STANFORD, CA.- This summer, Stanford University´s Department of Anthropological Sciences, are offering a unique opportunity for Stanford students to be involved with an extended visit of an Aboriginal family from Australia to the American West. The overall aim of this project is to establish a foundation for partnerships of bio-cultural exchange between Martu Aborigines, diverse San Francisco Bay Area communities, and Indigenous groups in the Western United States. Martu live in the heart of Australia’s Western Desert. They are in many respects classically oriented and committed hunter-gatherers, and owners of the largest Native Title in Australia. At the end of June 2006, a family of four Martu representing three generations from Parnngurr Outstation will began a six week visit of the Bay Area and various Native communities in the American West. Their visit is organized around three Martu concerns: arts heritage, resource use and land management, and indigenous health.

The exchange began with a reception and art exhibit, in conjunction with the Stanford’s Department of Anthropological Sciences, where Martu artists showed a sample of their work featuring contemporary painting, woodworking, and basketry. The exhibit will remain open to the public for two weeks. The reception and exhibit are designed to provide a relaxed forum for Martu artists to engage with members of Bay Area communities interested in sharing unique lifeways and artistic expressions of human environmental dynamics.

Following this, the Department has organized a basket making workshop with Washoe and Paiute experts at the University Nevada in Reno. Martu will then be participating in an on-going ethnobotany project (Gidutikad Paiute and researchers from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, U.Utah) in Surprise Valley, CA, focusing on ecological and anthropomorphic factors influencing the distribution of important wild plant resources. The group will travel to the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute in Mission, OR where Martu will be participating with Umatilla in contemporary subsistence activities. The visit will then finish with a trip to the American Southwest, accompanied by indigenous representatives from University of Utah, to visit Indian communities that share commitments and concerns about subsistence resource management and links to health.

The Martu visit offers a unique opportunity for very different communities to explore shared interests in maintaining and promoting bio-cultural diversity. Martu educate through their art: their themes are the inextricable ties of their Law – culture writ large – resource use practice, the totemic landscape, and the rites of life. In turn, experiencing aspects of life very different from their own will provide tools for these and possibly future Martu to analyze the global importance of their social relationships with their country and their response to change.