I should preface my remarks this evening—and I must say that this will not be an entirely hopeful talk, and for that I apologize—with some explanations of how I came to live with—to try to live with, really—the Wiideema.
When I finished my doctoral studies among the Navajo of the American Southwest, I realized, as many students do, that I knew less at the end than I did in the beginning. That is, so much of what I took to be the objective truth when I started—things as self-evident, say, as Copernicus’s arrangement of the inner planets—became so diluted by being steeped in another epistemology that simultaneously I came to grasp the poverty of my own ideas and the eternity of paradox within Navajo thought.
Let me put this to you in another way. When I finished my work among the Navajo—or, to be both more precise and more honest, when I gave up among the Navajo—I had as my deepest wish that someone among them would have been studying my way of knowing the world. I might have been more capable then of accepting the Navajo as true intellectual companions, and not, as has happened to so many of us, have ended up feeling disillusionment, even despair, with my own culture. I believe I would have been able to grasp our expression of Beauty Way, and in that sense I would have fallen back in love with my own people.
But it did not work this way. My postdoctoral studies brought me here, to Austin, where I declared I wanted to look at something I’d never studied before—among people I’d have to go out and find, an undiscovered people. On the strength of my work with the Navajo—and, again, to be candid with you, although I learned to speak that extremely difficult language fluently and though, for example, I memorized the full nine days of Blessing Way prayers, the obsession cost me my marriage, my two children—on the strength of that earlier work, I was granted awards and fellowships by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Henry Solomon Memorial Trust. This financial support, and the regard with which my own department treated me—my teaching duties here were light to begin with, and I must acknowledge, embarrassing as it is, that I took them lightly—with all this underpinning, I set out to find a tribe of people with whom I could explore one idea—hunting.
The conventional wisdom on this, of course, is that there are no intact hunting cultures left in the wilder Southern Hemisphere—not in Africa, not in South America, not in Australia. I’d learned through a friend, however, that it was possible a few, small hunting bands might still exist uncontacted in the Western Desert, in Australia. So I went there immediately. I’ll be brief about this part of it. An important question—Why disturb these people if they are, indeed, there?—was one I deliberately ignored. I suppressed it, I will tell you, with a terrible intellectual strength. I importuned every professional acquaintance, until I got myself so well situated in the anthropological community I was able to arrange a small expedition, with the approval of the Central (Aboriginal) Land Council, into a region of Western Australia west of the Tanami Desert, where I was most hopeful of contacting a relict hunting band. It is now safe, though still compromising, to reveal that I lied to arrange this expedition, both to my friends and to the Land Council. I was not interested, as I claimed, in searching out the last refuges of rare marsupial animals and in comparing what I could learn of their biology and ecology with information gathered in conversations with local people and gleaned from scholarly publications on their hunting practices, belief systems, myths. I wanted to find a fresh people, and to pursue with them another idea.
When the Wiideema, in fact, found us—in the Northern Territory, technically, not in Western Australia, though the designation of course meant nothing to them—I was ecstatic. As soon as I realized the Wiideema were shadowing us—a fact I was the last to discover, though I believed I was the first—I contrived to abandon my white companions and our aboriginal guides. Under cover of darkness one night I simply walked out of camp. I’d not gone but a mile before I felt the presence, the subtle pressure, of other people. And there they were, standing like so many dark sticks in the sand among tufts of spinifex grass. Truly, it was as though they had materialized.
I made signs that I very much wished to join them and leave my companions. We walked that night until I was delirious with exhaustion. We slept the whole of the next day in the shade of some boulders, walked all the following night, and then did the same again, another two days. My exhaustion turned to impatience, impatience to anger, anger to despair, and despair to acquiescence. In this manner I was bled.
Through it all I took notes, most especially on hunting. My position during those first few weeks, however, could be construed as that of a camp dog. I was given scraps to eat, patted on the shoulder by some of the older women, was yelled at, and served as a source of laughter when performing ordinary tasks—making a double-secure tie in the laces of my boots, for example, or when I examined the binding on a spear shaft with a hand lens.
One day, having had more than my fill of this and being the butt of pranks—the children sniped at me in the same way their parents did, a probing but ultimately indifferent curiosity—I confronted one of the men, Karratumanta, and with a look of defiant exasperation burned a smoking hole in a eucalyptus limb with my hand glass. Karratumanta regarded me blankly. He picked up a stone and threw it with terrific force at a small bird flying by. The stone knocked the bird, a songlark, to the ground, dead. He stripped away and ate its two minute slabs of pectoral flesh and then regarded me as though I were crazy to assume superiority.
You can imagine how this played out, certainly, in those first weeks. On reflection, I realized my plans had probably been transparent to my white companions and to our guides, and that they had no intention at all of searching for me. Instead, they trusted little harm and some good would come from my conceits and lack of integrity. I hope, in the end, you will find that they were correct.
In the early days of my work with the Wiideema—I call it “my work” because it was work, keeping up with them—I was dazzled, predictably, by the startling degree of their intimacy with the places we traveled through. The capacity of every object, from a mountain range to an insect gall, to hold an idea or to abet human life was known to them. I expected this high level of integration with place, a degree of belonging that the modern world envies, perhaps too desperately; but I was not prepared for the day I began to hear English words in their conversations. The first words I heard were “diptych,” “quixotic,” and “effervesce,” words sufficiently obscure to have seemed Wiideema expressions, accented and set off in the run of conversation exactly as they would be in English. But they were not Wiideema words. Over a period of days I began to hear more and more English, not just words but phrases and occasionally entire sentences. What was happening was so strange that I did not want to ask about it. During my years in the field, if I have learned one thing, it is not to ask the obvious question right away. Wait, and you often see the whole event more clearly.
When I could understand almost everything that was being said, though in a way I’d never understood English before, I asked Yumbultjaturra, one of the women, “Where did you learn to speak English?”
“What is that, ‘English,’ the name of your language?”
“It’s what we’re speaking.”
“No, no,” she said smiling. “We are merely speaking. You, you, I think, might be speaking that.”
“But we can understand each other. How could we understand each other if we both weren’t speaking English?”
“We can understand each other because—how should I put this to you?—we do not have a foreign language. You understand what I say, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“At first you didn’t.”
“However,” she said, “from the beginning we understood you.”
“From the start? Then why did you never answer my questions, why didn’t you speak to me?”
“We spoke to you all the time,” she stated. “And forgive me, but your questions were not compelling. And to be truthful, no one was inclined to speak with you until you put your questions away. You’d have to say this is a strict tenet with us—listening.”
Our conversation went on in this manner for five or ten minutes before I understood what she was doing. She wasn’t, in fact, speaking English. It was not even correct to say that she was speaking Wiideema. She was just speaking, the way a bird speaks or a creek, as a fish speaks or wind rushes in the grass. If I became anxious listening to her, she got harder to understand. The more I tried to grapple with our circumstances, the less I was able to converse. Eventually, in order to understand and be understood, I simply accepted the fact that we could understand each other.
Now, knowing this, I can imagine what you are perhaps anticipating—but it did not happen. I had no intellectual discussion with the people I traveled with. We did not discuss or compare cosmologies. I did not seek to discover whether the grand metaphors of my own culture—entropy, let us say, or the concept of husbandry—had their counterparts in Wiideema culture. I did not pursue any philosophical issues with them, say Gandhi’s ahimsa, or the possibility of universal justice. No Enlightenment notions of universal human dignity. I simply traveled. I drew the country into myself, very much as I drew air into my lungs. Or drank water. I ceased what finally seemed to me my infernal questions and menacing curiosity. And I finally came to see the Wiideema as a version of something of which my own people were a version. What we shared—and it was a source of pleasure as intense as any I had ever known—was not solely food and a common hearth, human touch, small gifts, things I would have expected, but a sense of danger. A sense that it was dangerous to be alive.
I do not mean by such danger poisonous snakes or no water; or solely that you might be bludgeoned in your sleep, all of which occurred. The sense of danger we shared came from accepting consciousness. Human consciousness beckons us all. My Wiideema companions, wary as wild animals, had not accepted it fully. They didn’t shun knowledge; and it was not that they were never contemplative or curious about ideas or other abstractions. But their hesitancy had led them off in another direction. All that they knew, all they believed or imagined, they cast in stories. Stories for them were the only safe containers for what consciousness, as we have it, might have elucidated for them about life. Or let me say this another way. When I put my imagination, as distinct from my intellect, together with their stories, having steeped my body in the food, the water, light, wind, and sand of the Wiideema, I found as much in these stories as I could expect to find in the most profound and beautiful Occidental articulation of any idea or event with which I am familiar.
I finally left the Wiideema—a decision awful and hard to arrive at—because I could not exercise the indifference they managed toward violence. On several occasions, the fourteen people I traveled with encountered other groups. Often these encounters were friendly, but three times they were fatally violent. Someone was murdered. And then life started over again. In a troubling way this was like hunting. An animal was killed and eaten, and all were refreshed. The distinction, the emotional and moral separation between human and animal death, was one I could never grasp in my Occidental mind and not perceive in my infant Wiideema mind. They were willing to accept far more suffering in their lives—from heat, from starvation, from thirst, from wounds—than I could abide. And nothing but thoughts of retribution, as far as I knew, were raised for them by incidents of murder.
In the end, I did not consider that the Wiideema lived on some lower plane, or, transcendent in their infinitely clever world of stories, that they lived on a higher plane. I thought of them as companions on the same plane, shielding themselves in a different way from the fatal paradoxes of life.
When I left the Wiideema it was in the same fashion as I had arrived, rising in the night and walking away, though I understood now this was only a ritual, that my departure was not camouflaged. I had learned enough to get on alone in the desert, unless circumstances became truly dire. I walked out at Yinapaka, a perennial lake in the outwash of the Lander River, and eventually met some Warlpiri people who took me to Willowra. From there I came home.
What I hoped to find when I left Austin 2½ years ago was an uncontacted people with whom I could study the hunting of animals. I was curious about how, emotionally and spiritually—if you will allow me that imprecise word—people accustom themselves to daily killing, to the constant taking of life, as I saw it. I was afraid that in my dealings with the Navajo, a people studied nearly to death, all I was learning was a version of what I or others already knew. What I found when I began to travel with the Wiideema was that their emotions, their spiritual nature, was unknowable. When we killed and roasted kangaroo, I could only inquire into my own ethics, question my own emotions. I sought, finally, companionship with the Wiideema, not reason, not explanation.
I have to say, however odd it may sound, that what little true knowledge I returned with is knowledge already known to us—that we and the Wiideema share the same insoluble difficulties, which each day we must abide. And that not “once” but now is a time when human beings all speak the same language. (What actually happens, I think, is that people simply speak their own language but it is clearly understood by each listener.)
I wanted, 2½ years ago, to gain another kind of knowledge, the wisdom, so named, of primitive people. One day my friend Karratumanta killed a man called Ketjimidji. He speared him quickly through the lungs without warning. There were six or seven of us standing together when it happened. We had met on a trail, Ketjimidji’s people coming from a soak or water hole and our group walking toward it. No voices were raised. No argument broke out. The killing—Karratumanta handled Ketjimidji deftly, coolly, on the spear, until Ketjimidji went down and stopped struggling—was followed by a preternatural silence. Ketjimidji’s people went away, carrying the body with them, and we walked ahead to the soak. In the moments right after the killing I was fine but soon I was fighting for air. I felt as if all the bones in my face had exploded.
Ngatijimpa, one of Karratumanta’s daughters, came to me that night and told me a story. It had nothing to do, as far as I could see, with what had happened. It was one of a long series of stories about the travels of Pakuru, the golden bandicoot. She was not, I finally understood, offering me allegory or explanation, but only a story, which, as she intended, pulled the sense of horror out of me in some mysterious way. I slept. But I remembered. And my nights afterward were disturbed because I remembered. I couldn’t be healed of it, if that is the right word.
Karratumanta, a tutor of mine, had seen me reeling after the spearing and said, “I will not be your martyr.”
Many months later I was spattered by blood when another person was killed violently in front of me. Again, Ngatijimpa came to me. She told me another part of the story of Pakuru and his travels and under the soothe of the story I slept deeply. Ngatijimpa was young, only a girl, but she was eloquent and effective with the wisdom she dispensed.
I owe those who have supported me an exact and detailed report of my months with the Wiideema, a scholarly work rigorous in its observations, well researched, cautious in its conclusions. I have begun this paper, and, somewhat to my surprise, I have made progress. In it I’m describing hunting techniques, the ethology of desert animals; but what I am really wondering, night and day, is what I can give the Wiideema. Such questions of allegiance seize upon us all I believe—how can we reciprocate, and how do we honor the unspoken request of our companions to speak the truth? What I wish to do here, the task-in-return I have set myself, is to rewrite the story of Cain. I want to find a language for it that offers hope in place of condemnation, that turns not on aggression and vengeance, but on the mystery of human terror.
I do not know if I will be successful, or—if I am—whether success will mean anything substantial. But having sojourned with the Wiideema, I want to understand now what it means to provide.