth and that is why Aboriginals live a particular lifestyle. Most Aboriginals living in this cosmogony are hunter-gatherer tribes. This aspect of their life can be traced to stem from the idea of

Aboriginals or indigenous Australians are the native people of Australia. Aboriginals were nomadic people who came to Australia about 40,000 – 60,000 years ago from Southeast Asia. Religion is a great part of Aboriginal culture. The essay answers these questions: What do Aboriginals belief? What is a Kinship system? What is Dreaming and Dreamtime? What rituals does Aboriginals have?

Molly related an experience with four Oglala Sioux shamans: "When asked about what was wakan ("holy," "mysterious"), said, 'Every object in the world has a spirit and that spirit is wakan. Thus the spirit[s] of the tree or things of that kind, while not like the spirit of man, are also wakan.' " (2005, p. 41) Believing that each tree has a spirit, each animal is a brother or sister, each rock and hill has a life force would alter your perception of the world. Your feelings toward those things might be changed a bit, knowing that they have as much life in them as you do. Black Elk, a Native American, said, " We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples." (Goffman, 2005) Whether a tribal culture believed in a Great Spirit, or Mother Earth, or felt that a certain tree held a powerful spirit, many of the native religions worshiped the earth and held it in a highly sacred regard. "To say that nature is full of spirits can be a way of affirming the presence of both a universal life force and an essential, underlying sacredness." (Molly, 2005, p. 41) Molloy continues:

The belief in kinship with creation is widely supported within most indigenous religions. In this way of thinking, there is more importance placed on the concept of “we” than there is on the concept of “I”. Here, the family or village is where strong emphasis lies. In many indigenous traditions, developing and maintaining a respectful relationship with spiritual energy is paramount. This concept doesn’t only apply to humans, but also, in many cases to the immediate natural environment as well. The oneness of the body and the land is vital. Many think of themselves as mere ‘caretakers’ of the earth, and nothing more, who has a duty to nurture and preserve it for future generations. Certain animals are seen as spiritual conduits, just as certain trees are seen to impart herbal healing secrets.

contemporary aboriginal & European relations. Last Indian Residential School in Canada closed (in BC last one closed in 1984).

These myths and rituals were also a source of inspiration for much aboriginal art, including paintings, carved objects, symbolic weapons and poetic chants. The forms of art varied according to region, with differences in the decoration of objects and weapons depending on local myths and traditions.

Australian Aborigines believe that to destroy or damage a sacred site threatens not only the present inhabitants but also the spiritual inhabitants of the land. Broome described that "Each tribe believed that its boundaries were fixed and validated by the stories about the movements of their ancestors, and therefore there was no reason to desire or try to possess the country of another group: it would have seemed meaningless to them since their creation stories only related to their own piece of territory" (14). Australian Aborigines traveled around a land that was a symbolic and religious world. There were not simply rocks, trees, and watering holes but they were objects and places that the great ancestors had created and places where they still lived. The Aboriginal culture stressed continuity over change.