An interesting talk featuring both David Holmgren and Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu. Bruce explains the manipulation of the land and natural resources by Aboriginal people, using crops which have disappeared from that land today. Various Indigenous villages thrived in places that settlers were barely surviving, due to their complex knowledge. It is particularly interesting to look at the reasons that settlers erased this history. Pascoe explains that if people were believed to have complex relationships with the land, cultivating it successfully, they would have legal claim to it according to colonial law, so in order to dispose of these people and steal land, settlers created a myth of the indigenous hunter-gatherer as helpless. This is arguably a form of enclosure of the commons. The knowledge and ethics of Indigenous people has formed the basis of permaculture, as a way of living with the land.
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