Garma Festival

This Maak is a declaration by the Yolngu leaders who, with our clans, gathered in July 1999 at Gulkula, the place of our ancestor Ganbulabula to celebrate the foundations of our humanity, our physical and spiritual homelands, and our cultural and intellectual traditions. The nature of our gathering was a Garma ceremony.

The Garma ceremony is an enactment of the meaning of being Yolngu, of being human, as we understand this through our cultural inheritance from our ancestors. Our performance of the ceremony embodies the meanings of our traditions, enshrined in sacred places. To those of us who participate, Garma restores our spirit to a state of harmony and balance in the world, purifying us and bringing us to a deeper understanding of our duty to respect and share the legacy of our knowledge.

maak

This Maak is in five parts.

The first Maak is to introduce the concept of Yolngu knowledge systems as ancient foundations, ways of comprehending the world that have sustained Yolngu societies.
Our traditions provide us with the knowledge and the skills to harvest the bounty of the land and the sea for the satisfaction of our needs, and the opportunity to enjoy life. Through the ideas of Garma we explore our humanity. We, the Yolngu, Aboriginal people of Northeast Arnhem Land, believe that our intellectual traditions are relevant to people of other societies, and are especially important to universities and institutions in which people seek to expand human knowledge.

The second Maak is to share the vision of Garma. This ceremony reminds us of our duty to pursue knowledge, to discover and teach in co-operation with others, acknowledging the potential of all individuals to contribute equally according to their own capacity. It reminds us to acknowledge our bonds of common humanity, and thus the unity that we celebrate in the Garma ceremony reminds us of the necessity to work with others for the common good.

The third Maak is to inform you of the establishment of the Garma Cultural Studies Institute, an initiative of Yolngu leaders, developed by the Yothu Yindi Foundation.

The fourth Maak is to invite you to come to Gulkula and to take part in a Garma ceremony. We offer you, the intellectual leaders of Australian institutions of research and learning, this opportunity to understand Yolngu intellectual traditions in this way. We also invite you to accept the challenge of Garma to share knowledge and to work together to transmit our various ways of knowing about the world to our younger generations. We propose that you attend a Garma ceremony in November 1999. A specific invitation asking you to confirm your attendance will follow.

The fifth Maak is to request you, our counterparts in Australian research and education institutions, to accept in good faith this invitation from the leaders of Yolngu society who love and respect learning and knowledge.

We hope that you accept this invitation to engage genuinely with our traditions, acknowledging our systems of knowledge as the rightful intellectual inheritance of the Yolngu. We ask you to consider that our knowledge traditions are living systems requiring rational thought, empirical observation, formalisation, experimentation and formal education. We trust that you will accept this invitation and work with Yolngu to advance respect for the diverse Australian traditions of knowledge. We trust that you are mindful, as we are, of the need for goodwill and coexistence between us as an example to those whom we teach.