You are a honey ant, a totem of our people.
Hold this end of the thread.
You are the mountains, hold that end of the thread.
You are the language of our people. Take the thread.
You are the waterways where we fish, drink and bathe.
The thread, keep it taut.

An elder from the Biripi nation walked around the room in Maitland Town Hall and assigned indigenous totems, animals, languages, and natural features to the 30 school teachers present, all of European descent.

Each white hand held a thread, forming a rainbow-coloured web that symbolised the interconnectedness of all things. The elder, Laurel Williams, told the teachers how for many thousands of years their threads had existed, and how they needed to be protected at all costs. Red, green, purple and yellow criss-crossed the room and linked ants to mountains, languages to rivers, one to all others.

“You must protect your totem, your language, your history,” Auntie Laurel said.

“This is all you’ve got.” Her creased hands then opened a pair of scissors and let the steel feel the tension of the wool. Every eye in the room watched her silently . . . there was a collective intake of breath. Indifferent, she cut the threads and the web disintegrated.

“You men are going to work the sheep station now,” she told them. “Eighteen hours you’ll be out there today.

“You young women are going to a girls’ home to be trained as servants. All you’ll know is servitude.”

Organisers of the Maitland Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group call this the Kinship Game.

Auntie Laurel conducted the game as part of the three-day Connecting to Country workshop, which also took in a visit to sacred sites and meetings with local elders.

The workshop is designed to help non-indigenous Maitland teachers understand, empathise and engage with their indigenous students.

MLAECG vice president Pauline Mitchell said few of the participants were immune to the emotional impact of the Kinship Game. “There were blokes in there weeping, it happens every time we do it,” she said. A quick scan of the room revealed that every other face was watery-eyed and distressed.

“Every Aboriginal person in there loses composure too as soon as she picks up the scissors – it just hits you in the chest like whoosh,” she said.

Indigenous elders, teachers and parents traipsed across the multicoloured shreds to the front of the room to share their stories, suggestions and fears.

To pre-emptively add gravity to the spectacle, the group had climbed to Biyami’s Cave near Milbrodale the day before. The cave is a sacred site, said to be the home of the creation spirit.

The area was also a meeting place and trading site for Aboriginal nations from across the region.

For Wonaruah elder and custodian Warren Taggart, the ancient cave is a central point of his culture and identity. “It’s a place where a lot of storylines and paths met,” he said.

“It goes back thousands of years. “I remember when my dad stood me up on the rock and spoke to me about it when I was young. “It’s a part of our lives.”

After the cave the teachers were shown indigenous artefacts at Kurri Kurri High School. Showing the educators places and objects of cultural significance only served to amplify the sense of loss that came later with the Kinship Game.

Mr Taggart said he felt charged with safeguarding the sacred sites of his people, which often meant showing them to outsiders. “Getting people, teachers particularly, to understand us is something I enjoy,” he said.

I don’t see the use in a teacher trying to talk to our kids if they don’t have any of our knowledge. “But now they’ve been out there and seen the sites they have an idea of who we are, how far we go back, what we want to continue.”

On the final day of the seminar the teachers went to Kurri Kurri TAFE to meet with local elders and hear their personal accounts as members of the stolen generation.

Organisers said the intimate final session was designed to show that traumatic policies continued to echo through younger generations of indigenous people.

“Teachers often ask themselves: ‘Why aren’t [indigenous] parents engaging with the school?’,” MLAECG President Debby Elliott said.

“But these policies are like skipping stones on a river. “They’ve long since passed but the ripples are still affecting us. “Parents and grandparents are a product of those policies. They still feel it and they builds up their child’s negative knowledge of school.”

Mrs Elliott said the immersive, sometimes confronting exercises and experiences were necessary. “It’s about educating [the teachers] to the other part of Australian history,” she said.

“Black history is their history too and they need to understand. “We can talk until the cows come home but people need to see it, feel it, watch their threads being cut, to understand.”

Francis Greenway teacher Harmonie Atwill said she felt lucky to have a first-hand insight into the culture and looked forward to using her experiences in the classroom.

“We’re very lucky,” she said. “Not many would get the opportunity to do this, to hear these stories and tell people what it’s all about. “Being able to connect with students makes things more significant in the classroom.”

Story appeared in the Maitland Mercury. Published in 2015.