The Children of the Whale The Children of the Whale
Nature

The Children of the Whale

The Mirning People of Australia
Agnieszka Burton
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time 7 minutes

The Great Australian Bight is home to the Mirning, one of the island’s Indigenous peoples. They feel responsible for animals living there, because they believe that they are related.

According to the reasoning of the ancient Chaldeans and the Greco-Egyptian astrologers, the human body is connected to the system of planets and zodiac signs in the sky. It’s a microcosm. Blood vessels run through our body just as life-giving water channels run through the body of the Earth. Our breath is like air, and the warmth of the human body is like the ‘inner heat’ of the Earth (as was commonly believed in mediaeval Europe). In the 18th century, scholars from The Royal Society in London argued that the Earth is an expanded human organism.

In the 1970s, astronomer Carl Sagan explained that our DNA contains the same material that stars are made of; in 2010, Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, attempted to prove that 97% of our body matter comes from ancient stars. Yet for about 65,000 years, or ever since Dreamtime, Indigenous Australians have believed

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Autumn Peltier. Photo by Linda Roy, courtesy of Stephanie Peltier

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They are teenagers, and just like many of their peers, trying to save the planet. They say that simply growing up in the Indigenous communities of the Americas counts as climate activism. They bring it to a new level: to them, the Earth is sacred. They call water ‘blue gold’, and learn how to live from other living creatures.

When eight-year-old Autumn Peltier went to the bathroom during the Water Ceremony she attended with her parents at Serpent River First Nation, she was dismayed. How come it was not possible to drink tap water in an Indigenous reserve? What does it mean that the water is toxic? Autumn pelted her mother with questions. This experience was an utter shock to the little girl who grew up in the Wiikwemkoong community by one of the Great Lakes and was always taught that water is sacred.

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