"Waka Ŋurrkanhayngu - Regenerating the Existence of Life”: Indigenous and Western Researchers Engaging in Two-way Exchange to Revive and Strengthen Living in Harmony to Resolve Our Existential Crises

Humanity is experiencing increasingly existential crises. Whilst the crises are potentially apocalyptic, they create psychological, spiritual, cultural and social transformative opportunities towards ways of being-knowing-doing that not only ensure our survival but thriving. Realizing these transformative opportunities requires the prevailing Western worldview remembering and embracing ancient Indigenous worldviews. One potent pathway for accomplishing this paradigm shift is authentically exchanging two-way with Indigenous peoples. To illuminate this pathway and its value, we offer knowledges from a long-term initiative that has been requested by and is being co-lead, co-designed, co-implemented and co-evaluated by female and male Yolŋu traditional owners, clan leaders and CEOs living in the very remote community Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island in Northern Australia. Yolŋu female leaders are leading this initiative. Our research aims at reviving and strengthening Yolŋu to heal and reduce ‘natural’ and social disasters. We utilize a bricolage research design continuously exploring, bridging, uniting and transcending Indigenous with suitable Western philosophies/worldviews, methodologies and methods for collecting, analysing and co-constructing knowledges. We developed an Indigenist two-way inter-cultural kinship-based and clan-based participatory action research that is long-term, heart-based, holistic, transdisciplinary, emerging and iteratively co-created, co-implemented, co-evaluated and co-refined using Yolŋu governance. The knowledges we are co-constructing increasingly reveal holistically the dense net of interacting psychological and contextual colonising practices that systematically weaken Yolŋu and how sophisticated Yolŋu ways of being-knowing-doing combined strengthen Yolŋu. Several pathways emerged as key leavers for removing what weakens Yolŋu and facilitating what strengthens Yolŋu, ultimately enabling Yolŋu regenerating the existence of life by living according to their Yolŋu Law in harmony with nature again.

Public significance statement: This paper is providing insights into the source of and antidote to our existential crises. It suggests that authentically exchanging two-way with Indigenous peoples can create the paradigm shift required to heal the source and to co-create a transcending culture the restores living in harmony with nature. The paper also offers insights into how Indigenous and Western peoples can be genuinely working together two-way to resolve our existential crises and ensure our survival and thrive.

Key words: Paradigm Shift and Transformation, Indigenist Participatory Action Research, Decolonisation and Indigenisation, Existential Crises and Disasters, Living in Harmony