Kayaking over Sea Country. Photograph by Dean Greeno. ©Dean Greeno. All rights reserved.

Western navigators named the Sea Country around Tayaritja the ‘Bass Strait’ after an early coloniser. There are a few of our names known for this area, but the context surrounding the naming and its uses within the language are restricted to community.

We are saltwater people. We care for and observe our traditional resources within Sea, Land and Sky Country. This includes the interrelated observation of weather, ocean currents, species migration, predator, prey, spawning and nursery places. It is knowledge derived from ancestors who lived this worldly perspective knowing that to care for fish, birds, kangaroos, seals, shells, water reeds, and kelp allows us to carry out cultural creative practices. This highlights that caring for Country is caring for ourselves.

Pakana look long, not short. We do things for generations, not political cycles. Pakana see time wholistically and interrelation-ally across the many traditional influences and indicators, such as the changes in food, and resource, or species migration, and connected ancestral knowledges. We have responsibilities to the generations yet to come, to the Country that is an ancient living being that cares for the many sacred libraries and sites that connect us across time to our geospatial past.

Some traditional knowledge is women’s only business and it is not my place to share. The knowledge is sacred and can only be shared in specific places to specific people. We are often asked to describe Country simply, but this is akin to translating the 30 descriptive contextual Inuit words for snow into one word. Sometimes translation is colonisation because it is arrogant and one-sided. The Pakana perspective or agency gets discarded when translated to coloniser and only the coloniser voice gets heard.

Indigenous perspectives are valuable to Indigenous people, they are not a commodity that requires marketing to colonial people. If colonial people don’t get it, that’s good, that means our knowledges will be safe in our hands. The Western lens or supposed mainstream perspective, that currently believes itself to be the dominating knowledge paradigm, has become the current tool used by Indigenous people to translate knowledges we wish to share. This perspective says that Tayaritja, where my recent ancestors grew up, are the island remnants of what were once high points of a land bridge. However, Pakana see it in an alternative lens.

Consider ‘Bass Strait’ as a stream whose crossing stones have been temporarily covered by the water. When the water drops the crossing stones, cultural pathways, bush tracks, previous living sites and sacred ceremonial sites are still there. These underwater sites are part of our knowledge library. They connect to other above ground libraries and knowledge systems. We see Lutruwita as inclusive of the area that made up the ‘land bridge’ and we see ‘Bass Strait’ as living Sea Country.

I observe coasts, oceans and waterways which are being impacted by climate change. I explore the ways traditional knowledge passed down by Elders can help with creating solutions or potential mitigations. This work includes long term observations made by many generations of families who have made detailed notes of these changes.

I advocate for Western knowledge to take a step back, and down, so that Indigenous knowledge can step up. Western science at its base is philosophically and politically broken. Research and development are now almost solely geared towards supporting an industrial, consumerist philosophy of life’s resources. This is why we have such a badly wounded climate. Triaging climate issues using the current Western science lens is akin to sticking a band aid on an amputated limb.

A respected international Elder, Dr Albert Marshall of the Esksasoni Mi’kmaw Nation of Cape Breton Island, northeast of Turtle Island (also known as North and Central America), speaks of the translation tool ‘two-eyed seeing’. He describes it as ‘learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye using mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all.’

Our lives have become governed by political 3-year cycles. Counterbalance this measure of time with land bridge knowledge and its associated song lines within Pakana and mainland First Nations, which is characterised by patience and looking long.

The Western community has become stuck doing laps in its own ever-shrinking knowledge-filled goldfish bowl, ignoring ancestral knowledges from people who have been looking after Country since the last ice age. The difference between us is, it is the Pakana watching the Western folks doing the laps in the goldfish bowl. We are waiting for them to ask and listen. 

Dean Greeno standing in front of the artwork he produced with his father Rex. The exhibition is called ‘Senior Craftsman Rex Greeno and son Dean Greeno’, and was part of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022. Photograph by Dean Greeno. ©Dean Greeno. All rights reserved.