Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: On Radical Hope in Dark Times

252 Pages·2023·8.833 MB·English

by  Olivia Guntarik

Indigenous Resistance
in the Digital Age
On Radical Hope in Dark Times
Olivia Guntarik
Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age
Olivia Guntarik
Indigenous Resistance
in the Digital Age
On Radical Hope in Dark Times
Introduced by Michael Taussig
Olivia Guntarik
School of Media and Communication
RMIT University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-031-17294-6 ISBN 978-3-031-17295-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17295-3
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Warriors
Olivia Guntarik
How might we meet the wretched of the Earth?
In care, to bloom or soar; in keeping songs.
Water, fire and air to land belongs.
In memories dark or in times of dearth,
To raise a voice, to march, to die, to birth.
Lest we not dwell on reconciling wrongs.
We bear a weight, a part of me still longs.
to fight, not grow, restore, reclaim, give worth.
For this is how the makers mark the world.
Accuse. Defend. We dare still level blame.
Communal struggle, hearts forever beat.
Warriors: eyes ablaze and bodies hurled.
Roots clenched to pregnant ground, the perfect flame.
we act, reflect, unbounded to our feet.
For Jungarrayi
Dedicated to
Salama “Tina” bin Sualan 1923–2009
Muliah Longguk “Molly” Guntarik 1949–2004
Tumbaki 1925–2008
Ratini 1957–1959
Tapiah “Matilda” 1947–
Golubi Guntarik 1951–
Banius bin Guntolik 1954–
Tuinie “Wendy” 1955–
Toimie “Amy” 1964–
Uillie “Twilly” 1966–
Tanah Muliah Guntarik-Davis 2005–
Anaé Suzanne Guntarik-Davis 2009–
And to the courage of all the Indigenous women in the world
F : B M T
oreword y ichael aussig
The Sorcerer’s Song
By Way of An Introduction
Olivia Guntarik has written us a coming-of-age song. She is listening,
listening hard, to the wind. It is howling on the edge of a continent newly
discovering itself with memories and longings other than those of the brief
spell of the European invasion. Her After-words arise at a Sydney beach. I
see her gazing at the open space of seagulls skimming the wave, kids play-
ing, and adults becoming kids again. That is the space of renewal I find in
this book (Fig. 1).
A good way to know a city, maybe the best, thought Walter Benjamin,
is to get lost while walking in it, which he aligned with taking hashish and
the montage rhythms of film. That parallels this book pulsing with the
energy of an end-run around the invasion that began a skip and a jump
from where she writes, eyes fixed on the horizon.
In an older European lore, sorcery proceeds largely by spells made of
words, as with the witches in Macbeth. Those spells may be chanted or
sung as well as involve bodily action, which is what I feel in this book.
Then comes the intermezzo with its humming, perhaps, or empty spaces
combined with storytelling and day-dreaming one foot after the other
lost-in-the-city walking in which things talk with things.
Spells proceed as a kinda poetry with piercing visual images. The sounds
of the words are likely to be as dominant as their meaning. Clap sticks
help. A lot. Like humming they are the membrane where bodies meet; my
body, your body, and the body of the world.
xi
xii FOREWORD: BY MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Fig. 1 Place of Thunder
On the Australian shore and elsewhere, spells may come with dreams as
Butcher Joe tells it in Reading the Country. First comes the dream, which
acquires a story-shape, and then you make its song. Surrealists tried their
hand at this, too. If you sleep close to Butcher Joe, be prepared for a
bumpy night in which spirit visitors hold forth. Small things, everyday
things, become mysterious and excite the landscape. Things look different
then. In Murngin-land, Gulf of Carpentaria, as recorded in the late 1920s
“Song of the Whitefish,” it is said that the sorcerers from the south learnt
sorcery from stones that walk like humans, providing a sorcery that kills in
tempo with the tides swelling the belly, then receding, till death occurs.
Who could not be interested in what it’s like to be where stones “walk like
men” and teach humans risky stuff that resonates with moon and tide.
“Blood will have blood,” says a frightened Macbeth. “Stones have been
known to move and trees to speak.”1
1 Macbeth, Act 4, scene 3.
FOREWORD: BY MICHAEL TAUSSIG xiii
To use the word “sorcery” in place of magic is to displace sugary won-
derlands by real-life struggles over bodies, animate and inanimate, massa-
cres, and rape, not to mention that mind-numbing bureaucratese of
“death in custody.” Stepping aside from sugary wonderlands is achieved
not by abandoning our many mother tongues but, like the wind, by run-
ning them together through melodies that, in imitating history’s cruel
twists and turns, gains power. Looking out from the beach at the endless
beyond you too might start to sing like the sorcerer. Give it a shot.
Indigeneity is central to this parable and that incurs the force of colonial
fantasy wherein non-Europeans were assumed to harbor occult powers
that included Jews and Roma as well as the peoples of Global South. This
made such people objects of fear and hatred as well as possessed of powers
to heal and make miraculous things happen. That is what you experience
as the wind winds its way through the pages that follow.
Brooklyn, NY, USA Mick Taussig
June 30, 2022