In the Desert, They Don't Remember Your Name

This is a break in the usual aspirational musings regarding the pursuit of societal excellence as I, Eudemoniatic, turn my lens and laser to the remote indigenous community of Yuendumu. 

While I was at first unsure as to whether this blog was the right space for my reflections on how to mediate conflict and violence in a remote community, I have decided that the coalface and field of flux found in between two vastly different cultures is in fact the perfect location for musings on human flourishing. I will however be taking a more reflective tone, as it is important that I regularly buff my cultural lens to be sure of my own bias. If I start pronouncing "universal truths" somebody please flick me on the nose or ear.

A brief update: since I was last active on the blogosphere, a few shifts have occurred. In my life's search for meaning I have been preoccupied with the question of justice. What is it? What does it do? How do we know when a situation is just? This was sparked from an early age through a feeling of being somehow wronged. This feeling of castigastion, from a seed of rage in my childhood germinated into vicious and self-destructive ideation in my early twenties. After a two year depressive period (internalised rage), many hours in therapy and what felt like many hours in the plant-induced psychospiritual space, I got to a place where I confronted  the root of this feeling of injustice that had been present since early childhood, and put it to rest. I no longer feel oppressed by a sense of injustice, but rather motivated to help bring more balance, wellbeing and justice into the world. I am as happy, fulfilled and full of hubris as the next hippy starchild. 

I've discovered that assisting people to negotiate interpersonal challenges in a way that empowers is the kind of justice I was seeking when I enrolled in Law. Unlike the legal process, which locates power in an external 'judgment' of right or wrong, conflict resolution locates power within the people having the conflict, and assists them to make empowering decisions - to own both the process and the result. 

A series of leg-ups from unnamed but deeply appreciated benefactors has put me where I am today: an accredited mediator, working as the Community Safety Coordinator in the indigenous remote community of Yuendumu.

Yuendumu is one of the larger remote communities in central Australia, with a population of roughly 1000. I say roughly because indigenous mobility values mean that the tides of people ebb and flow daily, as the shifting sands of relationships and alignments sculpt a new permutation of extended network of Walpiri people in a moment-by-moment mediation of what it means to be connected to kin. Family is King here in the heart of Australia, and without wrapping your head around the strength of kinship ties, nothing makes much sense.

Main st, Yuendumu

Wrapping your head around anything out here is a challenge. From the slicken green and gray of the easy streets of Melbourne to the red dust expanse on the southern edge of the Tanami Desert, acclimating has been a steep process. The light is harsh here. No cloud cover means that shadows are stark and unforgiving. The desert people - Walpiri - don't typically make eye contact, but they have a way of looking right through you and seem to see all the mixed motivations that can bring a person here. There is nowhere to hide in the desert. 

Some inter-cultural tensions are already manifesting, brewing inside me as well as fomenting through the town. The appropriateness of: violence, welfare, accountability, aspirations and deep oppositional cultural assumptions are already on my radar as 'hotspots' to keep an eye on as my thoughts and feelings change in response to lived experience shared with Walpiri. 

One moment between myself and a Walpiri coworker serves as an apt example: when talking about visiting a neighboring community for the day he asked me if I could give him some money for lunch. This is very normal and known as a 'humbug'; pestering for money. For us western mob, the fact that we earn the same amount of money and are grown adults make the request ridiculous. Self-sufficiency is valued highly. But for Walpiri, everyone shares everything, and denying a request is a denial of relatedness. So he was asking me as he likely had given his paycheck to his relatives. I explained that I had given my paycheck to the petrol barons of the Stuart highway and offered him a packed lunch instead. "Same problem as the last boss" he mutters. "Bugger offers me food when I ask for money". 

So here I am. I have my work cut out for me. My first day on the ground saw an inter-family dispute escalate to a multi-car smash up: twenty or so family members descended on the house of an opposing family, smashing cars, throwing rocks and punches as the sun set over the footy oval. This is not uncommon, though not the norm. Conflict and violence is a part of life here, and assisting the community to find other ways of relating is impeded by many things; some of western artifice, some that were already here. 

But more on that later.