Beyond Barbarians II
The trees are the lungs of our ancestors.
You provide me with sugar, you provide me with wheat
You are my healing remedy.
They manipulated you.
They left you to dry. They built walls and walls upon you
You have nothing left to provide.
We watered this land with our sweat
While the trunks of your palms are covered with blood.
We stand rooted to the ground.
It is not the sea, and body of waters around your resorts but the tears of our people.
We are the bars, casinos, hotels.
Call it exile, call it return
Earth is the breath we live.
Torn from the earth that once cradled their ancestors, many Indigenous people now navigate urban landscapes as spaces paved with both promise and quiet loss. The concrete jungle, raised atop bones of stolen lands, offers glimpses of opportunity, yet often demands the silencing of tradition in return. Like rivers diverted from their natural course, many are forced into the currents of city life—pushed by land occupation, deforestation, and the gradual erosion of livelihood on their ancestral soil. Yet within the steel frames and constant hum of the metropolis, the spirit of the land endures. Carried in language, ceremony and memory. These echoes speak back to the land, refusing to be forgotten. This essay explores that tension between disconnection and return, between erasure and resurgence. By tracing the stories of various Indigenous communities, this work seeks to honour not just the weight of their displacement, but the strength of their continuity.
The Black Hills of the Lakota tribe carried the wisdom of the buffalo, with prayers set in stone. A stolen cradle, land as a lost home. The Lakota, children of the wind-swept plains, have long danced in rhythm with the heartbeat of the earth. They are one of seven fires within the Oceti Sakowin—the Sioux Nation, a people whose spirit was carved into the sandstone of the Black Hills and carried on the breath of the buffalo. To walk their land was to walk with their ancestors; to speak their language was to summon centuries of memory. Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills, were not merely terrain. They were the spine of their cosmology, alive with spirit, prayer, and origin. But the drumbeat of their sovereignty was interrupted by the steel tread of westward expansion. Treaties once inked with solemnity became paper ghosts, torn by gold lust and settler hunger. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had sworn the Black Hills to the Lakota, but when miners came with pickaxes and greed, the promise was swallowed by Empire. Their resistance rose like thunder—most fiercely at Little Bighorn, where the earth itself seemed to rise in their defence. Yet soon after came the silence: Wounded Knee, where prayers turned to gunfire, and the snow drank the blood of the innocent. Evidently, colonial violence did not end with muskets. It wore new uniforms—boarding schools that combed tongues clean of Dakota syllables, reservation lines that sliced through kinship, policies that uprooted identity from soil. Still, the Dakota remained tough not unchanged. Their stories tucked themselves into the corners of memory, waiting for breath to bring them back.
What happens when sacred land becomes commodity? When ceremony must hide behind the fences of foreign law? These questions haunt more than the plains of the Dakota’s. They resonate in the tidal rhythms of northern Australia, where the Yolngu people have long navigated the silence imposed by settler law.
The Aboriginal Yolngu, a sacred mirror where the land shudders as its bones are cracked and stolen. A reflection of human impact, When the land is hurt, we are hurt.The Yolngu assert their sovereignty, through legal battles, art and song, but no one listens as the lungs of the earth are choked, roots are severed, rivers divert and where greed cuts deep with no alert. The Yolŋu people of Northeast Arnhem Land in Australia are weavers of worlds—language, song, ceremony, and land all bound in a sacred thread that predates time as the West knows it.To the Yolŋu, land is not property, it is identity. It sings through the veins of rivers and whispers through the bark of eucalyptus trees. Their rom, or law, is not written on paper, but sung into the earth through ceremony, passed from breath to breath in a cycle unbroken for tens of thousands of years. Here, knowledge is carried in the body, in the footfall of ancestors across the red dust, in the rhythm of the manikay (song cycles) that chant the stories of creation, kinship, and the cosmos. The land is both an archive and an altar. With each stone, each tide, each gust of wind imbued with spirit and meaning.
Their connection is not metaphorical; it is living, embodied, undeniable. But colonialism came like a storm with no regard for sacred ground. As when Europeans arrived, they brought with them maps that ignored memory, and laws that erased rom. Missions and government outposts tried to mute the Yolŋu tongue and dismantle their systems of kinship. Land was sliced and sold; language confined; ceremonies threatened with silence. To speak of the Yolŋu is to speak of a people who do not separate the spiritual from the political, the land from the self. Their stories ripple through generations, undammed by borders or policies. They do not ask permission to exist—they declare it, in the language of stars, stone, and song. Today, the Yolŋu continue to navigate the sharp edges of modernity while holding tight to ancestral ways. The clash between mining interests and sacred country remains ever-present; Yolŋu land is rich in resources, and corporations circle like hawks. But through initiatives in bilingual education, digital storytelling, and cultural tourism led by the community, the Yolŋu reclaim narrative. They are not relics. They are resurgence.
If songlines maps the sacred breath of the land in Australia’s North, what marks the terrain of belonging across the savannahs of East Africa? Where does the land begin and the body end, when cattle are not only wealth, but kin, walking prayers stitched into the rhythm of the earth?
In the red dust of the Maasai plains, the same displacement lingers. Their cattle, once free to graze across endless landscapes, now meet invisible borders imposed by conservation projects that claim to protect nature—while erasing those who have always lived within it. The Maasai, a semi-nomadic people stretching across the vast plains of Kenya and Tanzania, have long moved with the rhythm of the land, their footsteps tracing ancestral routes carved by time and tradition. Clad in striking shúkàs of crimson and deep ochre, they are guardians of a heritage deeply entwined with the rolling savannahs and the open sky. For centuries, their cattle have been more than livelihood—they are kin, wealth, and sustenance, tethering the Maasai to an existence shaped by the pulse of the earth. But the land that once stretched endlessly before them is now divided, fenced, and claimed by government, conservation projects, and commercial enterprises.
Swallowed by foreign hands who speak the language of profit but not of place. The Maasai are being pushed from their ancestral grazing lands in the name of wildlife tourism and modernization, their rights eroded like dust carried by the wind. Stripped of access to vital water sources and displaced from their homes, they fight against the silent erasure of their way of life. Their songs of resilience rise against a world that seeks to make them relics of the past, yet their presence remains—rooted, unyielding, and bound to the land that has always been their first and truest home.
Though each community speaks from a distinct place — be it the sweeping plains, sacred hills, desert coastlines, or sun-cracked savannas, their narratives trace a shared geography of resilience. Their lifeways, though shaped by different climates and customs, converge in the memory of place. Not as static coordinates on a map, but as breathing, sacred entities that carry identity, purpose, and belonging. What has been taken, whether by fences, flames, or force — is not forgotten. It lingers in ceremony, in lullabies passed between generations, in the quiet resistance of tending to the soil, reviving language, or simply remembering.
In urban spaces, where the hustle of daily life drowns out the murmurs of nature, the traditional ceremonies and practices that form the heart of Indigenous identity become increasingly distant. These ceremonies, once conducted beneath open skies, are now obscured by the walls of cities—hidden behind concrete and glass. Language programs and community-centred cultural events, which serve as vital lifelines for connection to heritage, are far less accessible, lost in the frantic pace of city life. For the younger generations, the disconnect from these traditional practices leads to a slow unravelling of cultural knowledge. It’s as though a thread, once tightly woven, is now slipping through fingers, leaving behind a tapestry that no longer reflects the past. This erosion of cultural continuity is not only a loss of practices, but a disintegration of the very ties that once bound communities to their land, to their history, and to one another.
However, in response to this gap there is a quiet but determined resurgence. Indigenous populations, particularly in urban centres, are creating grassroots organizations, cultural centres, and networks that act as sanctuaries for cultural learning. Such as The Lakota People’s Law Project, Dhimurru IPA in relation sustainable Yoglnu Management and The Maasai Conservation Vision. These spaces serve as vital bridges, connecting the urban environment with the traditions and knowledge systems that define their identity. Much like the roots of a tree that stretch far beneath the ground to anchor the trunk, these initiatives offer Indigenous peoples the opportunity to reconnect with their roots, grounding them even in environments that might feel foreign or disconnected from their heritage.
Yet, the broader societal landscape often fails to reflect these realities. Mainstream media and government policies continue to misrepresent the complexity of urban Indigenous life, presenting narrow, stereotypical images that obscure the richness of lived experience. These portrayals not only fail to capture the diversity of urban Indigenous communities, but they perpetuate harmful misconceptions, further distancing the general public from understanding the true struggles and triumphs of Indigenous peoples. In political and cultural dialogues, Indigenous voices are frequently silenced or marginalized, their perspectives diluted by a dominant narrative that values assimilation over cultural preservation.
In this tension between erasure and reclamation, there is a powerful push for visibility, for a rightful place at the table where decisions about land, culture, and identity are made. The initiatives led by Indigenous people in urban spaces are not just efforts to preserve the past; they are acts of defiance against a history that sought to silence them. These spaces allow for a reimagining of what it means to be Indigenous in a modern world, where urban landscapes might serve as both a challenge and an opportunity for cultural survival. The earths silent manuscript, it words buried beneath the soul of the land it is not only a record of history, but an ancestral heartbeat that provides a source of life and identity. This is not an ending, but a turning. A call to listen differently. To honour what still grows in the cracks. And to understand that the legacy of land is not only what is inherited, but what is protected, reclaimed, and kept alive.
The featured image on this website was sourced from the Norman Miller Archive. All rights remain with the original photographer and/or archive. The image is used here for informational and illustrative purposes only.
