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Indigenous Mythology

Dialogue Education. Indigenous Mythology. Aboriginal Perspectives.

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Indigenous Mythology

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  1. Dialogue Education Indigenous Mythology Aboriginal Perspectives THIS CD HAS BEEN PRODUCED FOR TEACHERS TO USE IN THE CLASSROOM. IT IS A CONDITION OF THE USE OF THIS CD THAT IT BE USED ONLY BY THE PEOPLE FROM SCHOOLS THAT HAVE PURCHASED THE CD ROM FROM DIALOGUE EDUCATION. (THIS DOES NOT PROHIBIT ITS USE ON A SCHOOL’S INTRANET).

  2. THE ABORIGINAL CREATION MYTH(10 minutes) Click on the image to the left. You will need to be connected to the internet to view this presentation. Enlarge to full screen.

  3. GAMES Click on one of the images above for a game of “Fling the Teacher”, “Penalty Shootout” or “Hoop-shoot”. Try playing a game with your students at the start and the end of the unit. Make sure you have started the slide show and are connected to the internet.

  4. Australian Aboriginal myths (also known as Dreamtime stories, Songlines or Aboriginal oral literature) are the stories traditionally performed by Aboriginal peoples within each of the language groups across Australia.

  5. All such myths variously tell significant truths within each Aboriginal group's local landscape.

  6. "A mythic map of Australia would show thousands of characters, varying in their importance, but all in some way connected with the land. Some emerged at their specific sites and stayed spiritually in that vicinity. “

  7. Australian Aboriginal mythologies have been characterised as "at one and the same time fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook, and to a much smaller extent a manual of cosmography."

  8. Antiquity • An Australian linguist, R. M. W. Dixon, recording Aboriginal myths in their original languages, encountered coincidences between some of the landscape details being told about within various myths, and scientific discoveries being made about the same landscapes.

  9. Aboriginal mythology: Whole of Australia Diversity across a Continent • There are 400 distinct Aboriginal groups across Australia,each distinguished by unique names usually identifying particular languages, dialects, or distinctive speech mannerisms.

  10. Public education about Aboriginal perspectives • The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's booklet, Understanding Country, formally seeks to introduce non-indigenous Australians to Aboriginal perspectives on the environment.

  11. An Anthropological generalisation • Aboriginal myths : justify the received ordering of their daily lives;help shape peoples' ideas; and assist to influence others' behaviour.

  12. An Aboriginal generalisation • Aboriginal myths represent a kind of unwritten (oral) library within which Aboriginal peoples learn about the world and perceive a peculiarly Aboriginal 'reality' dictated by concepts and values vastly different from those of western societies.

  13. Rainbow Serpent • Many Aboriginal groups share variations of a single (common) myth telling of an unusually powerful, often creative, often dangerous snake or serpent of sometimes enormous size closely associated with the rainbows, rain, rivers, and deep waterholes

  14. Rainbow Serpent • Anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown coined the term 'Rainbow Serpent' to describe what he identified to be a common, recurring myth.

  15. Rainbow Serpent • This 'Rainbow Serpent' is identified as a snake of some enormous size often living within the deepest waterholes of many of Australia's waterways.

  16. Rainbow Serpent • Even Australia's 'Bunyip' was identified as a 'Rainbow Serpent' myth of the above kind.

  17. Group-specific Mythology Murrinh-Patha people The Murrinh-Pathapeople describe a Dreamtime in their myths which is different from most of the world's other significant religious beliefs.

  18. Murrinh-Patha people In particular, scholars suggest the Murrinh-patha have a oneness of thought, belief, and expression unequalled within Christianity.

  19. Murrinh-Patha people Animating and sustaining this Murrinh-patha mythology is a belief that life is "...a joyous thing with maggots at its centre."

  20. Murrinh-Patha people The following Murrinh-patha myth is performed to initiate young men into adulthood. "A woman, Mutjinga (the 'Old Woman'), was in charge of young children, but instead of watching out for them during their parents' absence, she swallowed them and tried to escape as a giant snake. The people followed her, spearing her and removing the undigested children from the body."

  21. Murrinh-Patha people Within the myth and in its performance, young, unadorned children must first be swallowed by an ancestral being, then regurgitated before being accepted as young adults with all the rights and privileges of young adults.

  22. Pintupi people Scholars of the Pintupi peoples (from within Australia's Gibson Desert region) believe they have a predominantly 'mythic' form of consciousness.

  23. Pintupi people • "The Dreaming.. provides a moral authority lying outside the individual will and outside human creation.. although the Dreaming as an ordering of the cosmos is presumably a product of historical events, such an origin is denied."

  24. Pintupi people • Within this Pintupi world view, three long geographical tracks of named places dominate, being interrelated strings of significant places named and created by mythic characters on their routes through the Pintupi desert region during the Dreaming.

  25. You Tube How the Kangaroo got Her Pouch - Aboriginal Dreamtime Story (10 minutes) Click on the image to the left. You will need to be connected to the internet to view this presentation. Enlarge to full screen.

  26. Bibliography • # Beckett, J. (1994) "Aboriginal Histories, Aboriginal Myths: an Introduction", Oceania, Volume 65. pp. 97–115 • # Berndt, R. M. & Berndt, C. H. (1989) The Speaking Land. Penguin. Melbourne • # Cowan, James (1994) Myths of the dreaming: interpreting Aboriginal legends. Unity Press. Roseville, N. S. W. • # Dixon, R. M. W. (1996) "Origin legends and linguistic relationships." Oceania, Volume 67. No. 2 pp. 127–140 • # Elkin, A. P. (1938) Studies in Australian Totemism. Oceania, Monography No. 2. Sydney • # Haviland, John B., with Hart, Roger. 1998. Old Man Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point, Crawford House Publishing, Bathurst. ISBN 1-86333-169-7 • # Hiatt, L. (1975) Australian Aboriginal Mythology: Essays in Honour of W. E. H. Stanner, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Canberra • # Horton, David (1994) The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society, and Culture, Aboriginal Studies Press. Canberra. ISBN 0-85575-234-3 • # Isaacs, J. (1980). Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, ISBN 0-7018-1330-X • # Koepping, Klaus-Peter (1981) "Religion in Aboriginal Australia", Religion, Volume 11. pp. 367–391 • # Maddock, K. (1988). "Myth, History and a Sense of Oneself." In Beckett, J. R. (ed) Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality. Aboriginal Studies Press. Canberra. pp. 11–30. ISBN 0-85575-190-8

  27. Bibliography • # Morphy, H. (1992) Ancestral Connections.. University of Chicago Press. Chicago • # Mountford, C. P. (1985) The Dreamtime Book: Australian Aboriginal Myths Louis Braille Productions • # Pohlner, Peter. 1986. gangarru. Hopevale Mission Board, Milton, Queensland. ISBN 1-86252-311-8 • # Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1926) "The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia" The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 56. pp. 19–25 • # Roth, W. E. 1897. The Queensland Aborigines. 3 Vols. Reprint: Facsimile Edition, Hesperian Press, Victoria Park, W. A., 1984. ISBN 0-85905-054-8 • # Rumsey, Allen (1994) "The Dreaming, human agency and inscriptive practice". Oceania. Volume 65, Number 2. pp. 116–128 • # Smith, W. Ramsay (1932) Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines. Farrar & Rinehart, New York, reprinted by Dover, 2003, excerpts available on Google Books. ISBN 0-486-42709-9 • # Sutton, P. (1988) "Myth as History, History as Myth". In Keen, I (ed.) Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia. Aboriginal Studies Press. Canberra. pp. 251–68 • # Stanner, W. E. H. (1966) "On aboriginal religion", Oceania Monograph No. 11. Sydney • # Van Gennep, A (1906) Mythes et Legendes d'Australie. Paris • # Wikipedia- Aboriginal Mythology- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_mythology

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