The Crowned Spirit of the Wild

As summer weakens and the forest turns towards autumn, the stag becomes the crowned spirit of the wild. His antlers resemble bare branches holding the final light of the year, while their yearly shedding reflects the ancient rhythm of loss, renewal and returning strength.

In European folklore, the stag belonged to thresholds. He could lead hunters away from familiar paths, appear before encounters with the Otherworld and run through the darkness alongside the Wild Hunt. He represented sovereignty that could not be granted by human hands: instinctive, untamed and rooted in the land.

The stag does not mourn the fading sun. He carries it between his antlers, guiding its fire into the darker half of the year.

– Hex and Shadow Chronicles
via Facebook
August 18, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Beloved and Antlered
• Cernunnos
• Integrating Cernunnos, “Archetype of Sensuality and the Instinctual World”
• Cernunnos in Autumn Light
• Cernunnos and Pan: “Witch-Fathers of the Wild”
• The Devil We (Think We) Know
• Ed Simon on Why We Need a Pagan Theology
• Phillip Clark on the Magi as Archetypes of “Witchy Faith”
• A Day to Celebrate the Survival of the Old Ways
• At Hallowtide, Pagan Thoughts on Restoring Our World and Our Souls
• The Pagan Roots of All Saints Day
• "A Dark Timelessness and Stillness Surrounds Her Wild Abandonment”
• Awakening the Wild Soul
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• The Mysticism of Trees
• Mistwalking
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Prayer Tree
• The “People Between”
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Late Summer Blooms (2025)
• Summer’s End (2024)
• Summer Vignettes (2022)
• Summer’s End (2021)
• Late Summer Blooms (2016)
• Summer’s Parting Gift
• Eternal Summer

Image 1: Artist unknown.
Image 2: Michael J. Bayly.

The Wild Man

The following recently appeared in my Facebook feed. Given my interest in the mythological figures of both Pan and Cernunnos, it feels natural to share here at The Wild Reed this piece on the folklore figure of the Wild Man.

_____________

Long before modern stories of monsters in the woods, there was the Wild Man.

He appears across European folklore again and again. Covered in hair, carrying branches or a club, living far beyond villages and roads.

He was called by different names in different places, yet the image remained strangely familiar.

Not animal.

Not human.

Something in between.

The Wild Man lived where rules ended.

He slept beneath trees, drank from rivers, and answered to no king, no church, and no society. To settled people, this made him dangerous.

But the old stories rarely describe him as evil.

He was unpredictable.

Sometimes he kidnapped travellers.

Sometimes he offered wisdom.

Sometimes he tested those who entered his forest and punished arrogance.

Other times he guided people toward hidden truths.

Over time, the Wild Man became more than a creature.

He became a symbol.

He represented the untamed parts of human nature, instinct, emotion, freedom, anger, sexuality, survival, and the side of ourselves that exists beneath manners and expectations.

Civilization depends on control.

The Wild Man asks what happens when control disappears.

This is why old stories placed him at the edge of the forest.

The forests represented the unknown.

And the deeper you walked into them the closer you came to parts of yourself that ordinary life kept hidden.

The Wild Man reminds us of something ancient.

Not everything wild is dangerous.

Some things are wild because they were never meant to be owned.

And sometimes what we fear in the forest is the part of ourselves still waiting to come home.

~ Source

Related Off-site Links:
The Winsted Wildman ~ Ray Bendici (Damned Connecticut, August 2014).
“Wild Man” ~ A song by Kate Bush (2011).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Cernunnos and Pan: “Witch-Fathers of the Wild”
• Beloved and Antlered
• Cernunnos
• Integrating Cernunnos, “Archetype of Sensuality and the Instinctual World”
• Cernunnos in Autumn Light
• The Devil We (Think) We Know
• Biophilia, the God Pan, and a Baboon Named Scott
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Pan’s Labyrinth: Critiquing the Cult of Unquestioning Obedience


Image 1: Wild Man sculpture over the porch of St Mary's Church in Burwell, Cambridgeshire, England. (Photographer unknown)
Image 2: The Winsted Wildman. (Artist unknown)

“They Were Alive. Then They Were Not”

Early this morning my friend Kathleen and I visited the people’s memorial for Alex Pretti at the site of his murder by Border Patrol agents three days ago.

The pictures I share this evening of our visit to this sacred ground are accompanied by some recent writings on both the killing of Pretti and of Renée Good, also murdered by federal agents earlier this month on the streets of Minneapolis.

They were not symbols when they woke up that morning. Renée Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti were Americans moving through ordinary days, trusting that rules still mattered and that authority still carried restraint. They had names, routines, people who expected them home. Whatever arguments came later, whatever justifications were rushed into place, that truth does not change. They were alive. Then they were not.

Their deaths were not accidents. They were not confusion. They were the result of a system that has begun to treat force as efficiency and accountability as optional. Once a government crosses that line, citizenship becomes paperwork and innocence becomes irrelevant. Power stops pausing to think.

What makes this unbearable is not only the loss of two lives, but the speed with which language is bent to explain it away. The careful phrasing. The quiet shifting of blame onto the dead. This is how a republic teaches itself not to feel. This is how violence becomes procedural instead of shocking.

We mourn Good and Pretti because they deserved more time, more care, more restraint from those sworn to protect. But we also mourn something larger. A country that once demanded power answer to law is now asking its people to accept killings as background noise. To scroll past. To move on.

A republic does not collapse in a single moment. It frays. It excuses. It explains. And one day it wakes up realizing that mourning has replaced expectation.

Remember their names. Not as slogans. Not as ammunition. As people. Because a nation that forgets who was lost will eventually forget who it was supposed to be.

– Bruce Fanger
via social media
January 26, 2026

What makes that video so unbearable to watch isn’t only that an ICE agent killed Alex Pretti. It’s that in the middle of being shoved, struck, and repeatedly blasted in the face with chemical spray, his body kept doing one thing: reaching.

Reaching for a woman who had just been knocked down. Reaching for clarity through the burning in his eyes. Reaching to put himself between her and whatever was coming next. You can see that he is disoriented, choking, and staggering but still his instinct is PROTECTION.

He isn’t posturing or trying to be a hero for a camera. He’s trying to focus so he can shield somebody else. His nervous system is under assault, his vision is blurred, his lungs are on fire, and yet his moral center doesn’t collapse inward. It expands outward toward another human being in danger.

Maybe he knew her. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But that’s almost beside the point. What the footage shows is a man whose first reflex under state violence was not self-preservation at all costs, but solidarity. Care. The ancient, almost forgotten impulse to say, “you are not going to face this alone.”

That is what makes his killing so devastating. The state didn’t just shoot a protester. It shot someone in the act of trying to protect a woman. It shot a man whose last visible choice was compassion. Whose final posture was not aggression, but guardianship.

And that is the deepest obscenity of the footage. It’s watching a system built on force extinguish a body that was, even in terror, still reaching for love. Damn.

– Stacey Patton
via social media
January 25, 2026

Indigenous people in Minneapolis are very concerned.
And at the center of that concern is a human being.

Alex Pretti was not a symbol.
He was a son.
A family member.
A trusted presence in his community.

He was an ICU nurse – someone whose daily work was keeping people alive in their most fragile moments.
Someone trained to stay calm when bodies are breaking,
to act with care when others are afraid,
to move toward suffering, not away from it.

That matters.

Because when someone who lives a life of care is killed,
the questions do not stop at what happened.
They move toward how power responds when harm is done.

For many people, this may look like a single event –
a moment to analyze, to debate, to file away.

For Indigenous people, it lands differently.

Encounters with armed authority do not live in isolation for us.
They arrive carrying memory –
of patrols and removals,
of borders enforced through force,
of systems that have long decided whose lives are protected
and whose deaths require explanation.

So when force is used,
when official accounts shift,
when video and statements do not align,
our bodies recognize something before our minds do.
This is not fear.
This is memory.

And let me be clear – carefully, and without accusation:

This is not about demonizing law enforcement.
This is not about disorder.
This is not about political sides.

It is about responsibility.

Alex was known as someone who showed up for others.
Someone who believed presence mattered.
Someone whose instinct was to help, to witness, to care.

So when a life like that is lost,
the community has the right – and the responsibility –
to ask for truth that does not bend under pressure.

Indigenous peoples have not always lived under overlapping jurisdictions –
federal, state, municipal –
and when harm happens, accountability too often dissolves in those seams.

We are watching carefully.
Not with rage, but with attention.
Not to inflame, but to understand how power is moving in this moment.

Because safety cannot exist without trust.
And trust cannot exist without truth –
truth that does not change depending on who is speaking.
We are asking for clarity.
For transparency that does not circle back on itself.
For investigations that do not feel pre-written.

This is not radical.
This is relational.

In our teachings, responsibility is carried forward – not deflected.
We call this wâhkôhtowin – the understanding that everything exists in relationship, and that relationship requires care, honesty, and accountability.

We hold space for Alex’s family.
We hold space for those who worked beside him.
We hold space for a community trying to make sense of loss without being rushed past it.

This is shared in good faith.
With firmness, yes – but also with care.

We will continue to watch.
We will continue to speak.
And we will do so in a way that protects life –
especially the lives of those still coming.

Ekosi.
And so it continues.

– Standing Bear Network
via social media
January 26, 2026

We are not okay. But we are still helpers. We still see human. And that is why they will never win.

– Emily Solberg
via social media
January 26, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Minneapolis Left to Decide Future of Streetside Memorials to Renée Good and Alex Pretti – The Associated Press via MPR News (February 15, 2026).
“We Want Our Son’s Killers Brought to Justice,” Says Mother of Alex Pretti, Months After CBP Slaying – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, October 27, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts on the resistance to the Trump regime’s fascist occupation of Minnesota:
• Omar Fateh: Quote of the Day – December 4, 2025
• Photo of the Day – December 5, 2025
• Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis
• Doing What We Can to Stop Unjust Arrests of Immigrants
• Great Event, Great Sign, Great Nails
• Christmas Eve Musings
• May We Do Likewise
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like” – January 7, 2026
• “It Was Murder”: 12 Powerful Responses to the Death of Renée Nicole Good
• Omar Fateh: “Folks Are Waking Up”
• A Good Faith Appeal and a Grim Response
• Why Minnesota?
• Chris Hedges on ICE: “I Have Seen These Masked Goons Before”
• Steven Donziger: “Let’s Get Real . . . ICE Is a Domestic Terrorist Organization”
• Historian Kyle Dekker: “It’s Not Nazi Ideology We Are Fighting. It’s American”
• Knowing Our Rights
• Mike Figueredo on Why Trump Might Be Pushing the U.S. to the Brink of Collapse
• A “Red Alert Moment for American Democracy”
• Dispatches from Occupied Minnesota
• Marianne Williamson on How to Psychologically Endure This Moment
• What Moral Clarity Looks Like in Minnesota This MLK Day
• Nemik’s Eulogy for Renée Nicole Good
• “It Was Never About Keeping America Safe”
• “ICE Out!”: The Minnesota General Strike – 1/23/26
• “This Was a Flat Out Execution”
• “Organized Sustained Systemic Resistance and Self-Defense Are Our Only Options”
• Honoring Alex Pretti
• George Conway: The Trump Administration Is a “Criminal Organization”
• In the Face of Fascist Lies, MN Governor Tim Walz Sets the Record Straight
• Adam Serwer on How “Every Social Theory Undergirding Trumpism Has Been Broken on the Steel of Minnesotan Resolve”
• “Trump Is Scared Shitless”

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Love Will Not Lose

By Steven Charleston

Love will not lose.

Even if the evidence of the daily news
Seems to suggest that it will
Even if we despair of the values we thought we shared
Even if we imagine the divisions between us
Have grown too wide:

Love will not lose.

Love cannot be constrained by legal walls
Political pieties or institutional fear.
Love is the subversion of power by mercy.
It is the uncontrolled spirit of hope
That erodes the authority of oppression.

Love is the human soul made visible.
Once we see it in one another’s eyes
No force on earth can compel us to deny its reality.
No matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes

Love will not lose.

– Steven Charleston
in Spirit Wheel: Meditations
from an Indigenous Elder
Broadleaf Books, 2023

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• When We Choose Love
• Until the Light Returns
• What the Wind Says
• Secret Language of the Heart
• Marianne Williamson on the Need for “Radical Love”
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• In Australia, “Love Has Had a Landslide Victory”
• “What I Want to Remember Are the Moments of Love”
• A Light That Will Always Shine
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• A Sacred Pause
• Susan Raffo: Quote of the Day – September 11, 2012
• To Be Alive Is to Love
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Ilia Delio
• In the Garden of Spirituality – James B. Nelson

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

What the Wind Says

By Steven Charleston

Listen to the wind. It has something to tell you.
Whether it is as quiet as the current
That lifts the hawk to circle the sky
Or as loud as the storm chasing high waves to shore:
The wind has something to say.

There is a word for each of us, a message sent directly
That flows through the wind each day
Offering us insight and vision, clarity and creative ideas
If only we will stop long enough to receive it.

Be still. Be awake. Trust your spiritual senses.
Listen to the wind. The Spirit is speaking to you.

– Steven Charleston
in Spirit Wheel: Meditations
from an Indigenous Elder
Broadleaf Books, 2023

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Two Exceptional Singers Take a Chance on the “Spirit of the Wind”
• Resilience and Hope
• Trusting the Flow
• A Season of Listening
• To Be Still
• Today I Will Be Still
• Cultivating Stillness
• Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Secret Language of the Heart
• Come, Spirit

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Secret Language of the Heart

By Steven Charleston

I know the secret language of the heart
How it speaks in whispers about the pain it has known

How it talks of loves lost and dreams deferred,
The wordless memories of a lifetime

Sharing a story that cannot be contained by words
But expressed only in the sound of rain.

It is the collective sound of all those voices
All those stories, all those moments of joy
That I seek to raise up to the listening skies

To hold up as high as I can in prayer
That the angels of the night will hear us
All of us with the dignity of our own story

And know that we are still here, still together
Still doing what we can to make hope have meaning.

Keep speaking the poetry of the heart.
I am listening. Many of us are listening.
We do not need language to tell the same story.

– Steven Charleston
in Spirit Wheel: Meditations
from an Indigenous Elder
Broadleaf Books, 2023

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Abode of the Heart
• The Way of Love and Healing
• Be Just in My Heart
• Adnan and the Winged Heart

Image: Artist unknown.

Kanipawit Maskwa: “The Land Still Remembers”

In response to President Trump ditching Indigenous Peoples’ Day and opting instead to proclaim Italian explorer Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero,” Kanipawit Maskwa shared the following earlier today via social media. (NOTE: Kanipawit Maskwa is the ceremonial name of John Gonzalez, a Taíno/Pimicikamak journalist,activist and filmmaker, which translates to “Standing Bear.”)

______________________

When I hear words like “Columbus, the original American hero,” I feel a heaviness in my chest – not because I am angry, but because I know how stories can wound when they are told without truth. Our people have lived on this land since long before that man ever dreamed of crossing the ocean. The rivers already had names. The stars already had songs. The people already knew the Creator. To call him a hero, and to erase the names of the ones who were here, is to speak only half a story – and half-stories have always been dangerous things.

When the leaders of a nation use their power to lift up conquest and silence the survivors, it tells me they have not yet learned the meaning of kinship. A true leader does not fear truth. A true leader does not need to erase others to stand tall. Our ancestors taught that greatness is not measured by how far you travel or how many lands you claim, but by how well you remember your relatives – all your relatives – the four-legged, the winged, the swimmers, the crawlers, and the human beings.

When I was young, the old ones told us that stories are medicine, but they can also be poison if told without humility. This proclamation feels like that – words dressed in honor but carrying harm. It forgets the women and children who suffered, the languages silenced, the songs that were not allowed to be sung. It forgets that this so-called discovery began a long night for our peoples, one we are still waking from.

I do not speak these things to divide us. I speak them because truth must be spoken if there is ever to be peace. We do not need to hate Columbus to honor our own story. But we must not let his name stand above the countless ancestors who greeted him with open hands and were repaid with chains.

Today, when the government once again chooses to remember the colonizer and forget the Indigenous, it is not surprising – it is just a reminder that our work is not done. We must keep teaching the children who they are. We must keep speaking our languages, planting our medicines, walking softly on the land that still remembers us.

So I say this: we will not disappear because a proclamation forgets us. We were here before Columbus, and we will be here long after the politicians are gone. The land remembers. The water remembers. The wind carries our names. And as long as we breathe, we will keep telling the whole story – the one that begins not with discovery, but with belonging.

– Kanipawit Maskwa

Today is a gift.
The Great Spirit’s breath still touches the land.
The sky glows with colors of fire,
The wind sings softly.
And for this, I say – thank you.

I am grateful
For another chance to live a good life –
To walk with kindness,
To use my hands to bring healing,
To speak with honesty and truth.

Sacred breath,
Fill me with patience,
Help me to listen deeply before I speak,
And to walk gently where my ancestors once danced.

Let my heart remember:
I am never alone.
My ancestors walk with me –
In every breath, every step, every beat of the drum.

Today, may I live with love,
With courage,
And with a spirit that helps others.

This is the truth:
The sun rises for all of us, not just me.
We are in this life together.

So keep going, my relatives.
Together, we rise.

– Kanipawit Maskwa

Related Off-site Links:
Trump Declares Columbus Day, Omits Indigenous Peoples’ Day Recognition – Native News Online (October 9, 2025).
Noam Chomsky: World Indigenous People Only Hope for Human Survival – teleSUR (July 26, 2016).
The Real Christopher Columbus – Howard Zinn (Jacobin, October 12, 2015).
Five Young Native Americans on What Indigenous Peoples’ Day Means to Them – Sarah Ruiz-Grossman (The Huffington Post, October 9, 2017).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Words of Wisdom on Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Something to Think About – October 9, 2017
• Something to Think About – February 23, 2017
• Something to Think About – October 13, 2015
• Quote of the Day – September 27, 2015
• Something Special for Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Recognising and Honoring Australia’s First Naturalists
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• Celebrating Mabo
• Matariki
• “It Is All Connected”
• Forever Oneness
• Standing Together
• Standing in Prayer and Solidarity with the Water Protectors of Standing Rock
• At Standing Rock and Beyond, Celebrating and Giving Thanks for a “Historic Decision”
• Come, Spirit . . .
• Exploring the Meaning and History of “Two-Spirit”
• Tony Enos on Understanding the Two-Spirit Community
• North America: Perhaps Once the “Queerest Continent on the Planet”
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• “Something Sacred Dwells There”

Opening image: “The heart of everything that is” – Pahá Sápa, which is the Lakota name for the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly, June 2013.)

The Choice Before Us

The following is credited online as the words of a contemporary Hopi leader named White Eagle. The international press agency Pressenza, however, investigated the origins of this text and concluded that its author “remains unknown.” Furthermore, the agency stated that “we now assume that the text is neither based on authentic Hopi traditions nor represents the statements of a Hopi representative.” That all being said, I find it to be a very inspiring and hope-filled text. Perhaps you will too.

This moment that humanity is experiencing now can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or walk through the door belongs to you.

If you consume the news 24/7 – with negative energy, constantly nervous, and with pessimism – you will fall into the hole. But if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, and to take care of yourself and others, then you will go through the portal.

Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself in these ways, you take care of everyone at the same time. Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Take perspective of an eagle who sees everything from above with a wider view.

There is a social demand in this crisis, but also a spiritual demand. Both go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and futility.

You are ready to go through this crisis. Grab your toolbox and use all the tools available.

Learn the resistance of the example of Indian and African peoples: we have been and are still being exterminated. But we never stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire and having joy.

Don’t feel guilty for feeling lucky during these difficult times. Being sad or angry does not help at all. Resistance is resistance through joy! You have every right to be strong and positive. And there’s no other way to do this but to maintain a beautiful, joyful and bright posture.

This has nothing to do with alienation (ignorance of the world). This is a resistance strategy.

When we walk through the door, we have a new world view because we faced our fears and hardships.

That’s all you can do now:

• Serenity in the storm

• Keep calm, pray daily

• Make the habit of meeting the sacred everyday.

• Show resistance through art, joy, trust and love.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Active Hope
• Something We Dare Call Hope
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• “I Came Alive With Hope”
• Resilience and Hope
• Why “Revolutionary Love” Gives Michelle Alexander Hope
• Clarity and Hope
• In the Eye of the Storm . . . A Tree of Living Flame
• The Act of Surrender
• Surrendering in Sacred Trust
• Trust and Surrender
• Trusting God’s Generous Invitation
• Giving Thanks: A Spiritual Act of Trust
• Jesus and the Art of Surrender
• Trusting the Flow
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved

Image: Artist unknown.

An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

Following is a second excerpt from David Tacey’s 1995 book Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. (For the first excerpt, click here.)

Our spiritual way here [in Australia] cannot be, as was said by Hermes Trismegistus and other real or legendary Europeans, an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. There is too much nature in Australia, too much rock, too much prima materia or untransformed matter. If we heroically pitted ourselves against nature here in a bid to transform nature into spirit, we would go mad, breakdown, or be consumed by nature. The entire heroic fantasy about subduing nature, conquering Gaia or controlling Mother Earth is a European fantasy, which can never work in Australia. This country demands a different archetypal style, a style that works with nature rather than against it. The very notion that spirit is opposed to matter cannot take root here. Our spiritual mode will have to be ecological, a work with nature, an opus cum natura.

In this important aspect we must take our cue from the Aboriginal people and not from Western Europe. Herein lies what must be regional, local, or particular about an Australian spirituality. We cannot simply import Judeo-Christianity into this country and think that this will suffice. It won’t work, because it is based solidly on masculine and dualistic notions of spirit and matter that can make little sense here. The Australian Way will have to be ecological, like the Aboriginal people themselves. The new spirituality that arises from Australian experience will, I believe, be precisely the kind of spirituality that will set a timely example to the rest of the world. It will be non-heroic and will not go the way of the now exhausted heroism of Western Europe or North America. It will not be patriarchal, because the Earth Mother is far too strong here.

. . . My own experience in Alice Springs taught me to love and respect the Earth Mother in ways that I could not have achieved while living in Melbourne. It was the Earth Mother and her stony landscape that broke the encasement of my rational ego and drew me into a larger sense of identity, that opened up a dialogue between myself and the archetypal other. Naturally the vast expanses and the sheer weight of all this rock terrified me at times, and one can easily feel crushed by it. But Australian landscape is like the unconscious itself: if you respect it and realise the ego can never hope to assimilate, conquer, or transform it, you are allowed to survive. That is and must be our way, a humble aboriginal way, a shamanic way. Les Murray has said that the sheer space and size of this country is “one of the great, poorly explored spiritual resources of Australia,” since “in the huge spaces of the outback, ordinary souls expand into splendid [forms].” Randolph Stow has pointed out that “when one is alone with [the country], one feels in one way very small, in another gigantic.” The actual ego-personality is dwarfed and made to feel quite small and puny, but the soul leaps out of its human encasement and ecstatically unites with the greater world. “Alone in the bush, with maybe a single crow . . . a phrase like ‘liberation of the spirit’ may begin to sound meaningful.”

. . . I have felt that the rocks and mountain ranges of central Australia were large enough to accommodate many Dreamings: perhaps a different dreaming for everyone who comes into geophysical contact with them. The fact that there could be many Dreamings did not, for me, cancel out the validity or importance of my own or any other dreaming. The landscape itself was plural, ever-changing, a festival of light and rock, always different, and so naturally this complex world would give rise to many stories, to many myths of place. In my heart I realized the priority and respected the major status of the Aboriginal stories that had already accounted for the places that I mooned around as a boy. But I always felt, arrogantly perhaps, that there was still room for my own psychic participation in the land. It had already happened anyway, and it was not something I could call a stop to on political, ideological, racial, or any other grounds.

– David J. Tacey
Excerpted from Edge of the Sacred:
Transformation in Australia
HarperCollins (1995)
pp. 23-26

NEXT:
Last Days in Australia

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Recognising and Honoring Australia’s First Naturalists
• On Sacred Ground (2019)
• In the Land of the Kamilaroi (2019)
• Guruk Seascapes, From Dawn to Dusk (2017)
• Australian Sojourn – May 2016
• Earth Day 2015
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012
• Rock of Ages: Theological Reflections on Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Afternoon
• Boorganna (Part I)
• Boorganna (Part II)
• My “Bone Country” (2009)
• Alva Beach (2006)
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• “Something Sacred Dwells There”

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band
• Family Time in Guruk
• Journey to Gulmarrad

Images: Michael J. Bayly (except image 3 which is of Jamie Gulpilil in the 2006 film Ten Canoes, and image 4 which is artwork by Ainslie Roberts).

Warumpi Band

Above: Warumpi Band in 1981. From left: Gordon Butcher, Neil Murray, Sammy Butcher, Dennis Minor and George Burarrwanga. (Photo: Warner Music)

Something special tonight for “music night” at The Wild Reed . . . It’s the 1987 music video for the Warumpi Band song, “My Island Home.” It’s a fitting song to share given that I’m currently back in my homeland of Australia to support my mum.

Here’s some background information about the Warumpi Band, courtesy of The Little Red Yellow Black Book: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia:

The Warumpi Band, which takes its name from the Honey Ant Dreaming site near Papunya in the Northern Territory, developed a unique style of rock music. In 1983, the band members wrote, recorded and released the first rock song in an Aboriginal language, “Jailanguru Pakarnu” (“Out of Jail”). It was voted one of the top ten recordings in the National Film and Sound Archive’s listings, Sounds of Australia, in 2007.

About “My Island Home,” Wikipedia notes the following.

“My Island Home” is a rock song written by Neil Murray for George Burarrwanga. It was originally performed by the Warumpi Band [of which both Murray and Burarrwanga were members]. The song references lead singer Burarrwanga’s home up at Elcho Island off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. It was recorded in 1986 and released as a single from their second album, Go Bush!, in January 1987.

It was covered by Christine Anu in 1995; she had been a backing vocalist in Neil Murray and The Rainmakers during 1992–1993.

“My Island Home” won “Song of the Year” at the 1995 Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) Awards for Anu’s reworked version of the song. It was also listed in the APRA Top 30 Australian songs of all time in 2001.

NEXT:
Family Time in Guruk

Related Off-site Links:
Warumpi Band’s Trail-blazing Legacy: “We Just Wanted to Give Our Music to Everybody” – Andrew Stafford (The Guardian, November 19, 2021).
The Origins of Aboriginal Rock Legends the Warumpi Band – ABC Listen (December 27, 2021).
Big Name No Blankets Review – Warumpi Band Musical Is a Joyous, Rollicking Tribute – Cassie Tongue (The Guardian, January 11, 2024).
Warumpi Band Musical Big Name, No Blankets Arrives in the Northern Territory for First Time – Matt Garrick (ABC News, August 6, 2024).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Celebrating Mabo
• Recognising and Honoring Australia’s First Naturalists
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• Jojo Zaho: “Let Your Faboriginality Shine Through”
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012
• Spirit Dreams


Previously featured musicians at The Wild Reed:
Dusty Springfield | David Bowie | Kate Bush | Maxwell | Buffy Sainte-Marie | Prince | Frank Ocean | Maria Callas | Loreena McKennitt | Rosanne Cash | Petula Clark | Wendy Matthews | Darren Hayes | Jenny Morris | Gil Scott-Heron | Shirley Bassey | Rufus Wainwright | Kiki Dee | Suede | Marianne Faithfull | Dionne Warwick | Seal | Sam Sparro | Wanda Jackson | Engelbert Humperdinck | Pink Floyd | Carl Anderson | The Church | Enrique Iglesias | Yvonne Elliman | Lenny Kravitz | Helen Reddy | Stephen Gately | Judith Durham | Nat King Cole | Emmylou Harris | Bobbie Gentry | Russell Elliot | BØRNS | Hozier | Enigma | Moby (featuring the Banks Brothers) | Cat Stevens | Chrissy Amphlett | Jon Stevens | Nada Surf | Tom Goss (featuring Matt Alber) | Autoheart | Scissor Sisters | Mavis Staples | Claude Chalhoub | Cass Elliot | Duffy | The Cruel Sea | Wall of Voodoo | Loretta Lynn and Jack White | Foo Fighters | 1927 | Kate Ceberano | Tee Set | Joan Baez | Wet, Wet, Wet | Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy | Fleetwood Mac | Jane Clifton | Australian Crawl | Pet Shop Boys | Marty Rhone | Josef Salvat | Kiki Dee and Carmelo Luggeri | Aquilo | The Breeders | Tony Enos | Tupac Shakur | Nakhane Touré | Al Green | Donald Glover/Childish Gambino | Josh Garrels | Stromae | Damiyr Shuford | Vaudou Game | Yotha Yindi and The Treaty Project | Lil Nas X | Daby Touré | Sheku Kanneh-Mason | Susan Boyle | D’Angelo | Little Richard | Black Pumas | Mbemba Diebaté | Judie Tzuke | Seckou Keita | Rahsaan Patterson | Black | Ash Dargan | ABBA | The KLF and Tammy Wynette | Luke James and Samoht | Julee Cruise | Olivia Newton-John | Dyllón Burnside | Christine McVie | Rita Coolidge | Bettye LaVette | Burt Bacharach | Kimi Djabaté | Ahmad Jamal | Benjamin Booker | Tina Turner | Julie Covington | Midist/Wasim | Durrand Bernarr | Cold Play | Keiynan Lonsdale | Sharon Jones | Sylvester

Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Queer Appreciation series concludes with an excerpt from an insightful and moving article by Steven Lindsay Ross (right) on his experiences growing-up gay and Indigenous in Australia. It’s a fitting piece to share given that I’m currently back in my homeland to support my mum.

Ross’s article was first published in 2014 by Archer Magazine, “the world’s most inclusive magazine about sexuality, gender and identity.”

__________________

Many Indigenous LGBTI people experience homophobia and transphobia in their own lives. Unfortunately, the perpetrators are often their own people or family.

I was about five years old, I reckon. My father, a Wiradjuri man, and I were getting out of our old family Valiant. We lived in what was called “the new mission,” in Macauley Street in Deniliquin, New South Wales. All the blacks had been moved to Deniliquin from Moonacullah Mission some 20 years earlier.

The charming houses built for the Moonacullah Aborigines were fibro and erected on the fringes of town, not far from the sewerage plant. A stiff northerly breeze carried the smell of raw faeces into our street, and if there was an operational issue with the works, the town’s sludge would come bubbling up into our bathrooms. Not exactly a welcoming experience of assimilation.

Deniliquin was, and still is, a pretty town on the Edward River (Koletch, in our Wamba Wamba language). Ever since I can remember, the sign coming into town announced that there were 8000 people living there.

On this particular summer day, after my father had been looking after me (I sit in the corner of the local TAB while he bets on the horses), we arrived back in Macauley Street to discover he’d left the house keys inside. He ordered me to climb through the window to open the door, but I refused. His response was to verbally abuse me and, for the first time in my life, I was called a “poofter.” I didn’t know what this word meant, but, considering the tone of its delivery, I knew it couldn’t be a good thing.

Over the following years I heard this word a lot more, and figured out its meaning. Given my pre-pubescent romance with another boy, I soon knew I was this thing.

This was the prism through which I saw my early sexuality. In the community I lived in, I did get a sense that homosexuality was not a good thing within our mobs. And, of course, like all homophobia and all bigotry, these attitudes were designed to de-humanise me, to marginalise me and to keep me down.

In 1978 my mother wisely left my father and moved to Sydney with my sister and me. Mum moved in some pretty funky and arty circles and we were often at bohemian parties in Balmain. My sister and I would hide under my mother’s skirt while mysterious white people drank and danced and ate exotic food.

The host of these parties was known as Aunty Sharon, a redhead with striking features and a beak-like nose, who spoke beautifully and loved hugging us kids. She was my mother’s boss and she lived in Waterview Street, Balmain, with her girlfriend.

My mother never had to explain any of this to me and I lapped up the experience, as any curious child would. I loved our visits to Aunty Sharon, and the look and smell of her house. My favourite thing was to fall asleep cuddling her life-sized Wonder Woman cushion.

In hindsight, these were formative years that helped to empower my sexual identity and sense of self-worth. My mother never sheltered us from these influences. She knew I was gay all my life, I suspect, and when I finally came out to her in 1991, she said “surprise, surprise”.

My mother is a proud Wamba Wamba and Muthi Muthi woman and she knows her culture, her ancestors and the way forward for her people. She spent her life working for the mob and instilling her knowledge into future generations through environmental work, weaving and storytelling.

My father, on the other hand, is highly colonised and, in my opinion, a tragic figure of a man who was never there for any of his children. When I came out to my father, he told me he used to bash people like me. Whenever we fought, homophobic insults were not off limits.

I have seen this prejudice in other families in Deniliquin, too – we must have been a queer little community, given how many gay and lesbian relatives I have. One experience that springs to mind is that of my cousin Henry, who is transgender. Henry blossomed into Violet during her teen years. Not knowing how to deal with this change, her brothers were brutal and violent.

Violet moved to Newcastle and rarely returned home. Despite all this, there remained a staunch set of sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins who adored her, kept in regular contact and resisted, berated and belittled those small-minded brothers.

This group also provided powerful protection for the rest of us LGBTI kids growing up. Hopefully, the prejudice of the old uncles dies with them.

We were also lucky enough to have Elder LGBTI people guide us through our childhood and coming-out phases. Small country towns are not the most hospitable places for young black kids, let alone young black LGBTI kids.

That said, homophobia still finds fertile ground in our communities. In late 2013, a boxer by the name of Anthony Mundine unleashed a homophobic rant on Facebook following an episode of Redfern Now. Mundine’s comments released a flood of memories for black LGBTI people like me, and gave room for more Indigenous people to express their homophobic beliefs.

If anything good came from Mundine’s incendiary comments, it was the chance for collective self-reflection for Aboriginal LGBTI people, along with their families and supporters. For every person who supported Mundine there were dozens who spoke out against his narrow-mindedness, promoting the loving acceptance of gays and lesbians in our community. And it has also encouraged support and advocacy for black LGBTI peoples in local and broader representations.

The contrast between my mother’s open-hearted embrace of my sexuality and my father’s hateful reaction made me contemplate the idea raised by Mundine about the place of homosexuality in so-called “traditional” Aboriginal culture. There are indications from some cultures around the world that diverse sexuality is an integral part of “traditional” indigenous life – for example, the Sistergirls of the Tiwi Islands, or the Two-Spirit movement found among some Native American cultures.

There is also a logical and reasonable approach to this argument: Aboriginal people have been in Australia for more than 60,000 years in what many anthropologists describe as a triumph of survival and mathematics. Given the overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is biological, it is logical to assume that homosexuality would have been a part of such a social equation. It is estimated that there have been four billion Aboriginal people In Australia since the dawn of time. Four billion, and not one gay person? That just defies belief.

Some argue that our culture would have oppressed such behaviour. This raises some interesting questions, as well as some colonial mythologies. Which traditional Aboriginal culture is being referred to here? When white people colonised Australia, there were hundreds of Aboriginal cultures. To know the mores and values of every single Aboriginal culture would be a major feat of anthropological prowess – one of which I doubt Mundine and his ilk are capable.

This argument also ignores the major diversity between groups, and indeed within them. This is why a homogenous approach to government policy doesn’t work, and why a consensus on constitutional reform will probably never work. We are as diverse as any other ethnicity and this must be acknowledged to really move forward.

This idea of “traditions” is also dangerous because it glues us to the past, rendering us immovable and static. It also sets up a system of haves and have-nots – those who have maintained their “traditional” culture, and those who have lost it.

All cultures change, and Aboriginal people would not have survived for so long had they not been adaptive and dynamic.

As for gay people being accepted in Aboriginal communities, I know a dozen or more black LGBTI people who are strong and powerful leaders in their communities. Some have led their mobs to successful native title consent determinations – a role that is built on trust. A native title case would include holding secret knowledge of sacred sites, family histories and land management practices, not to mention being entrusted to negotiate on behalf of thousands of claimants.

This responsibility would not be given lightly. It is a position that involves trusting a person’s character. The fact that LGBTI people have been entrusted in these processes speaks volumes for the support we have within our communities.

Of course, there will be narrow-minded people in our communities, too. We may dislike the Fred Niles, George Pells or Tony Abbotts of mainstream culture, but we are not surprised that those voices exist in a liberal democracy. There are narrow-minded indigenous people. There are also indigenous fundamentalists, climate-change deniers, racists and misogynists.

When I think of these people, or when I hear their bullshit in the media, I think of my accepting, unsurprised mother. I think of my sisters fighting for my rights, and defending my cousin Violet, and I remember the embrace of that Wonder Woman cushion.

– Steven Lindsay Ross
From “Homosexuality and Aboriginal Culture:
A Lore Unto Themselves”
Archer Magazine
October 20, 2014

NEXT:
June Vignettes

Related Off-site Link:
Embracing Queer Indigenous Australia – Todd Fernando (Pursuit, May 16, 2022).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Jojo Zaho: “Let Your Faboriginality Shine Through”
• Recognising and Honoring Australia's First Naturalists
• Clyde Hall: “All Gay People, in One Form or Another, Have Something to Give to This World, Something Rich and Very Wonderful”
• Terence Weldon: Quote of the Day – November 12, 2011
• John Corvino on the “Always and Everywhere” Argument Against Gay Marriage
• Same-Sex Desires: “Immanent and Essential Traits Transcending Time and Culture”
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012
• Thanks, Mum!

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Queer Appreciation series:
• What the Bible Really Says About Gender Justice
• Remembering the “Out, Proud and Vivid” Sylvester
• Exploring the Meaning and History of “Two-Spirit”