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Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: On Radical Hope in Dark Times - Original PDF
Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: On Radical Hope in Dark Times - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Olivia Guntarik خلاصه: 1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Wild Things Written with my mountain home and First custodians Aki Nabalu and Odu Nabalu This is a chapter about place and Indigenous resistance. I am writing out of the politics of the two homelands I occupy in my mind as an Indigenous woman moving between two worlds. My voice is the bridge between two worlds. Places are never captured precisely in words or pictures. They are always more. Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak on Borneo island, is dotted with rock edges. Before it was damaged by an earthquake in 2015, one rockface took the shape of a donkey’s ear and was named so. It was the image that came to mind for the person who named it long ago but I have to say: What a diminutive title! I have to muse when this person looked up to that enor- mous pinnacle whether he heard a donkey’s ‘hee-haw’ braying down to him. Conservationist David Attenborough climbed Mount Kinabalu in 1975, describing a landscape of magical beauty. Granite pinnacles jutted skyward. The sky seemed to move as you climbed, as did the rockpools at the peak reflecting the stars. We learn the ascent was challenging, that nature came bearing gifts. Wild myrtle, rhododendrons, orchids, ferns. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Guntarik, Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17295-3_1 2 Fig. 1.1 Mount Kinabalu from Kundasang. My grandfather Tumbaki, my mother Molly and my aunty Wendy. Photo credit Moffen Gondoloi Gifts that carried not just life but ominous signs. Pitcher plants shimmered with poison water, tricking insects in a dance of death. And so we learn of nature’s realities. Life and death, doom and gloom, smoldering side-by-side. Words. Pictures. A perspective from high up. Reading his words today, Attenborough’s (1975) nature walk up the mountain rumbles with sound. Frogs bleeeerrk-bleeeerrk at the lower reaches. Birds trill louder and louder farther up the trail. Birds in this part of the world do not fly away on approach; so tame, they scurry at the walker’s feet in a cheeky game of chasey. Come play with us, the birds seem to sing. At the top, where I imagine the walkers resting, perhaps stooping to drink water from mirrored rockpools, the icy wind cuts through bodies razor sharp. But oh how the top is worth the hike! The panorama magnifi- cent—even as you become more conscious of your breath, wind howling in your ears. Imagine this: terrestrial moss, lichen, liverwort, tiny trees clinging to rock icicles for dear life. Imagine the sounds and sights, sacred custodian of my homeland Aki Nabalu tells me. O. GUNTARIK 3 Let us consider this and listen, sings another custodian Oku Nabalu. Both of them are caretakers of this mountain place. My original home. Custodian ancestors help us tell the histories of place and the legacies of our survival. They are our original storytellers. They evidence the ways storytelling pioneer modes of knowing, merging animal and human, the wild and the tame, nature and machine to draw attention to the political dimensions of our existence (see Seton 1898; Cloos 1954; Carson 1962). This politics draws out the musical nature of stories to crystallize purpose and meaning. Listen to the words, for instance, of Australian poet Eileen Chong (2021, 73). ‘There is merit// in quietude, in the precise layering of sound, /image, and object. In the simple acts of walking, /waiting/and witnessing’. A precision to sound, image, object. An intention. Image and object and language come into play for me too. Words offer ways to see, to hear, to read the landscape. The world tilts like an optical illusion or like the multicoloured gems in a child’s kaleidoscope into new configurations of speech. Poets sculpt history into story. So I must pose new questions of life, nature and humankind. I am that tree clinging to bare life on the mountain. Maybe it takes more balls to survive and to talk this way. We need a new way to think about theory, to bring ideas into practice and the world. Praxis we might say. Activism working with reflection, as Paulo Freire (1968) claims. So I am reflecting with Attenborough and the First Custodians on a “sound walk” up a mountain ridge that today rises above a surrounding plateau of a disappearing jungle with a disconcerting backdrop. Dwindling rice plantations. An invasive eyesore of African palm. This is also the home- land of my ancestors: Dusun people, an Indigenous hilltribe of Borneo who were once subsistence farmers. Who share land with the governing Malay, and multiple generations of Indian and Chinese migrants, along with more than sixty Indigenous groups. It is an incisive and empowering moment in my readings of walks through the wilderness, reseeing a don- key’s ear and ‘other peaks...labelled rather unimaginatively...I could not help reflecting that local Dusun names would have been far more appro- priate and musical.’ Attenborough’s words (1975, 103).

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