Dancing to heal
Originally published in The Nyngan Weekly
Wakakirri Mayi means dance people, and dance, teacher Jamie McLennan says, is healing. Performing this week at the Nyngan NAIDOC opening ceremony, Wakakirri Mayi has been working together for several years.
“I’ve been doing a pretty full-on dancing with them for maybe four or five years. I’ve been teaching and watching them grow.
“Every time I come up they’re a little bit older and heaps more confident in it.”
Mr McLennan has been dancing since he was a teenager, and takes great pride and joy in sharing culture and knowledge with the next generations.
“When you come out here, and to some other places too, it’s like ‘oh yeah, this is my culture’ and it’s so refreshing to see the young people in it.
“It makes me feel amazing. This is medicine. It’s medicine for our peoples, medicine for me when I started doing it too. I just can’t wait for the day I’m sitting down there and watching them all. Even seeing them now, it’s like they don’t even need me now.”
Mr McLennan started dancing when he was 13-years-old, and said it was a decision that helped set him on the right path in life.
Prior to this, he said he was on the wrong path and it was reconnecting with is culture and learning the essence of it that helped get him to where he is today.
Recently returned from an overseas trip, he now takes his dancing across the globe, connecting with Indigenous peoples from all over the world.
“I really enjoyed my culture and started dancing, and it gave me direction. So, then I went from dancing to really starting to learn the essence of Aboriginal culture.
“Then I kind of started to link in with different cultures around the place and go and sit and listen and learn and it gave me a lot of directions and morals.”
Today, Mr McLennan earns his living through sharing culture, and it’s brought him a fulfilment he hadn’t experienced previously.
“I’m trade qualified as a high voltage electrician and then after about six years of that, just didn’t feel like I was doing what I was supposed to be. I started doing a lot of community work, working with kids in at risk juvenile justice, some of the most behavioural issued kids in Dubbo.
“I worked with them with a cultural source, taking them to corroborees and taking them out bush.”
Connecting to culture, such as through dance like Wakakirri Mayi, is setting up children for the best future, he says.
With intergenerational trauma still very prevalent within his community, Mr McLennan said that cultural continuation can heal.
“We’re the trauma and the hurt. They took a culture to replace it with that, so we can replace it back again with culture and love. It might take a little, these kids they’re learning from a young age, they’re growing up with it now. And then the next kids will come through, and then it’ll be normalised than all of a sudden.”
At the end of Monday’s NAIDOC opening ceremony, Mr McLennan and his dancers taught the Nyngan community a dance. He said that sharing culture is one of his favourite things to do.
“One thing I’ve tried to do is share with everyone. Yeah. So even my songs and dances are travel around the world. It’s big messages in the songs and answers but it brings everyone together while they do it as well.
“It was beautiful today [Monday]. I can’t wait for the day where there’s not enough work for me because, of course, all these young ones are doing it, like I’ll be so happy be pretty cool to look back on.”
Learn more about Mr McLennan’s work in next week’s edition of The Nyngan Weekly.