What >65,000 Years of Governance Looks Like
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ONE THING is for the busy (speak of the devil) Future Director, in which FDI Founder Paul Smith picks just one thing Future Directors oughta know or do or stew on for the next month. We hope you get something (at least one thing) out of it.
We’re always working toward inclusivity and intersectionality at Future Directors. And, today, it’s particularly important that I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I write this – the Whadjuk Noongar people.
This month, as I travel to and from North America for a series of talks on board performance, AI and impactful governance, the one thing I’m reminded of what impactful governance actually is.
By this I mean the sustainable, sensitive, and sage form of governance that looked after this country and the people within it, for the (at minimum) 65,000 years prior to European invasion and, encumbered but proudly and continuously, through to this day.
I’m talking about the governance enacted by Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other First Nations communities across the globe. I’ve been so privileged to learn from the wisdom of so many people who have generously shared their time and insights.
There’s a great quote in Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ that inks with crystal clarity the sharp divide between the governance mindset of Traditional, versus Colonial:
“The system in operation could be considered a jigsaw mutualism. People had rights and responsibilities for particular pieces of the jigsaw, but they were constrained to operate that piece so that it added to rather than detracted from the pieces of their neighbours and the epic integrity of the land.
The piece of the stream or land that a group retained responsibility for bled into country so distant that they may never visit. They had to imagine how the whole picture looked, and they had absolute confidence in the coherence of the accretive construction of their law over thousand of years, and knew that the jigsaw would make sense and that their responsibility was that it continued to make sense.” (Pasoce 2014, p199)
The ‘jigsaw mutualism’ Pascoe describes is a system of governance not based on possession and control, but stewardship and custodianship.
The difference is this: Possession seems often used by the possessor as an excuse to carve the object of their ownership out of the collective picture. To have bought it out of the strings of the system from which it had previously belonged. To treat it as disconnected and unrelated. A license to do with it what they will.
But the custodianship enacted by collectivist cultures, such as many First Nations, shows us the exact opposite. Custodianship is not the absolution of oneself or one’s people from obligations to the collective. Instead, it’s a guarantee of that participation. It’s a locking-in of that onus toward country and others, over large expanses of time.
You can see this governance in the careful use of fire in Indigenous Australian life, the construction of housing, and the cultivation of subterranean yams along Australia’s east coast over millennia, but that were quickly eaten up by the sheep the Europeans brought.
You can see it in the Indigenous understanding of moiety – that each is only half of the whole. In many songlines, people who think with their head are required to only enter relationships with partners who think with their hearts – and vice versa.
And you can even see it in the small gaps between the rockwork of the Brewarrina Fish Traps that allowed the smallest and youngest fish to escape, ingeniously avoiding overfishing.
All throughout First Nations communities there is a deep and sophisticated awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.
That’s why the Māori tribe of Whanganui in Aotearoa in New Zealand fought for the recognition of their river to be granted the same legal rights as a human being. Or why there was such a severe reaction to Rio Tinto’s actions in 2020 when they blasted a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand an iron ore mine.
It’s this kind of governance we need more of in our boardrooms – a sensitivity toward the broader community and the environment – to safely and sustainably steward organisations into the future. Something I’d describe as a ‘more humane’ form of governance.
That’s why I believe it’s so important that (in Australia), come referendum, we enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in our nation’s constitution.
The Voice is another crucial step in the healing. It will need to be strengthened and tested over time. And it will need to lead to Treaty, and then to Truth. But, as important as healing, the Voice will start to cement a role for one of the most sustainable, conscious, sensitive and oldest governance models known to humankind in Parliament House.
We believe this will be a positive influence on governance at all levels. Government. Institutions. Companies. Organisations. Humans. To borrow Pascoe’s metaphor, this is our once-in-a-lifetime chance to piece this jigsaw together.
