An Indigenous Peoples’ Statement to the World

Delivered at The Parliament of the World’s Religions

Convened at Melbourne, Australia

on the Traditional Lands

of the Wurundjeri  People of the Kulin Nation

December 9, 2009

PREAMBLE

In keeping with the theme of this year’s Parliament: “Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth,” We, the Indigenous Peoples participating in this Parliament hereby issue this statement:

We are Indigenous Peoples and Nations who honor our ancestors and care for our future generations by preserving our lands and cultures. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have maintained a fundamental and sacred relationship with Mother Earth. As peoples of the land, we declare our inherent rights to our present and continuing survival within our sacred homelands and territories throughout the world;

We commend the Australian government’s recent support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We call on all governments to support and implement the provisions of the UN Declaration.

Since time immemorial we have lived in keeping with our sacred laws, principles, and spiritual values, given by the Creator. Our ways of life are based on thousands of years of accumulated ecological knowledge, a great respect for our Mother Earth, a reverence and respect for all our Natural World relations and the survival of our languages, cultures, and traditions.

The Indigenous instructions of sharing and the responsibility of leadership to future generations are wise and enduring. As the traditional nations of our lands we affirm the right to educate our children in our earth-based education systems in order to maintain our indigenous knowledge systems and cultures. These have also contributed to our spiritual, physical and mental health;

Indigenous peoples concept of health and survival is holistic, collective and individual.

It encompasses the spiritual, the intellectual, the physical and the emotional. Expressions of culture relevant to health and survival of Indigenous Peoples includes relationships, families, and kinship, social institutions, traditional laws, music, dances, songs and songlines, ceremonies and dreamtime, our ritual performances and practices, games, sports, language, mythologies, names, land, sea, water, every life forms, and all documented forms and aspects of culture, including burial and sacred sites, human genetic materials, ancestral remains, so often stolen, and our artifacts;

Unfortunately, certain doctrines have been threatening to the survival of our cultures, our languages, and our peoples, and devastating to our ways of life. These are found in particular colonizing documents such as the Inter Caetera papal bull of 1493, which called for the subjugation of non-Christian nations and peoples and “the propagation of the Christian empire.” This is the root of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that is still interwoven into laws and policies today that must be changed. The principles of subjugation contained in this and other such documents, and in the religious texts and documents of other religions, have been and continue to be destructive to our ways of life (religions), cultures, and the survival of our Indigenous nations and peoples. This oppressive tradition is what led to the boarding schools, the residential schools, and the Stolen Generation, resulting in the trauma of language death and loss of family integrity from the actions of churches and governments. We call on those churches and governments to put as much time, effort, energy and money into assisting with the revitalization of our languages and cultures as they put into attempting to destroy them.

The doctrines of colonization and dominion have laid the groundwork for contemporary problems of racism and dispossession. These problems include the industrial processes of resource exploitation and extraction by governments and corporations that has consistently meant the use of imposed laws to force the removal of Indigenous peoples from our traditional territories, and to desecrate and destroy our sacred sites and places. The result is a great depletion of biodiversity and the loss of our traditional ways of life, as well as the depletion and contamination of the waters of Mother Earth from mining and colonization.

Such policies and practices do not take into account that water is the first law of life and a gift from the Creator for all beings. Clean, healthy, safe, and free water is necessary for the continuity and well being of all living things. The commercialization and poisoning of water is a crime against life.

The negative ethics of contemporary society, discovery, conquest, dominion, exploitation, extraction, and industrialization, have brought us to today’s crisis of global warming. Climate change is now our most urgent issue and affecting the lives of indigenous peoples at an alarming rate. Many of our people’s lives are in crisis due to the rapid global warming. The ice melt in the north and rapid sea rise continue to accelerate, and the time for action is brief.

The Earth’s resources are finite and the present global consumption levels are unsustainable and continue to affect our peoples and all peoples. Therefore, we join the other members of the Parliament in calling for prompt, immediate, and effective action at Copenhagen to combat climate change;

On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In support of this historic event, the Episcopalian Church in the United States adopted a resolution at its 76^th General Convention in July 2009, repudiating and disavowing the dehumanizing Doctrine of Christian Discovery. By doing so, the Church took particular note of the charter issued by King Henry VII of England to John Cabot and his sons, which authorized the colonizing of North America. It was by this ‘boss over’ tradition of Christian discovery that the British crown eventually laid claim to the traditional territories of the Aboriginal nations of the continent now called Australia, under terra nullius and terra nullus. This step by the Episcopalian Church was an act of conscience and moral leadership by one of the world’s major religions. Religious bodies of Quakers and Unitarians have taken similar supportive actions.

In Conclusion, we appeal to all people of conscience to join with us: We hereby call upon Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican to publicly acknowledge and repudiate the papal decrees that legitimized the original activities that have evolved into the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Dominion.

Click here to download this document.

From the Lewis and Clark Law Library,

Indigenous Peoples at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne Australia called for the Catholic Church to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery.

Indian Country Today reported in part: “The Doctrine, a fundamentally racist philosophy from the 15th century, continues to allow powerful nation-states to dehumanize people and devastate the living earth in their endless search for resources and markets, the delegation said.

Indigenous peoples from around the world, including a Haudenosaunee delegation, attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Australia Dec. 3 – 9. The Parliament is an interfaith organization formed in 1893 “to cultivate harmony among the world’s religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its guiding institutions in order to achieve a just, peaceful and sustainable world.” It meets every five years.

While the delegates came from diverse geographies and cultures, they easily unified around the intersecting themes of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and climate change. . .

Click here to read more.

World Religions Get Down to Earth

by Trebbe Johnson

“Sensually, it was a panoply of colorful raiment, ceremonies, liturgies, and languages from around the world.  Spiritually, the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, held December 3-9 in Melbourne, Australia, had the feeling of a quest, or rather thousands of individual quests pursued by people who came together not just to espouse their own beliefs but to explore together how to solve some of the world’s most grievous problems.  “Making a World of Difference: Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth” was the theme of this gathering held in the soaring, light-filled Melbourne Convention Center on the bank of the Yarra River, int he ancestral homeland of the aboriginal Wurundjeri people.  For a week, six thousand participants from eighty countries, representing religious and spiritual traditions old and new, shared one another’s worship services; attended 662 talks, panel discussions, and films; and exchanged ideas, prayers, and email addresses.

The first Parliament of World Religions took place in Chicago in 1893, the second not until one hundred years later, again in the Windy City.  Cape Town, Barcelona, and now Melbourne have hosted subsequent gatherings.  Since the beginning, the concept of what the parliament has to offer, and to whom, has changed radically.”

Click here to download the full article (pdf)

Trebbe Johnson is the founder and director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a non-profit organization devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places. She writes frequently on the relationship of myth, nature, and spirit and is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved. She lives in rural Pennsylvania.

Australia’s ABC TV youth video team covers Day 4 of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, Melbourne, focusing on Indigenous Peoples.

This paper by the Head of State of Samoa, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi, was written especially for the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, Melbourne.

His Highness thoroughly discusses many aspects of Samoan Indigenous religious culture, drawing both from his personal experience and extensive academic research.  He addresses and confronts the struggle to speak openly about subjects considered by some to be inappropriate.  In his own words,

[T]his paper is a continuation of a search, one that began many years ago. What I hope to generate here, as before, is an openness to dialogue about the good and bad of our indigenous knowledges. I hope to reaffirm the need for forums for open and constructive sharing; forums powerful enough to impel a desire amongst teachers and scholars to speak and write with clarity, rigour, passion and pride about the poetry, logic and nuances – the beauty – of our Samoan indigenous religious culture; forums where the not so beautiful aspects can also be probed and debated.

Click here to read the full article (pdf)

by Robert A. Cathey, Professor of Theology at McCormick Theological Seminary

The presence and witness of indigenous religious leaders from Australia (the so-called ‘Aboriginals’), New Zealand (the Moira), Pacific Island nations, Africa, Asia, the Artic, North and South America was one of the most distinctive dimensions of the fifth Parliament of the World’s Religions that occurred in the Melbourne, Australia Convention and Exhibition Centre, December3 – 9, 2009. With strong financial support from the Australian government, the regional government of Victoria and the city of Melbourne, every plenary session and program session of this Parliament began with recognition of the indigenous ancestors and elders who cared for the region of Victoria and Melbourne before the arrival of European colonizers in the 1700s.

Click here to read the full article

Kusumita Pedersen discusses the impact of the 2009 Parliament in Interreligious Insight: a Journal of Dialogue and Engagement!.  The article highlights issues of climage change, Indigenous peoples, women in Afghanistan, and the maturing of the interreligious movement.

Kusumita P. Pedersen is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis College in New York, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions and Co-Chair of the Interfaith Center of New York.

Click here to read the full article (pdf).

In an op-ed published today in one of the United States’ most prestigious publications — The Washington Post — major speaker Katherine Marshall extols the fact and potential of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.  By focusing on topics such as poverty, climate change, the role of women of faith and indigenous peoples, Margaret presents a vision of “a fresh determination to mobilize the energies and creativity…”

To read the full story, click here.

What is the Parliament about? Quite simply, We Are All in This Together.  Which is why we’ve just published seven great public-service announcements in connection with our upcoming Parliament in Melbourne. In addition to the video I linked above, there are six others, each corresponding to the subthemes of this year’s event.

For an approach to the problem of Healing the Earth with Care and Concern and the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples, watch this video.

The subtheme of Overcoming Poverty in an Unequal World is an issue confronted in this video.

This video announcement addresses the question of Securing Food and Water for All People.

Does peace come about at the expense of justice or must one be present for the other?  The pressing dilemma of Building Peace in the Pursuit of Justice is pondered in this video PSA.

What is meant by “Creating Social Cohesion in Village and City?”  Find out in this video.

Finally, witness the process of Sharing Wisdom in the Search for Inner Peace in this video announcement.