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It's time the Indian community acknowledged First Peoples ' ownership of the land, and decolonised our perspective on arts practice

BYAPARNA ANANTHUNI

At the time of the first E u ropean settlem ent, dus area was occupied by the Yalnkit- Willam clan. lt is now over 180 years si nce the Europeans have en tered our cotmtry. They came up on our sacr ed river, known as the Birrarung " A un ty Carolyn Briggs speaks s lowl )~ firmly. She is a Boonwurrung elder from Victor ia and a keeper of the llistory and genealogies of her people. Sbe is welcoming us to the country upon which we have all gathered, in the s u burb now known as Footscray. And she is telling us a story The story of the land on w h ich we stand. She is telling us about own e r ship, sacred ground, and most of all, respect. "Respecting sacred ground. We sh ould all acknowledge th e sacred ground on w luch we stand "

Sh e says the creator of d1e Boonwurrung, Bunjil, caught them co always welcome guests. But the guests must first pronuse two dungs: one, not to harm the land, and two, not to harm d1e duldre.n. T lus is w h ere it gets complicated a nd yet very simple as well. Because there is no d enying that the earliest 'guests' to dus land, w hose arrival evenmally led co dus p lace that we call the Commonwealth of Anstralia, a nation-stare, a 'modern' state, clid not make, and certainly didn't keep, d1ose promises. And that we who have come as later gnests, have ourselves in large part ignored t he original ownership and sanctity d1at beat beneath our feet as we walk and prosper in 'our' new country.

The place was Foorscray Community Arts Centre, and the event was Day 1 of Arcs Front, an extraordinary, three-d ay, physical and virtual gathering of arrists, arts workers, and art producers from all over the cotmtry. A n initiative of Feral Arts, the aim was to develop a share d vision fo r arts and culture in 2030.

This first clay was in fact designed by Arts Front's First Peoples Steering Comnlittee, who put to us two intertwined guesrioos to discuss:

How do we put First Peoples at the centre of atts practice?

How do 111e decolonise ourselves so as to decolonise this pmctice?

It's wo rth noting at this point that there we re exactly five Inclians (i ncluding myself) in d1e audience. And we combined with a group represenring Peril magazine to form the only meagre cohort of Asian artists, in a sea of Wes t ern practirioners. Before th e First Peoples delegation came in, people of colour were barely visible.

As formerly colo nised people of colour, Indians in Australia share, to a certain degree, in the marginalisation of views, pracrices, languages and histories that is the everyday reality of the First Australians.

And yet we also clistauce ourselves as a community from dus kind of post-colonial understanding of our place in Australia. \Ve stay insular, cultural, even exoric. But most importantly, we don't recognise the privilege inherent in our b eing able to express our cultural identiries at all, and to practice our arts free, in a superficial sense at least, of the colo1ual gaze. Tlus is not the experience of Indigenous Aus tralian s, for whom decolonisation continues to be an agonis ingly, nnfairly slow process. The F irst Peoples Commi ttee forced us co reckon with d1e urgency of this cask of putting them back into the centre of arts policy.

We were asked: How h11ve)'ON been deco/011ising J011r minds? Ho/JI haveJ'Otl been deco/011isingyo11rpractire? H 0111 haveyo11 been decolonising the thoughts 11po11 which you 're dcpC11di11g? Knowing that so much ef colonialism is travellingfonvard into thejitture if 1ve all don't decolonise our 111i11dr togethe1:

1ve needyou t,0 active!J go 011! there and think about what it is to be decolonised.

To not do so, we were told frankly, is to erase lncligenous cul ture, and Indigenous peoples themselves

To take a s imple but powerful example of putting First Peoples at the centre: the first ac tiv ity o f the day was an introduction activity, where everyone in the room had to begin their introduction wid1 the name of the traclicio n al owners of the land that they lived or worked on. J\fany people alteacly knew, others said they would have to look it up Just doing this exercise, though, alte red the atmosphere, and changed the picture. For here was what Aunty Caro lyn was speaking of, given i ts rightful p lace: sacred ground, ownership, respect. lt is srill rare for us as an Inclian community to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land upon wluch we meet for our many concerts, festivals, celebrations Furthermore, we view the mainstream arts space, and our position in relation to it, tl1rough a lens that nusses the arts practice of traditio nal owners. It is rime we understand that to not acknowledge th em speaks to a lack of acknowledgement of our own colonisation, and, conseguently, a lack of respect for the llistories of Indigenous Australians. Histories that still permeate d1e.ir lives today.

It is also time to come out from our self-enclosure in d1e "cultural" space, and move forward, with organisations like Feral Arts, to envi sion a new future for d1e arts in Australia A decolonised future A future that respects sacred ground

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