 Snakes, Spirit People and Lalkapurra Insect
by Maggie Pampa Napangardi, Lajamanu, 1984,1995
translated from Warlpiri with Barbara Gibson Nakamarra (1984, 1995) and edited for the CD-ROM Dream trackers (UNESCO, 2000) by Barbara Glowczewski SONG 1 The little kalakala Galls belong to the Napanangka and Napangardi women and Japanangka and Japangardi men. The big kanta Galls belong to Nungarrayi, Napaljarri, Jungarrayi, Japaljarri. SONG 2 We sing and dance the yawulyu together, fifty-fifty. STORY 1 Two snakes were walking after having eaten two men cannibals. They were crawling underground. They lied (lay) near the Parlakuna well. They saw Tirpirimpiri. They went, changing into another type of snake, juntangala. The Two Snakes put some red ochre in Lubra Creek. They lied down. They crossed the plain country and they went to the West. They are there for ever, on the Limbunya side. This is how the two Dreaming Snakes took the spirit of the Warakalakala Dreaming. The female spirit Kaya Kaya and the male spirits Nyikiriri were travelling with them too. Those spirits who talk for the spirit children born human. We always talk to them when we go hunting 'Kaya! Kuyulanyanjanpayala!' And they answer us, 'Kaya! Kaya!' Kaya goes from cave to cave and has a rest in the trees. That's why one must be very careful when cutting a tree. Only a kurdungurlu should do it, not us the Kaya Dreaming kirda owners. Kaya spirits come on the women's ring place. We sing 'Kaya kaya! Nyikiriri!' STORY 2 Kaya and Nyikiriri, they look like people. It is my Dreaming the Two Warna Snakes, the Kaya and Nyikiriri Spirits, the Warakalakala and the Panya Panya sugar leaves. These leaves you squeeze in a cloth to eat the sugar. It is my kuruwarri, my father's kuruwarri. It is Jukurrpa, it is serious, not for fun. It is true. Lalkapurra, the insect that lives in the little kala kala galls is very important. The green insect lalkapurra came from Boroloola and New Castle going through Elliot and Murunjarri. He crossed the people of the Ngarrka Jukurrpa. And he crossed them again at Mirrirrinyungu. He crossed the Seed and Wallaby Jukurrpa at Jangalpangalpa. And he went along the Jiwanyparda waterhole. He saw the marrarnki nut tree. And the lalkapurra insect went back north, leaving the wirrkali eucalyptus tree everywhere on his way. He finally went underground in Lawurrpa. All this I can talk about, but the Parnta and Jilbili Dreaming, it is Kajirri way, it is secret.
The Kana women grow trees by Maggie Watson Napangardi, Lajamanu, 1984 translated from Warlpiri with Barbara Gibson Nakamarra (1984, 1995) and edited for the CD-ROM Dream trackers (UNESCO, 2000) by Barbara Glowczewski
The kana Dreaming starts in Mina Mina. The Digging Stick Women travelled to Kimayi where they went underground. Later on they went to Janyingki where they danced in a big circle. When they sat, the circle became a big hole, a cave.
From Janyingki they went East, stopping all along the way to dance. They were walking in the desert plain. The ground was bare like an aerodrome. After their dance, the trees and bushes grew up the way they are now.
They passed Yalkutu (Yaruku), the place of an outstation belonging to some Japanangka and Japangardi of the Alyawarra and Anmatyerre tribes. They travelled from spring to spring on this foreign land, stopping everywhere to dance. As they were going, my sisters turned their heads back westwards, to look at their country, my country. They stopped to look back and they sang as we sing today the Kana Jukurrpa. They were longing for their country.
2. They create antbeds for honey
The Kana Women went underground and have been there since. I tell the truth. The Digging Stick Dreaming is buried there in the foreign country where Kardiya people built a cattle station, Ameroo. The Women sleep for ever. But in the Dreaming they kept travelling.
They travelled underground all the way back to come out in our country near Yuendumu. A lot of women came out from underground. Each of them made a flat antbed, which can still be seen today. These are the spots (where) we dig for the yurrampi honey ants. It is not a small quantity of sugarbag that the Digging Stick Dreaming left there, but a whole stock that is renewed every season!
After they came out from the earth, the women went to Jurntu, a place shared by Budgerigar Jukurrpa and Fire Jukurrpa. But their Jukurrpa did not stop there...
3. Goanna makes hairstrings
On their way to the Janyingki cave, the Kana Women stopped in Ngalyipirla. They found there some men who were not initiated. They took from them all the boys and gave them to two Kajirri women. These two put something there in the sand dunes, and since then there is a waterhole.
The women went hunting for big game. We call them jintikirliwati! Like the men today, they had spears and boomerangs. The men had only sticks then until pilja, the seducing Goanna man, came from Jarrardajarrayi.
Goanna puts his shield on the ground; he brings it to the men who have none. The stranger cuts the men's hair and makes strings with them. He coats the strings with red ochre and makes with them a minyeri headband. He decorates it with some pakuru tails and leaves it on the ground to dry in the sun.
When the women come back from hunting, they find the hair-string headband drying in the sun. 'Oh, look! This is pretty!' 'It's for me!' 'No! for me!'
The Goanna man also made a long rope with the men's hair, makarra, something very dear for us. He might have tricked the women as in exchange for the rope and the headband, they gave to the men their ritual knowledge and the spears for hunting.
The women were sleeping one next to another. But some of them went to the men and started to fight. 'This one's for me!' 'But we can both share him!' 'No, he's for me alone!'
Finally, each woman chose one man in Ngalyipirla, the place with the ngalyipi Vines the men use to fasten the witi poles for the Ngarrka Kurdiji shield ceremony.
4. The birth
As the women were dancing along the desert plains, from their jumps grew many trees the oaks and the ngayaki tomato bushes. They were born from the dance of the Women who stuck their mangaya in the ground connecting them together with hair-string.
Through their dancing, they changed the boys into men. Then, after a long journey they all came to Janyingki, my country where the women's dance made the cave. Women and men disappeared inside there.
Later on the women gave birth. They dug (into) the earth and lit a fire inside with leaves on top to smoke their babies. They also warmed their bellies to stop the bleeding. Lots of holes were thus dug in this country. Men have their own kanunju story for Janyingki, the Kana women's camp. I can only tell the kankarlu way.
5. Mangaya
After giving birth, the Kana women travelled again, far away to the East, to Wangalanjirri. They danced the Kurdiji ceremony for the sons they were giving to the men.
We sing 'At Wangalanjirri, many women were sitting...'
Stumping the ground with their feet, they went further East, all along the Rain Dreaming, near Pawala et Wakulpu, finally arriving near Yalkutu (Yaruku) in the foreign country.
They went underground singing, 'In the Mulga country, Kana goes, near Ngarna (Mina Mina) the Dreaming goes back...'
They stuck their sticks in the ground, and new acacia trees grew up. Then they disappeared underground. We sing, 'mangaya, the power of Kana, Yellow Ochre stopped breathing'.
Coming into Being in Dreaming Stories and Rituals
A totemic and territorial ritual is not performed primarily to represent an ancestral epic. The purpose of the re-enactment is rather to identify men and women with what they are singing, painting and dancing. In other words, a body is given to the words, drawings and gestures, Jukurrpa names and places are fused into symbols supported and mediated by the participants and the ritual objects, and the bodies or objects are transfigured into Jukurrpa places and beings.
Each man and woman embodies a Dreaming spirit-child. The Warlpiri say that by painting, singing and dancing, men and women awaken in them this Dreaming spirit or other spirits. During the time of the ritual performance, they really ‘become’ Jukurrpa Ancestral Beings and the sites the Ancestors travelled through and where they sit or sleep for ever. Just like the bodies of the totemic Ancestors turned into hills or waterholes, transforming their blood into red ochre or urine into waterholes, and leaving their spirit to sleep there for ever, men and women in their rituals, by ‘becoming’ the Ancestors, also become the sites that embody them. The ritual metamorphoses the actors from agents into those acted upon. While in the initial state the actors paint, are painted, sing and dance, in the final stage it is the dances, the songs and the paintings that make the actors come into being.
Does this mean that the action of painting, singing or dancing transforms subjects into objects? Nancy Munn (1970) has analysed the transformation of subject into object that characterises the Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara (4) myths through identification with the sites or the sacred objects (5), achieved by metamorphosis, imprint or ‘externalisation’ of their bodies, organs or substances (urine, blood, milk, saliva, tears, feces, sweat). The heroes affirm themselves as Eternal Beings.
From a linguistic point of view, in both languages the final state is expressed by the addition of a suffix (respectively -jarri and -(a)rri), which translates as ‘in the process of becoming’ (coming into being). Douglas (Capell 1979) concluded that in the Pitjantjatjara language there is no structural contrast between metamorphosis and process. He gives the example of Aborigines who say that they are 'caught' by a wild animal when they catch it. The inversion of subject and object does not signify that the hunter has confused himself with his game.
At this point, the notion of identification raises a problem. When Aboriginal people say in English that they ‘belong’ to this or that country ('it has them'), to signify that it belongs to them ('they have it'), it is not that they confuse themselves with the land. In Warlpiri, just as in Pintupi (Myers 1986), they say that they hold the land in the sense that the verb kanyi is used to talk about adults looking after children. On the other hand, they define themselves as the children of the earth that feeds them. It is not a confusion between subject and object, between being and having, but it is an enunciation that shows two points of view corresponding to different stages of the same process they are the country as its children (coming into being, becoming) and they have it as hunters and ritual custodians (acting). They are the land not in order to have it but in the process of becoming through the country, they can act to master it.
I prefer to speak of self-reference rather than identification. Through their myths, rituals and their everyday use of language, the Warlpiri people and their neighbours seem to say that the subject is deconstructed in time through actions and becomings which look like temporary metamorphoses. To understand these processes of transformation, one must follow a three-stage argument. Instead of the ‘initial’ and ‘final’ states of a transformation, I would say there is a before without a beginning (the desiring subject), a meantime (the subject 'imprinting' with the object of his/her desire), and an after without an ending (the subject becoming another subject). The objectivation of the subject in the myth or in the ritual is only a temporary final state, a step necessary for the process to be constantly repeated that constructs Ancestral Beings as well as men and women as evolving subjects, becoming another subject through different rituals.
The inversion of subject into object (and vice versa) in the myth, the ritual, or the everyday statement, is not a mirror effect, but a self-referential movement that involves a third term. The Ancestral Being becomes, not only a hill or a waterhole, but the eternal Jukurrpa principle living in this place. The ritual actor becomes, not just a painting, but the Jukurrpa of which, like the site, this painting is a ‘trace’; the hunter becomes, not a kangaroo, but the Jukurrpa of which this animal is a manifestation; similarly the Warlpiri person becomes, not his land, but the Jukurrpa that gives him his name. The relationship to different Jukurrpa can be understood only in a feedback process. Men are fed by the land because they come from Jukurrpa, but they feed it in turn when, in their rituals, they become different Jukurrpa.
Every Warlpiri person is an aspect of the coming into being of the many Jukurrpa, an active form of a living memory, Jukurrpa, the Dreaming space-time, which transcends that person, and which he or she has to actualise in rituals. What is at play in Warlpiri ritual is always a double movement; an actualisation when the ancestral forces are called from the Dreaming to spread kankarlu, that is, on the earth, and a virtualisation when they are sent back kanunju, that is, underground and into the cosmic elsewhere of the Dreaming, where different potentialities are emerging waiting to materialise. The Warlpiri categories kanunju and kankarlu are thus two aspects of the Jukurrpa living memory the virtual which is hidden below or inside, and the actual which is the visible life above or outside.
Since for the Warlpiri everything that reproduces — humans, other species, atmospheric and cultural phenomena — participates in the same generative principles, women as procreators are the symbols of everything that is actualised. It is in this sense that they are finally identified with kankarlu, while the Ancestral women they identify with are the keepers of an inside knowledge that reproduces both nature and culture. Thus the mythic theme of a transfer of female knowledge to the men, for example in the Digging Stick Dreaming, illustrates above all a situation that is repeated with each generation; women have to give their children to men so alliances can be made between clans and tribes. Men who are born from women are the virtuality women actualise. As such men are identified with kanunju, the virtual secret and sacred realm.
While the existence of all things can be explained by the reversibility between kanunju and kankarlu, the fact of death, on the contrary, marks the irreversible passage of time. Reversibility and irreversibility are like two modes of the Jukurrpa space-time. For the kankarlu world, a deceased person is lost for ever, and his/her body must disappear. But for the kanunju world, the deceased becomes eternal through his/her depersonalised name, that is, his/her particular identity is lost. The deceased’s Kuruwarri images-forces and Kurruwalpa spirit-child return to and dissolve into the places they came from. Meanwhile the destiny of the pirlirrpa soul is to accompany the image-forces on the clanic path of travel to fuse with the maralypi site by penetrating the earth. The soul is taken beyond the Milky Way, to be absorbed into the cosmos by the two Magellanic Cloud galaxies, like the Ancestral Beings when they finished their travels. This destiny belongs only to the very old people. The souls of children fuse with the spirit-children they embodied, who will wait in specific places to be embodied again. The souls of all others are condemned to wander like ghosts, with the risk of becoming kurdaija vampires if they do not find their way into the cosmic path.
At a cosmological level, kankarlu and kanunju are not merely opposites, like above and below ground. Kankarlu as above/outside is the land, the world of people as well as ghosts, vampires and various spirits who show themselves to people who are awake; it is also the visible sky. Kanunju as below/inside is underground, by definition hidden, but also the infinite cosmos (the distant sky) whose true shapes are visible to people only in dreams or on the journeys of the maparn people; it is the domain of the Ancestral Eternal Beings, the deceased, the spirit-children and all the virtualities, that is, all future life to come. The coming-and-going between kanunju and kankarlu is a process of transformation mediated by the production of dreams and ritual activities aiming at generating a certain reversibility from irreversible events experienced by the society, both individually and collectively.
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