This Is Not Your Land, These Are Not Your Stories. Pagan Use & Misuse Of Indigenous Spaces.

In the Flinders Ranges somewhere, a group of women gather for an empowerment ritual. Their feet slapping the ground, and hips gyrating as they sing the names of various goddesses in unison, inviting the energy of the very earth beneath their feet to flow into them, honouring their connection to this land.

There's just one problem; the very spot they are dancing upon is considered a sacred site by the land's traditional owners - a fact they have been informed of, numerous times, and yet chosen to ignore.

This is not your land.

Elsewhere a father, well versed in an eclectic based pagan path, regales his son with stories of The Dreamtime. The tale he weaves incorporates not only elements from the traditional indigenous storytellers, those who first told of The Dreaming, or sang the sacred songs that connected them to country, but elements more familiar to a pathway that has its basis in a hodge podge mix of English based cunningfolk traditions, and Asian mysticism.

He has no connection to The Dreaming, and the The Dreamtime stories he so readily shares are part of a greater tradition he isn't part of, and chooses not to fully understand. But still it adds a nice layer of earnestness to the earth connected practice he shares with his family; what harm is there in that.

These are not your stories.

At the base of Uluru a pagan couple, wishing to honour the love and partnership they have forged over the past five years, bend to leave offerings of food and wine to the spirits they believe inhabit this sacred rock. Later that same food will spoil, the wine will sour, and they will have fulfilled their promise to one another to stand atop Uluru and thank the gods of their practice for all that is, and all that is to come.

As they descend they delight not only in the landscape they have walked upon, but the stories of the great monolith they have heard from the traditional owners. Back at their remote campsite they talk of of how deeply spiritual it would be to incorporate the ancestral spirits of the traditional owners of the land into their own nightly ritual of the moon.

This is not your land. These are not your stories.

As people who traverse a wide range of earth and nature based pathways, we often feel we have an automatic connection with indigenous peoples, that somehow their beliefs are also ours to tack onto whatever our own beliefs and practices are - like some sort of spiritual 'pin the tail on the donkey'. But the fact is unless we have sort out the elders of the indigenous tribes, whose beliefs we otherwise would be trampling upon, and sat and listened and learnt what is the right and wrong way to practice; unless we have engaged in a respectful search to understand what is and isn't possible to incorporate into our own personal spirituality; unless we have had specfic tutelage in all of these matters, then this is not our land to trample on, and these are not our stories to butcher in the name of 'spirituality'.

So much has already been taken from the indigenous people's of this land, so much loss and heartbreak and intergenerational trauma that still runs deep through the very life blood of their bodies. As practitioners of spiritual paths that perhaps deviate from the mainstream norm, let us not continue to steal the very heart and soul of their culture as well.

This is not our land. These are not our stories.

#wicca #pagan #paganism #entitlement #indigenous #traditionallandowners #aboriginal #sacred #culturalappropriation