Check out SLFP’s new video: Song for the Rainbow Serpent! Three percent of the world’s zinc lies beneath the serpentine riverbed of northern Australia’s McArthur River — and the zinc will soon be headed to China’s steel mills. For Aboriginal Australians, the entire river is respected as the Dreamtime pathway of the Rainbow Serpent, one of the most important of the ancestor spirits who formed the land and still enforces the law. Xstrata Zinc is starting to excavate an open pit mine at McArthur River and is building a 5.5 kilometer diversion channel to redirect water around the deep hole the mining company is digging. When we tried to enter the area with traditional owner Harry Lanson, the mining company threatened to arrest us for trespassing and ordered us to leave. As Harry Lanson asserted his right to visit the land he was born on, to show us his sacred sites, a helicopter landed within 100 feet of our “mob” — which included more than a dozen children. We retreated back down the road to the river. Even after the humiliation and stress, the Aboriginal women proceeded with the dance they had come to do next to the river, to honor the female form of the Rainbow Serpent, which in English they refer to as a “mermaid.”
Check out a new two-minute film: A Song for the Rainbow Serpent
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January 6th, 2008 at 12:45 am
I was looking at the clip of film by the Mc Arthur River and the Rainbow Serpent Dance, I was struck by the simple ownership picture of the Aboriginal people there. They had no title deeds to the property of the sacred land which were signed in the Courts of an invading people, an industrialisation for wealth of the few. But in their simple dance they pounded out the document with their feet, Grandmother, Mother and Grandchildren as had the generations before them and whose Spirit was still in the Land the river and the Sky. Rights and documentation are flimsy words and paper which can be ignored by Corporations and Government when it suits their purpose to turn their back on them. The simple dance and stamping feet will for generations to come join with the sound of those ancient feet in the background, growing louder and louder until the day that Truth and Spiritual rights free the land to those who guard it for the sake of their Ancestors.