riginal and nonab-original Australians.[22] He knows how hard it is to move forward on these challenges and wasn't surprised by the lack of progress of the effort in Canada in which I had been involved.
Dodson wanted me to contribute to a meeting that he was convening with John Sanderson, the former chief of the Australian Army. They were trying to construct a new set of agreements (including constitutional amendments) that would, more than 220 years after the arrival of the settlers and 15 years after the High Court verdict that overruled terra nullius, put the relationship between these two peoples on an equal footing.
The evening before our meetings were to start, I walked by an outdoor cinema and found myself watching two documentaries. The first was The White Planet, a film about arctic wildlife and the dangers it faces from global warming.[23] The second was Kanyini, about an Australian aboriginal leader named Bob Randall, a member of the "Stolen Generation" who as a child had (like many Canadian children) been taken away from his family by the government.[24] In Kanyini, Randall argues that the crisis in aboriginal society originated in their having been dispossessed and estranged from the four aspects of life that are essential to survival: their belief system or law, their land or country, their spirituality, and their families. "The purpose of life is to be part of everything that is," he says in the film. "You take away my kanyini, my interconnectedness, and I'm nothing. I'm dead." I was struck that Randall's yearning was the same as Paul Tillich's love: "the drive towards the unity of the separated."
In the juxtaposition of these two films, I could now see what happens when we employ our power without love. Our destruction of aboriginal societies worldwide and our headlong rush towards the destruction of the ecosystems on which all our societies depend arise from our disconnection from one another and from the earth. Environmentalist