Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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Stan Grant: I've been very attracted recently to the idea of silence as a way of speaking to the unspeakable. Australia, I've always described to people as a place with no memory. And there is something that is referred to as the Great Australian Silence. It is a place where memory, story, and history are silenced. But what is it when your memory and your history and your story is in the ground? It can't be silenced for us. To silence our history is to bury our ancestors twice. And I think the curse for us in Australia as Aboriginal people is to know Australia as a place of tragedy, as a place of violence and evil, but to not be able to find the words to tell Australians that it's real.
We think in the 24/7 news world, and I'm of that world, I emerge out of that world, that because the television is on, we must always speak. And there is too much noise. And the words fail us. And sometimes, as Wittgenstein said, if you don't have the words, don't speak the words. The idea of silence, and how profoundly that can speak, is sometimes the best response to the inability of people to hear us. So my challenge as a, as a communicator, I'm trying to translate the deep silence of my people and our place to a noisy world that can't hear.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Here's a brief and complete history of Australia. The first peoples would have arrived somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, maritime navigators from Southeast Asia. The first European explorers landed in 1606. They were Dutch, so it became known as New Holland. The first British colony appeared in 1788, a penal colony meant to banish British convicts to quote, "improve the land and extract natural resources for the crown." And then in 1901, 122 years ago, modern Australia was born when six colonies united as a federation under the British Commonwealth. In 1902, Australia granted women the right to vote, one of the first countries in the Western world to do so. And yet today, Australia remains the only Commonwealth country not to have an acknowledgement of the first peoples of that land.
So imagine for a moment the quiet, the silence, the land. The deep time of Australian Aboriginal peoples that would have preceded European colonization, preceded the British convicts deported there, preceded the introduction of disease and gold mining and the quote, "improvement of the land," preceded the parsing of that land into units for sale. What was that deep time like before indigenous Australians were displaced and killed, marginalized and ignored?
Stan Grant is an Aboriginal Australian journalist, former war correspondent, and an award winning author of multiple books, including 2023's The Queen is Dead: Time for a Public Reckoning. He served in high profile roles in Australia, he was a current affairs and news presenter with Channel 7 and CNN, then ABC. He was recently appointed the inaugural director of the Constructive Institute, Asia Pacific, and the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. He joined me for a far reaching and wide ranging conversation on his experience growing up as an indigenous Australian, the son of Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi people in the Outback, New South Wales, Australia. He tells the story of his family's Christian faith and Aboriginal identity, how the two work together. He shares a sense of Aboriginal homelessness and displacement. His efforts to seek justice, securing a voice to parliament for Aboriginal people in modern Australia, a place he describes as having no memory. He teaches us the meaning of yindyamarra winhanganha.
Stan Grant: Yindyamarra means respect. It's far more than just a Western idea of respect. It is to be quiet, to be kind, to sit in the silence, to extend to everybody the grace and love that you would extend to those closest to you, and to not differentiate between the people who love you or the people who wish to do you harm.
Evan Rosa: A fitting concept for our podcast. He comments on declining democracy, how to live with dignity after catastrophe, what it means to be both nothing and everything, drawing deeply on the work of Simone Weil. And when all else fails, we learn from Stan about the power of silence to speak to the unspeakable. Now this conversation is longer than our average episode, but the fact is, once you start listening to Stan, it's hard to stop. So thanks for tuning in today. Enjoy.
Would you say who you are?
Stan Grant: Yeah, it's hard for me to say who I am, but I'm Stan Grant. I am, in essence, I'm my mother and father's son. That's, that's all I ever want to be. That's enough for me. I've never really wanted to be anything other than that. What I do, I'm a journalist. I carry Grant as the name of an Irish convict who came to our country and had children with an Aboriginal woman and created something entirely new. Not something that was created in peace, but something that seeks to find peace in our country. I carry the blood of Irish and Aboriginal in me. That makes me Australian, however we want to define whatever that, that, that might be. I'm a husband and a father. I write, I read, I think. I try to be, I try to leave the space for God to find me, and hope that I'm open enough to hear what God has to say to me, and courageous enough to live what God tells me, and to find a way of bringing that to the world. And I think at heart of what I do is to try to find the words to speak to those who still can't listen.
Evan Rosa: How do you like to introduce yourself? As Indigenous? Aboriginal? Australian?
Stan Grant: You know, if people ask what I am, I'm, you know, I'm Stan Grant, I'm a Wiradjuri, Gamilaroi, Dharawal person. That's easier to say than to say Australian. Australian is something I'm negotiating. I am grateful for the things Australia is. When I look around the state of our world, I'm hopeful for the possibilities of what Australia could be, and I share that space with love for those from wherever they've come from. But I'm a Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Dharawal person.
If I say those words, I know the touch of those words. They speak to something in me. I know the stories that come with those words. I know the places that those words connect me too. They are the most meaningful expression of how I see myself in the world to say I'm Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi and Dharawal. They roll off my tongue. They are the easiest things to say.
Evan Rosa: Where should we begin?
Stan Grant: Um, where should we begin? We should begin a long way from home because I'm a long way from home, and to find home away from home is an interesting idea for me.
Evan Rosa: Well, what's home to you then?
Stan Grant: It's a state of mind, I think, because I come from a people who have been exiled in our own home. And we've had to carry our home with us. And I've found that place of exile as a place to meet my brothers and sisters of exile and to find myself in them. There's a beautiful story I was in Iraq covering the war. And I went to do an interview, and the family were Palestinian, and they had relocated to Iraq in the 1960s after the 1967 war. And war had followed them to Iraq. Their life had been framed by conflict.
And I interviewed the man, and he went in, his name is Mohammed, he went into the room, he came out, and he put a glass jar in my hand full of dirt, and he said, there's my home. And I knew what he meant, that connection, a visceral connection to something that holds a part of you, that he carries in a jar, but he also carries in his heart and in his mind. And the Jewish people have the same story, of course, the, the way of carrying your exile, carrying your home. So home for me is a state of homelessness but never being away from home because of how we carry it.
Evan Rosa: Home and history are going to matter as well. Another place I want to begin is not just your conception of home, but let's talk a little bit about geography and talk about place and where you're from in that sense.
Stan Grant: I am from this, this little town, what we call Outback, Australia, Outback, New South Wales. And the town is called Cowra. And when I was a boy, we moved around a lot. We were a very poor family, an itinerant family. My father was a manual laborer, worked in sawmills mostly, but found work wherever he could get it. We were the first generation out of the missions, the places where we were segregated and excluded. And we were entering Australia, entering this country that had grown up around us that we were excluded from and trying to find a way in. So my life was spent on the road.
And it's really interesting when you spend a life where you are rootless, what places speak to you? And there was a little town called Kula, and uh, it's a tiny little town. And it always seemed to resonate with me. The memories I have from that town, and we may have only lived there, we lived there twice for what may have been a total of less than a year, but my memories are incredibly vivid. You know those places where a sound can take you back there, a song can take you back there, the taste of something can take you back there? It was a place that I don't think I've ever truly left. And I've always wondered, what was it about this particular place?
Later, I learned it was the place that intersected the countries of my father and my mother. My father is a Wiradjuri man from central and southern New South Wales. My mother is from the Gamilaroi people who are northern and northwestern New South Wales. And Kula was a town that absolutely landed on the boundary of those countries. So of course it would resonate to me, of course it would feel like home. My grandfather lived with me there and he was a touchstone, a connection to something much older, another Australia. An Australia that wasn't our Australia. And I would sit with him, and I'd soak up the stories that he would tell me. So that place more than any other, I think, connects me to a sense of history, belonging, country, and story, to the essence really of what it is to be an indigenous person in Australia. Those places of our soul. That's what it means to be an indigenous person.
Evan Rosa: Let's hang out on this. For an indigenous Australian, an Aboriginal, tell me a little bit about how you have integrated a sense of your history with, as you say, the way that Australia grew up around as a country. Because I think it's interesting as, as such a, as an island continent and as a, as a country for, for you to enter, I mean, you never entered really, but there still is an entrance that you described.
Stan Grant: Well, there's an entrance. There's an entrance to what we call Australia, which is not my country. And there is a difference. Australia, I've always described to people as a place with no memory. It's a place where people escape the world. They escape history. You think about Australia, the modern idea of Australia, it emerges between the two great revolutions of energy, the American and French revolutions, Australia, the beginnings of what becomes Australia, the British invasion, settlement, conquest of Australia, lands between these great revolutions. It is in many ways an enlightenment nation in the sense that the Enlightenment severs the connection with the past. It is about tomorrow. The things, the virtues that we see of the Enlightenment, of liberalism and democracy, the ability to remake yourself, really does sit at the heart of what Australia is. And that can be an amazing thing. If you're fleeing war, as waves of migrants to Australia have done, if you're fleeing revolution, if you're fleeing famine, if you're fleeing conflict, then Australia, with its endless skies, its long summers, is a place where the sun can literally heal the scars, but you don't ever want to go back there.
And there is something that's referred to as the Great Australian Silence. It is a place where memory, story, and history are silenced. But what is it when your memory and your history and your story is in the ground? It can't be silenced for us. To silence our history is to bury our ancestors twice, and we can't do that. We live with that. It's a visceral thing. In Australia, people will often say to me and other Aboriginal people, why don't you just get over it? It was all in the past. Move on.
And I say to them, move on from what? My history doesn't live in the past because we don't have a conception of the past. Our conception of time isn't always time, what's been called an "every-when." It is here. It is past, present, and future experienced now. And I say to them, if I touch the hand of my father, who when he was born touched the hand of his grandfather, who when he was born, touched the hand of his mother, who was there before Europeans arrived, our history is that close. It is a touch, a breath away. And when you carry that touch and the wounds of that history in a way that it is never allowed to be spoken, let alone resolved, then there is an impasse, there is a gulf, there is a chasm between us. And I think the curse for us in Australia as Aboriginal people is to know Australia as a place of tragedy, as a place of violence and evil, but to not be able to find the words to tell Australians that it's real.
Evan Rosa: I mean, there is a, there is a great silence. I think it's somewhere between not knowing what to say and simply having words not available.
Stan Grant: The words aren't available. And sometimes, you know, I've been very attracted recently to the idea of, of silence as a way of speaking to the unspeakable.We think in the 24/7 news world, and I'm of that world, I emerge out of that world, that because the television is on, we must always speak. And there is too much noise. And the words fail us. And sometimes, as Wittgenstein said, if you don't have the words, don't speak the words. The idea of silence, and how profoundly that can speak, is sometimes the best response to the inability of people to hear us. And in that silence, it might invite people into a deeper introspection. You know, and our country, in many ways, is a silent land. If you go out onto, onto my land and you sit by a river, you sit under the stars, you sit by a tree, you feel the wind on your face. If you sink into it, there is a noise, but it is not the noise of gravity. It's a quiet gravity. It's to sit with the bird song, the rustle of wind through the trees. You can hear the footfall of animals, you can hear the running water, but all of those things speak to a silence. And there is such a truth and a power in that silence, that to try to speak into it will only diminish the truth.
So my challenge as a, as a communicator, and I've often described myself less as a journalist and more as a translator, I'm trying to translate the deep silence of my people and our place to a noisy world that can't hear. And then I try to communicate that noisy world back to my world. And I have to accept the limits of that as much as I might reach for them, as poetic as I may try to speak to those things, there is a silence that will always speak more profoundly. And Australians, if I dare say this, Australians are terrified of that silence. They are terrified of that silence. They know what whispers in the land.
Evan Rosa: I want to talk about the whispers in the land and, and, and how that kind of speaks into your life, because you do have this Christian formative element as well. And it might, we might take these in, in some kind of parallel, but I'm curious how you tell the story of both a depth of understanding your indigenous background with your Christian formation. How would you introduce that?
Stan Grant: Jesus is an ancestor. Be still and know that I am God. I am Alpha and Omega. All of the things that speak through the scriptures speak to us in our country. We have our word for God, Baiame. Baiame is a creator spirit. It is the, it is the beginning and the end of all things. It is Alpha and Omega. It is from where we draw our spiritual connection to our place. You know, when the British arrived, we didn't exist as a people, legally. Under the legal doctrine of terra nullius, empty land. This was a land free for the taking because to all intents and purposes, we were not there legally. We were rendered British subjects, and whatever rights we may have had to our country and our law and our culture were extinguished. And many people had, you know, the idea at the time was that we needed to be brought into humanity, into modernity. We would be civilized, and we'd be Christianized.
The missions emerged out of two things. One, a desire on the heart of people, in the hearts of people to save us from the brutality of the frontier. They were havens from a violent world, but they're also places where we would be Christianized, and our culture would be bred out of us. But I always say to that, Jesus didn't arrive in the first fleet from Britain. Jesus wasn't planted in our land with the Union Jack. He was always there. God was always with us. We're in the land God gave us. There was never any conflict between Jesus, Christianity, God, and our idea of who we were and our place in the world. And like all peoples, you know, we interpret those scriptures through our own cultural and historical spiritual lens. The amazing thing about the Bible is, you know, Old and New Testament, is that it is a library of books, and different parts are going to speak to you.
And I always describe the church that I went to, which was the little church on the Aboriginal Mission, where my uncle was the minister, as the Church of the Forsaken. It was the place where we didn't ask, does God exist? But we did ask, does God care? When you have lost everything, in that sense of being forsaken, of God being far off, where are you God? The books of suffering in the Bible spoke to us: Job, Lamentations. Lamentations especially. You know, the roads to Zion mourn. It is in the earth itself. The land mourns the suffering of the people. Exodus, the idea of exile, of coming to God. Isaiah, you know, um, justice is far from us. You know, the truth stumbles in the street, honesty cannot enter. These are the things that spoke incredibly powerful to us, and the, the idea of the crucifixion as an emblem of suffering and shame, the shame of your suffering. It was how I entered into my own relationship with God and Christianity. It spoke to a historical suffering that connected to an eternal sense of our place in our country. And it gave us a way of holding on, holding on through the suffering and waiting for God, the sense of waiting, waiting for a God. We may be far off, but who has left the trace of love for us to find God?
Evan Rosa: I've been, one of the questions I've been dying to ask you is your, your interaction and engagement with Simone Weil.
Stan Grant: Oh, enormously powerful. Probably the person who made sense of these yearnings for me, of these questions for me.
Evan Rosa: Give us a little primer to Simone Weil.
Stan Grant: Well, Simone Weil, of course, she was a Jewish person, philosopher, writer, born in, in France, leaves France during the Nazi occupation, lived in the UK, died at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, but the complications of tuberculosis because she refused to take any more food than was rationed to the French resistance, resisting the Nazi occupation. Simone Weil is someone who gave voice to affliction. She took the idea of what it was to be afflicted and what it was to live with Christ in that affliction. She spoke about her own relationship to God and the embodiment of Christ in her, she was this sense of incarnation. She said that she felt the spirit of Jesus enter her. There's been some deliberation about this, that she was never baptized. Some think she may have been later in life. But I know there was a period where she said she wouldn't be. For many reasons, one, she didn't feel worthy, but also her relationship was already there.
But what spoke to me about her the most is the, the unflinching, unapologetic, unselfconscious way that she writes about her relationship with God. Waiting for God is a, is a big idea. The idea of attention, of silence. And I think what has become even more profound for me as I've, I've explored and thought more about her is the idea of what it is to be nothing. And she talks about affliction as being the cold hand of fate. The chill of indifference. It is meaningless. We're taught to look for meaning in these things. I looked for meaning in our suffering. But of course it is utterly meaningless. There is nothing we, we did to deserve it, and there is no meaning that comes from it, but there is the reality of it.
She said that only the afflicted know the truth, everyone else lies. The truth that Jesus knew in that moment of suffering and being abandoned in that affliction. Where are you God? Why have you forsaken me? That resonated with us, and the idea that we find nothingness, which is everything. If, she was so sparing in her language, so direct, so unfiltered, that to sit with one sentence of Simone Weil can last a lifetime. And I have just, she has been a guide to me. She has been a puzzle. She gets closer to the truth than just about any person I have ever read. And she has been a way for me to find a way of being in exile, in silence, and in nothingness, where I don't have to look for the meaning of affliction, and I don't have to look for someone to answer for that affliction because Christ is already there to hold the weight of that affliction. She is an extraordinary, extraordinary person, and I don't think I've ever read anybody who gets as close, uh, to what I could hear as the word of Christ himself speaking. I don't think there's anyone.
Evan Rosa: I need to come back to today, but I want to give you a chance to catch up a little bit on what you might think of as the more of the values of the Aboriginal background that you've got, that you received far predating Australia. So, I'm, I'm wondering when you, like, for instance, with Baiame, would that cross various countries? Yeah. Countries?
Stan Grant: Yeah. And you know, for people who aren't aware at the time that Europeans arrived, there were at least 200-250 distinct language groups, hundreds of nations, and very different. We are very different peoples, and from one side of the country to the other, would not have been able to speak to each other, but there were things that were common, and I think if you, if you consider living and living in a place uninterrupted for we know now to be at least 60,000 years, um, I say forever, you know, we've, we've, we become who we are in that country. We are of it. And to have lived in that untouched when the British arrived, we'd had various contact with people from the north throughout Asia who'd come down and fish and trade. There'd been the Dutch and others who had, who had touched the continent, but no one who had come to stay. But when the British came, you know, modernity landed on us with its full force. We had not been prepared for that. Others had experienced the creep of modernity. There were thousands of years of war, empire, conquest, that had touched other parts of the world, even here in, in North America.
Native Americans had had waves of contact with other peoples. Their longevity in this country is, is not to the same extent as ours. So to sit untouched for that time gives you a different conception of time and space, and the stories that connect us to place. So there is a commonality, despite our differences, a commonality to the depth of antiquity, and a spiritual connection to place. So when I talk about Baiame, others will talk about the Rainbow Serpent. Others will have other stories of creation and creative beings that explain their relationship to the land and to the cosmos. But they are very common. They are about creation. They are about country. They are about a totemic relationship to animal spirits, these things that explain the depth of our spiritual connection to our place. That is always common, and that's always been with me.
But again, it doesn't preclude, or it doesn't clash with any sense of what it is to be a Christian because those things are embodied in those stories too. My uncle used to always say to me, Jesus is a tribal man living in a place of occupation. He would even talk about his totem, and he'd say his totem was the water. Think about how often the water, washing people's feet, the, the, the water into wine. The idea of water, he said, was always there with Christ. And that was a totemic relationship to that, to that essence of life. So those things were very, very easy for us to connect to. Deep silence, deep time, which I think ultimately is what we are waiting for other Australians to open themselves to.
We will never be able to speak to each other until we share the sense of deep time and deep silence. They're very common to Aboriginal cultures right across Australia. And I think, and again, this is, this may be the, the real breaking point with modernity. If modernity is about bringing God to earth, if it is about wrestling with God, if it is about being smarter than God, if it is about making ourselves God, they're questions we've never asked. We are at our essence spiritual people, poetic people of place. We are not political people of enlightenment. And that, that is a hard weight to bear, to live as poetic people of God in a world of politics that seeks to kill God.
Evan Rosa: So I think this is, this will be a question that's a connection here about responsibility. And so I wonder if you'd speak to that, like to whom or to what are we responsible?
Stan Grant: We are responsible to our place and everything that happens on our place. The wisest person I've ever met is my father, who says things that astonish me. The simplest things that are the most profound. And he said to me, one day he, he helped to revive our language. Our language was almost dead. He was one of the last speakers. And together with a linguist, they, they put this language together again. They wrote a dictionary. They taught a new generation to speak it.
Evan Rosa: And is that the Wiradjuri language?
Stan Grant: Wiradjuri, yeah. Yeah, big part of us.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, so would you speak a little bit?
Stan Grant: Yeah, *speaking in Wiradjuri.* That's to say I'm a Wiradjuri person. I'm a proud Wiradjuri person. I come from Wiradjuri people, and I belong to Wiradjuri land. You know, we grew up with this language all the time. I was speaking it even when I didn't realize I was speaking it. Even when we speak English, they would always have Wiradjuri words in them. And even if we spoke English words, they sounded Wiradjuri. So, so it's, it's always been a part of me. For my father especially though, to be able to, to give that gift and to honor his ancestors. His grandfather was sent to jail for speaking that language. He spoke those words to my father in the main street of the town they grew up in. He was arrested, charged with offensive language, and he went to jail for speaking that language.
For my father to have been able to honor him by breathing life into that language and sharing it with people who are not Aboriginal people, to connect them to where we are, has been an amazing thing to see. It's helped to soften my father. It's given him a sense of his own purpose and why he's here. And that's been a beautiful thing to see for me, for someone who has lived a very, very hard life, to be able to find a sense that what he was and what he spoke mattered. That there was still a place to be and a place to speak those words was incredibly powerful.
So it's, and my father says that if there is no language, there is no people. *Speaking Wiradjuri,* no language, no people. We've got a language, and we're still the people. I said to my father one day, "Why do you teach non-Wiradjuri or non-Aboriginal people to speak our language?" And he said, "Son, because language doesn't tell you who you are, it tells you where you are." And in that moment, he upended modernity. Modernity is who you are. It is chance to dare to know. It assumes that, you know, reason is the slave of the passions, and it's wrestling with our rationality as a way of expressing our essence, our sense of ourself, the sovereignty of the self. To say that it's not who but where completely changes our relationship to ourselves, our place, and to each other.
If anything happens on our country, we are responsible. And you think about that, think about what that means. The wars, the massacres, the suffering that others inflicted on us. Are we responsible for that? Well, we're not. We're not culpable. But the fact that it happens on our country means that it is our responsibility.The responsibility to carry the weight of the pain of the people who inflicted pain on us. To understand that to kill another human being, to inflict pain on another human being, comes from some lack in yourself, comes from a place of pain. Think about the enormous sense of what it is to truly have a responsibility to place, to say that that person who is hurting me, I'm taking their pain. That's what we do.
We have a word, yindyamarra. Yindyamarra means respect. It's far more than just a Western idea of respect. It is to be quiet, to be kind, to sit in the silence, to extend to everybody the grace and love that you would extend to those closest to you and to not differentiate between the people who love you or the people who wish to do you harm. They are on our country. They are part of us. What we are doing, we are doing. It is an incredibly challenging idea. I wrestle with it all the time, but I'm held to account to that. We have a phrase, yindyamarra winhanganha, which means to live with respect in a world worth living in, which of course, you know, is what you were talking about in your podcast. A life worth living, a world worth living in.
We can't create a world of respect in a world worth living in, if I'm always going to hold you forever to account for your worst. I must find a way to love you in your worst. I, this past year, had to endure, because we've had a, and we'll get to this, a referendum in Australia about recognizing Aboriginal people who are not even recognized in our constitution as a distinct peoples, as the first peoples of the country. And it's unleashed all of the hate that you could imagine in a 24/7 media environment, in a toxic social media environment, in a world of culture wars, it unleashed the worst of us.
And being a person in the, in the public eye, being a prominent Aboriginal person who speaks to these truths, I've been attacked, my family's been attacked, and I decided in the midst of that to walk away from my job in the media, to walk away from my role in television. Because I thought, if I am part of this, and this is what we are capable of, I have to step out of it, to exercise yindyamarra, to live with yindyamarra. And in my final words on the program that I was anchoring, my final words were that I am not responsible for what I do. I'm also responsible for what you do. And that is the essence of what it is to be a First Nations person in Australia. That is the essence of Yolngu. It is a respect and a responsibility beyond who we are but connects us to where we are.
Evan Rosa: It's far reaching. I mean, I've got so much to say and respond to, but one of my first associations with yindyamarra was respect everyone.
Stan Grant: Yeah. Respect everyone.
Evan Rosa: Honor everyone.
Stan Grant: Everyone. Not just the people who love you. It's easy to love the people who love you. And it's, you know, this is a big calling. It's a hard weight to bear. But if I was to betray that, I would not be an Aboriginal person. Being an Aboriginal person is not just the blood that runs through our veins. I have European ancestry too. I'm not conflicted by that, because my European ancestry enters into a loving relationship with my Aboriginal ancestry that connects me to where I am. I live as a First Nations person in my country. If I were to betray that core, to respect everyone, then I would not be an indigenous person. I would no longer be one.
And how do we do that in a world where to be someone, to be something is to be prized above all? Where identity is what we value rather than our sense of belonging? And I differentiate between the idea of identity, which is a modern construct, to the deep time, and space, and silence, and God of belonging in our country. And that's got to be my answer to the madness of the world, otherwise I'm going to participate in it, and I'm going to perpetuate that madness if I don't hold out against that with the idea of what it is to be a First Nations person.
And to go back to Simone Weil again, you know, she says it is better to be nothing. What a terrible thing it is to be something. And we live in a world of something. And to be nothing. You know, she says, um, in Jesus, in the crucifixion of Jesus, they killed God because he was only God. Only God. It's only God. We can do without God. We can kill God. God's dead. Only God. If God is nothing, then I want to be closer to nothing than to something, to the something that can dismiss God as only God, but to find in God what it is to be nothing and everything. And that, that connects deeply to what my father is telling me about our relationship to where we are, not who we are.
Evan Rosa: I want to, I want to press on another question and I'm going to set this up a little bit because well, the question is, what should we do when we fail to live a good life? What should we do when we fail?
Stan Grant: I think we have to accept that failure is part of what it is to be human. We fail, I fail every single day. I fail yindyamarra every single day. But we hold out for that, and we find the love in the face of that. Now the Uluru Statement and the idea of Makarrata, of coming together after a struggle, was a poetic way of speaking love to the nation, of saying to Australia, let's find a way to walk together in this country. An extraordinary act of generosity from a people, politically, would have no reason to extend that generosity. But as I said, we are not political people. Our relationship is to our country and to God, and we offer that love to everybody in the country.
Australia wasn't ready for that. You know, it wasn't ready for Makarrata to come together after the struggle. The struggle, Australia loves the struggle. They live for the politics of the struggle. The Uluru Statement and the Referendum for Recognition of First Nations People failed because it was reduced to a political exercise. Australians were not ready to hear the deep silence. They weren't ready for it. And so we have to know that in the face of that we don't abandon who we are. We don't give up on who we are. We're not leaving our country. We are sitting there, and we are holding out the love that people will one day find the ability to love us, too.
One of the responses to the Uluru, to the failure of the referendum was for people like myself and other First Nations people who are prominent in that movement for a recognition to enter into a sacred silence. And we did. I didn't speak for several weeks after, asked to do interviews, to give speeches, to write. Silence spoke more profoundly. We had lost our voice. We asked for a voice in the Constitution, a representative body for Aboriginal people to be able to speak to the Australian people, the Australian Parliament. And it was denied us. So our response to that voicelessness was silence.
And that's what we do, is sit with that profound, deep silence, and wait for Australians to hear the silence. And we may wait a very long time. It may not happen in my lifetime, but my lifetime is not the measurement of time. It's not the measurement of Australia. It's not the measurement of our history. It's certainly not the measurement of God or love. Again, you know, something my father said to me, we were at a funeral just a week ago, and um, we're always burying our people, our people die so young in Australia.
I'm constantly going to funerals and in mourning, and we were leaving the funeral and during the service there was a photograph of my father's grandmother, my great grandmother, uh, who was the grandmother of my cousin we were burying that day. And we were leaving, and I said to my dad, "Oh, they had a nice photo of Nan." And he looked at me, and he said, "We shouldn't do that." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "We don't have to hold her in this world. She's gone from this world. She'd had enough of this world. We shouldn't try to keep her alive and speak about her and show her image in this world." And it was such an incredible thing to think about. We invest so much into this world and this time, and he's telling me that this isn't it. She is in a place way beyond this, and we don't have to hold her here. In fact, it is wrong to hold her here.
So I've had to recognize in the wisdom of my father and others that that moment is a moment in time. It was a political act, but it doesn't define us. And we hold the sacred silence and the sacred place as we have always held it, and we always will hold it. That can't be taken from us, and to relinquish that is to relinquish who we truly are in that country and to fail the act of love and generosity to those who still cannot hear the silence. We have to hold it and hope that one day they will realize that the world that they are so enamored of is not the world that matters.
Evan Rosa: That's, that kind of response, I feel like there's the need for a very brief kind of contextual comment from you, mostly for the, just to extend the benefit to people who are not aware of, of these recent events in Australia. How would you briefly contextualize this referendum, the voice to parliament, the Uluru Statement from the Heart?
Stan Grant: We are the only commonwealth country, current or former, in Australia, we are the only commonwealth country that has not recognized First Nations peoples politically. There are no treaties like there are in North America, Canada, the U.S. New Zealand has treaties with Maori people. There is no formal recognition of our status in the country as the First Peoples. There is no recognition in our constitution that we are the First People of the country. When Australia was founded as a nation in 1901, it's an incredibly young nation, uh, the constitution explicitly said that for the purposes of deciding the population of Australia, Aboriginal natives will not be counted. We were not counted. We endured different forms of secondary citizenship for much of that modern history of Australia, and there has been an ongoing struggle of Aboriginal people to find our voice in a country that has rendered us politically voiceless, to campaign for treaties, to campaign for recognition. This is something that we've inherited from our grandparents and great grandparents. That struggle has never ceased.
The Uluru Statement and the referendum to recognize us with a representative body, a voice enshrined in the Constitution, was just the latest iteration of that ongoing struggle. And every single time, it has failed. Every appeal to the better angels of Australia's nature, you know, to quote Lincoln, um, has failed. And yet we have never given up that struggle, and we continue that struggle because our people are dying. We die ten years younger on average than other Australians. In some parts of Australia, Aboriginal life expectancy for a man is fifty or below. We are the most impoverished and imprisoned people in the country. We're fewer than 4% of the population, and by last measure, we were around 40% of the prison population. In some parts of Australia, the prison population, or the population in juvenile detention, is over 90% Aboriginal. We have the highest rates of suicide. We have ten year olds committing suicide. We have the highest rates of mental illness, the worst outcomes of health, housing, employment, education, and yet we are constantly told to get over it, move on. That as Aboriginal people we should not be recognized as distinct or separate people but just be like other Australians.
But we are not like other Australians. We have never been treated like other Australians. We don't live, and we don't die like other Australians. So that struggle has never ended. It will never end. This latest political setback is just something we have grown terribly used to. And in the meantime, we keep burying our people. We keep teaching our people. We keep loving our people. And we keep hoping and believing and praying that one day Australia will find a way to see themselves in us too.
Evan Rosa: Thank you. I want to continue, if it's okay with you, and I think it would be interesting to hear about the question of living with catastrophe, which is a recent quote of yours from this year, um, in light of some of your war journalism. Yeah, it's, it's perfectly fine to stick with Aboriginal history as well. But what is it to live with catastrophe?
Stan Grant: There's a, you know, I've drawn inspiration from so many people, people who have endured the worst, have lived through it and found a way to hold on to their dignity, God, love, hope in the face of those things. And it adds, it brings greater meaning to those things. I think, again, you know, Simone Weil talks about the absence of God. Jürgen Moltmann talks about God being far off. We know God's love, and God's, and we know God is real when God is not there. The absence of love makes us know that love is real. To cry out, to wonder about those things, means that we have to ask ourselves harder questions. And I've drawn inspiration from so many others who've asked these questions.
There's a, a wonderful story of, American Indian chief, Native American chief, Plenty Coups from the Crow people. And the Crow people were the great warriors of the plains. It was once described that everything that a Crow person did was preparing for battle. A mother would not prepare a meal, she would be preparing the child for fight, to get strength. Chief Plenty Coups was considered the greatest of all warriors. To win a battle would be to, to claim a coup stick. And he hid won more than any other. And he, when he, before he died, he gave an interview, and he said to the interviewer, "When the buffalo died, my people's hearts fell to the ground. We could not lift them up again. After that, nothing happened." There has never been a more profound and poetic expression of catastrophe than that.
Nothing happened. After that, nothing happened. Simone Weil's nothingness. Only God. Where you had to ask happens when there is nothing left. Time moves, we get up, we eat, we raise our families, but the sense of what it is to be a Crow person is gone from the world. And he had a dream, and in that dream, the Chickadee came to him, the smallest of birds. The smallest, but the wisest, and it told, gave him another vision for his people, that his people would no longer be the warriors of the plains, that they would find a new way to fight. They'd become farmers, and teachers, and architects, and engineers, and lawyers, and doctors. And he put away the weapons of war to find a new way to live with dignity after catastrophe, after nothing happened.
And there's this great image, when after World War One, there was the burial of the, the unknown soldier in Washington, and he was invited as a representative of American Indian people, and he walked up to the sarcophagus, and he put his warrior's war bonnet on the sarcophagus and placed his coup stick. It wasn't an act of surrender, it was an act of claiming your dignity after catastrophe. A way of giving meaning to something that had removed all meaning. After that, nothing happened. How do you live after nothing happens? It's incredibly powerful to me. And I've gone in search of that all around the world, looking for that idea of what it is to live with dignity after catastrophe.
As a reporter, I looked into the eyes of refugees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria. I could have been looking into the eyes of my parents and grandparents. I know that look. I listen, you know, you, you. All the wars that I've covered, all the conflicts I've covered, have all been rooted in some form of catastrophe that metastasizes into resentment. How do we live after catastrophe without resentment? You know, listen to the words of Xi Jinping in China when he talks about the hundred years of humiliation: "Never forget what the foreigners did to us." Vladimir Putin that talks about the collapse of the Soviet Empire as the great catastrophe of the 20th century: "And we will never forget, and we will wreak our revenge for that." The wars of religions that I've covered that are still fighting the crusades. People who, for whom history lives in their veins, and it poisons you, at its worst, it can poison you.
But how do we live beyond that? You know, we look at what's tragically playing out in the Middle East right now, the Shoah and the Nakba, two people's of catastrophe, and even to speak of this is to look for some sort of equivalence where there isn't any. It is real to each of them, and yet they have to live with that. How do you live with that without falling prey to the toxicity of that history where you repeat those things? And you know, I've drawn incredible strength from reading, uh, people who've endured the Holocaust and to find a grace or a, or a love to hold on to what it is to be Jewish in the world after that unspeakable thing. It, it is extraordinary to be able to sit with the, the power and the wisdom of people who have wrestled with the hardest questions.
Elie Wiesel in the book Night describing when it was the Nazis in Auschwitz were hanging a group of Jewish men, and one man was taking a long time to die, and he hears a voice saying, "Where is your God now?" And then he hears another voice saying, "There I am, I'm hanging on the gallows." Wow. God is dying with us. God is dying here. What do we do with that? These people who ask these hardest questions are the people who have inspired me. And it's not always, the answer is not always love. The answer is not always to forgive. Sometimes it is this righteous resentment, Jean Anne Marie, who, who endured the worst of that and said we cannot lock away these things in the cold storage of history. That resentment was a virtue. I have to wrestle with that.
I know the lure of resentment, but I also know where it can lead. Albert Camus who says, "Resentment is always resentment against oneself." We punish ourselves with our resentment, even when that resentment may feel like the most righteous thing you can do. And I don't have answers to this. I'm a seeker. I don't have answers. But I'm putting myself out there as someone whose people know what it is to live with catastrophe, to try to find a way of love and dignity in the face of that, and to be open to all of it. The resentment, the death of God, um, the struggle to find forgiveness, I'm open to it all. But I know what happens when history bites down hard, and we see this far too often in our world, where conflicts are rooted. They would sit down to you, help us, you know, what, what do you do to reconstruct from there?
Evan Rosa: So the coming together aspect of, of, of, in the wake of struggle or in the wake of catastrophe. This is not to, this is not to like demand that it lead to a coming together, but it's just...
Stan Grant: There has to be the willingness for it. I've learned this from Miroslav, Miroslav Volf, and he's remembering rightly. It's hard to remember rightly. Well, you know, the suffering of our people can become the source of our identity. I don't think that's healthy. It's not true. It's not the truth. The suffering is meaningless. To try to bring meaning to it can never do justice to the suffering. I don't want to be defined by the suffering. I want to be defined by how we live with it, with all of it, wrestling with it all. Miroslav makes the point that there must be the willingness to forgive. It doesn't mean we do. But in the willingness to forgive, it creates the opportunity for forgiveness. There has to be atonement, there has to be a reckoning, and there has to be justice.
In Australia, we can't have these conversations. We are told to move on, put our history behind us. The moment the referendum failed, we were being told, we must heal now, we must reconcile, we must find unity.These words have lost their meaning because they don't sit with the full weight of the affliction itself. We're sitting there as the afflicted who know the truth, trying to speak truth to a people who want to tell us that what we need is to unify. Unity without the idea of a reckoning and an atonement is just going to be a political measure. It's not going to be a spiritual thing. And Miroslav opens the door to that idea of the willingness to forgive, which creates the potential and the capacity for the person who is inflicting the suffering to also find their way back to God. Because God is their God too, and God is waiting for them too.
I don't own God in my suffering. I share God with the person inflicting the suffering on me. And so people like Miroslav have been incredibly inspirational to me and they've been great people to share the journey with as interlocutors of trying to find a language. To live with the catastrophe of history and to understand that it is small in the face of God's love. And even when that love may feel so far off, and I can only imagine now trying to go to someone whose family is held captive by Hamas, who are burying their dead, or to speak to a grieving Palestinian mother and say, "Let's just forgive, let's just find love. You know, let's all just come together." How empty and meaningless those things were. To even go to those people right now and speak of Simone Weil or Jürgen Moltmann or Miroslav Volf, to speak of poetry right now.
We've driven God out, and we are doing what human beings do. But God's waiting, and we wait, and we know that there is a time, a time when our hearts fall to the ground, after that nothing happens, and we've got to find something after nothing happens, and maybe the nothingness of it all is the meaning of it all. And this is my, this is my quest to try to understand those things. And it's the quest of an exile. It's, it's exile that I was forced into, that my people were forced into, that I share with others, that I seek to embrace as an exile of silence, an exile of love, and an exile of belonging and not identity. James Joyce, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, these people have shared this journey, uh, the great poets, the great writers, the great artists who have sought to give expression to that sense of what it is to be exiled from the modernity of who we are, what we all want to be something. And maybe when we are reduced to nothing, we may find what it is to be everything.
Evan Rosa: Those are very like poignant and, and sounding conclusive remarks. And I, and I want to let you go soon, but if I may, um, I want to fill in a little bit and perhaps we can do it. I mean, even in a more conversational way. And I, so there's a, I think I still will go through the lens of some of these questions because I think it works out and I still, I'm, I'm just, I'm, I'm wanting to hear more about, um, about the vision of flourishing that might be present in an Aboriginal sense. And yet I don't want to simply negate the fact that you may need to think through, through negation. You may need to think through nothingness. You do? It's fine. That's how it is.
Stan Grant: That's how it is. There's also the Hegelian idea of the negation, of the negation, right? The non-identity of identity. I've been open to those things, but you know where it leads me? It leads me to the simplest of places, the most holy of places. After the Queen died, there was a moment of reckoning in our country. What she represented as the figurehead of the crown and all of that history. And it was an incredibly cathartic moment. I wrote a book called The Queen is Dead, where I, I wrestled with these conflicting emotions, but it led me back to the river.
It led me to sit by the water, um, the holiest of places, the baptism of water, uh, the totemic relationship of Jesus to water that my uncle talked about. It led me to water. And I'd been with my mother and father, I went down to the river, I sat under a tree, I looked around and I could feel this country speaking to me. And that afternoon I went for a run, and I was running through, along the river, up into the town. I ran past a church, and I heard this beautiful singing, and I just stopped for a moment, it was coming up to Christmas, and they were singing "O Come All Ye Faithful," and a beautiful hymn. And I looked across, and there were a group of white Australians outside the church, under a tree, and they were singing words of praise to God.
And I didn't have to go over, I didn't have to speak to them, we didn't have to touch to share the presence of God in a place. They were on my country, under a tree, outside a church, singing about God, and I heard them. That's enough. That's how we flourish, by being open to hearing these things. To shrink into the silence so that we can speak from the silence. To know that we are not something, that we are nothing and everything. It was a moment that encapsulated all of that for me. Our people are not a people of tragedy. We are a people of suffering, but not tragedy. Our people flourish every day. We flourish by the mere fact of our survival. We're speaking our languages again.
Australians, every time they meet, acknowledge the country they are on. They say, "This is the land of the Wiradjuri people, or the Gamilaroi people, or the Aranda people, or the Kalkadoon people, or the Warlpiri people, the Dharawal people." Any of the hundreds of peoples, there's an acknowledgement, and Australia is slowly waking to this. That's flourishing. We have to hold on to those things and not give in to the tragedy of it all. You know, again, I've come to this sort of realization that nations themselves, as much as we like to talk about nations as being heroic, they're tragic. Nations are tragic. They're born often out of tragedy. They emerge out of someone's loss and suffering. They seek to find a way of containing people and belonging that is political and legal.
And yet we know we can only find that through a sense of love and story. Nations are tragic. And I look around the world, and I see the tragedy of nations. Because I know that they don't speak to what we share as human beings. So I don't want to be defined by the tragedy. I want to flourish in a world where we can find the dignity after the catastrophe, where I can go for a run on my country and hear people who have come to my country, under a tree on my country, who are part of me and belong to that country now, and can sing praise to God. That's a beautiful way of flourishing in the face of a world of catastrophe.
Evan Rosa: So much of it is tied to the land, place, that, that, that physicality and that materiality sort of being, being unified in an, in an important way with the earth and, and, and the elements. What does that say about, what does that say about humanity? What does that say about our humanity and what is it to be human?
Stan Grant: It's in Genesis. We are born out of the dust. We come out of the earth. This is, it is miraculous that we are here. You know, I've studied physics, and the, the perfection of the mathematical equations that are required for us to have this conversation, the fact that we are here at all is miraculous. It is extraordinary, the fact of our consciousness that no one and no scientists can truly define. We can't say, we can say what's in a sunset. We can say what's in the touch of a child. We can't say what we feel in those moments. It comes from what it is to be on this planet, breathing this air, eating from this earth, drinking from this water, being born into it and of it. It's everything.
And yet, look what we do. We carve it up. We put flags and borders in the ground. We define it politically. We banish God entirely from it. And then we wonder why on earth we can't find peace. We do everything to banish God and peace, and then we wonder why we can't find peace. Because we've lost, we can't contain ourselves in these differences. We have to find each other in what it is to be human, and that comes from this place itself. It's all through the scriptures. It's all through the scriptures what it is to belong to a place, a place that God has given you, what it is to come out of the earth itself. It's all there, and yet, we do the opposite. We don't share the space. We contest the space. And we wonder why we continue to repeat the conflict over and over and over again. Because the fragility of the earth itself reflects our fragility, but fragility is the last thing we want to embrace.
Evan Rosa: I'm, I'm struck by the sort of the self, the self givingness of yinyamarra and, and that, that act of taking on responsibility for the other, the, the kind of, you know, the ownership, radical ownership. And, I realized like the irony of, of that term in conversation with indigenous First Nations peoples, the ownership is a very conflicted concept, so to see responsibility then as, as expansive in that way.
Stan Grant: And how much better is it to talk of responsibility than it is to talk of sovereignty? You know, I, responsibility is an act of nothingness, of recognizing the nothing in us, which makes us. Be able to give everything to someone else. But the act of sovereignty is a political act of ownership, of claiming something. Now I know that, you know, it's, it's the lingua franca of, of politics, you know, the ownership of soil to define who you are and where you are.
This is how our world is ordered, but it doesn't speak to me as a, as an Aboriginal person. You know, we have these debates in Australia and Aboriginal people would use the word sovereignty as a political word, saying that we have never ceded our sovereignty, we want recognition of our sovereignty. But when I explore the word itself, I see that it's a word that is not sufficient, it's not up to the task. It's not sovereignty I seek. I don't need to ask Australians for anything that tells me who I am and where I am in my own country. So I would rather speak of responsibility than sovereignty and responsibility for you, not just for myself.
Evan Rosa: You talk about the decadence of liberal democracy too. That's why I'm kind of feeling like this, which it's, it's, it's the kind of...
Stan Grant: Weightless, you know, I think liberal democracy is weightless. It's not that these things are without virtue. I mean, they're thin. And I think this is what we see now with the blowback against liberalism. It might be fine if you're in Denmark or Norway, if you're in small, rich countries where people all look like you. But liberalism struggles to hold the weight of contest. You look at the United States, which is an extraordinary experiment. I am blown away when I come to America to consider a nation that is an invented, imagined nation, as all nations are.
It is a place that has been the best and the worst. It lives with the stain of slavery and genocide of, of First Nations people here. And it holds all of this difference, this dedication to the proposition of what it is to be America. But we wonder now whether it can still hold that weight. It's breaking. You can feel it straining at the seams.The weight of inequality, of concentration of wealth, of racism, of, of historical injustice, of real suffering, and the contest of voices. America is noisy. It is loud. It's always had the ability, I think, to reimagine, reinvigorate itself. It's been through civil war. It's, it has found a way to find something out of that. But I think right now it's struggling. And I think as America struggles, so does the rest of the world.
Freedom House now counts fifteen, sixteen years of declining democracy. There are fewer democratic states today than there were ten years ago. And those, those democratic states themselves are increasingly undemocratic. They're autocratic. They are technocratic. They are captured by wealth and privilege. Democracy does not speak equally to all people. And the idea of liberalism as a neutral space, as a, as a veil of ignorance, as Rawls would have seen it, where you can, but there's no ancestors in Rawls. We don't come to Rawls.There's no dust on our feet. There's no history in Rawls. Yeah, there's no history, right?
And, and liberalism is about tomorrow. And the promise doesn't speak to us when we know that it is about tomorrow, but it can't speak to our past. It promises us a future if we bury our ancestors. And that's not something I can do.It's not something that many of us can do. And I think the world right now is going through such a state of enormous upheaval where the biggest engine of economic growth in the world, China, is an autocratic regime that doesn't emerge out of a 300 year enlightenment experience but emerges from its own philosophical traditions. We're seeing the rise of incredibly powerful states in the Middle East, wealthy states like Saudi Arabia and others. We're seeing the leftover battles of the twentieth century still play themselves out. We're seeing all of this contest, and we keep hearing about a liberal rules based order, and we know that, that liberal rules based order never really existed, and certainly doesn't have the answers to what we face today.
So I think, you know, all of those things are in flux right now. And I know that liberalism and liberal democracy, as worthy as they are for offering us the possibility of living with our difference are not big enough to be able to speak to my ancestors, to my history. We've tried, we've knocked on the door of that. Liberal democracy has rejected us again, because it can't hold the weight of that history.
Evan Rosa: This is meant to be a kind of shorter, shorter statement, something encapsulating the assets of a lot of the, a lot of the guests. What is a life worth living?
Stan Grant: For me, a life worth living is to know where I am, and where I am doesn't have to be a physical location. It has to be a connection to something. I'm here talking to you in the, in New Haven, and I'm still where I am. My ancestors are around me. I can feel my country with me. Those stories are in me. To have that sense of a connection that is beyond time, that is the world worth living for me. It's a world where I am nothing, which gives me the ability to give everything that I have, to not seek to be something at the cost of someone else.
You know, I, what I worry about though is that's not enough. Is our world worth living in now? Not if you're in Gaza right now, not if you're in Israel right now, not if you're in Ukraine right now, not if you're an Aboriginal person right now. It's not enough that we can just enjoy the fruits of the world, the fruits of our labor, the good luck we may have, the opportunities we might have. There is a greater purpose and a greater meaning. We can't live in a world where we are smarter or think we're smarter than God. We can't live in a world where we kill God and then look for love and peace. We can't separate those things.
A world worth living in for me is a world where I am, with God, under my tree, by the water, with my ancestors, where I meet everyone and can find the love even for those who don't have love for me. Do I live that? No. Do I try to live that? I hope so.
Evan Rosa: Stan, thank you so much for this time.
Stan Grant: Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you very much, mandaang guwu. That's how we say thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured journalist Stan Grant. Production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes of the podcast, videos, articles, plenty of books to read, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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