Our politicians have shown themselves too small for this task

I am a magpie. It is my family’s totem, our animal spirit. It connects us to our place, in my case Wiradjuri country in central west NSW. It is my home, the land on which I was raised. It is a land that links me to my ancestors, to tens of thousands of years of tradition. It is the essence of sovereignty; our story comes out of our land, it lives in the waters and plants and animals and it lives in us.

I was back on country again recently for my Aunty’s funeral. She was my father’s sister, a formidable woman raised on missions and riverbanks in the hard years of state enforced segregation. She, like so many others, had lived at the coalface of bigotry and often brutality.

My Aunty grew up to travel the world, and dedicate her life to the pursuit of justice for her people. She served on the Wiradjuri Council of Elders and along with my father, fought to keep our language alive and flourishing. My Aunty was one of the trailblazers of Indigenous media and inspired me to chase my dreams.

She had a big funeral. Our people came from everywhere. When it came time to deliver her eulogy, I wore an armband of magpie feathers designed by one of my cousins. In our modern world we can so easily be cynical – too rational - about ritual and spirituality. I have been as guilty of this as anyone. My life has taken me a long way from home; far from the faces of my own. Little by little those ties to place begin to feel looser. But here I was home again, among the warmth and love of my family, wearing the feathers of the magpie, saying goodbye to my Aunty: it was all I needed to know who I am, where I belong. In that place I am Wiradjuri.

Wiradjuri means "no – (or not) – having". My Aunty would not have anyone tell her who she was and what she needed to be. Not for her the need for recognition. No one at her funeral asks Australia to recognise them. What a foolish idea, to tell these people of kinship and story and language and belonging that they need to be recognised.

As her coffin was lowered into the ground, one of my uncles spoke loudly in Wiradjuri language. Laying my Aunty to rest with words older than Australia. She was a woman of great Christian faith and deep Wiradjuri traditions; one strengthening the other.

A week later I was in the audience at ABC’s Q&A listening to a discussion about the Uluru Statement and constitutional recognition. After being home, this felt small. Indigenous people are asking Australia for a voice in the constitution, the constitution doesn’t feel big enough for us.

The idea of Australia isn’t big enough. Two centuries isn’t big enough to hold time immemorial. A flag, an anthem, a national day none of it is big enough to hold a Wiradjuri night sky.

This is what the Uluru Statement from the Heart asks us to imagine: a bigger nation. A nation freed from the curse of terra nullius: that can finally place the First Peoples of this land at the heart of Australia’s founding document.

Our politicians have shown themselves too small for this task. The generosity of the Uluru Statement has been shrunk to the politically possible. It is a debating point. Now, we fill the ABC studios with empty words that take us nowhere.

Road map for empowerment: The artists of the Uluru Statement of the Heart at Uluru in 2017. Credit: Clive Scollay

But the Uluru Statement was never for politicians, it was for the Australian people. Are we as a nation, big enough?

Battle weary Indigenous leaders must now take this idea back to their people. Politics is about compromise and if there is to be a political solution then compromise is inevitable. That’s ok too, if it means that those who suffer the most in this country have their voices heard.

My family, my people, those who gathered to farewell my Aunty, know that sovereignty is not something you ask for, it is something you have and cannot be taken. It is something you do; something you speak. It is who we are. It cannot be taken.

Listen to the words of the Uluru Statement from the Heart:

“This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors."

In two centuries of colonisation, that has never wavered. As the Uluru Statement says "it is the basis of the ownership of the soil".

This is Australia’s journey, bigger than politics. It is about finding a nation’s soul in a sovereignty as old as human time on this continent.

As we left the cemetery, my youngest son said "Dad, did you see the magpies?", a big flock of them, he said, landed on the grass behind us. They were their for my Aunty. They were there for us.

Stan Grant is professor of global affairs at Griffith University. He is a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man.