The One Who Wanted to Be Boss

In the southern vault of the sky, between the stars, there lies a dark shape that peoples of the continent’s south read as an emu—not a pattern traced by the stars, but the void between them, a creature made of night. Tyson Yunkaporta, of the Apalech clan, is a Brolga boy, the crane, the emu’s traditional enemy; he knows, he says, all the stories tied to it. The one he cherishes most he learned from a Nyoongar elder, Noel Nannup, in Perth. In the beginning, the story goes, a decision had to be made: who would be entrusted with the world’s care.

he tells the story of the Dreaming in which a gathering took place where all the species sat in council to decide which would become the custodial species of all creation.

A council, then, not a coronation. Creation is not entrusted to the swiftest or the strongest; it is debated, and the debate concerns a duty, not a throne. Yet one of the creatures behaves as if it were a throne. The Emu dashes about to display its speed, proclaims its superiority, « demanding to be boss and shouting at everyone. » Precisely what disqualifies it. The others must bring it back to earth: « The Kangaroo (its head in the Southern Cross) holds it down, the Echidna grabs it from behind, and the great Serpent coils around its legs. » The whole scene can still be read up there, fixed in the sky. And Yunkaporta draws the lesson without weighing it down: « Containing this malevolent narcissist’s excesses is a team effort. »

Here is the reversal. The one who wants to command is not the model of the custodial species; it is the danger. The world’s care is not bestowed upon the dominant, but exercised against the pretension to dominate—including our own. To be the custodial species is not to reign at the summit of the living, but to « keep creation in motion, » to ensure that nature’s and society’s systems continue to thrive. A function, not a privilege; work turned downward and sideways, never upward.

One does not assume this role by decree. One enters it through a way of dwelling. Yunkaporta offers a phrase from his language that he calls untranslatable—Aak Ngamparam yimanang wunan—which might be rendered, word for word, as « to be like the place where one is. » It is, he writes, « a good way to begin, if you want to start discerning the patterns of creation and thus join our custodial species. » To become like the place: not to oversee it for management, but to attune oneself to it until it changes you—the accent, the words, the way of speaking of the places with which one enters into relation.

Our tradition has ruled the opposite, and this must be said before any comparison. The Bible’s first book entrusts humanity with a land to subdue and living beings to dominate: it places us at the summit, stewards of a domain handed over to our care. Even our softened versions—management, stewardship, « sustainable development »—preserve the position: the manager stands outside the system they administer, above it, accountable yet sovereign. Yunkaporta’s custodial species has no such outside. It is within creation, among the others, and itself held by them—the emu is us when we proclaim ourselves bosses, and then the kangaroo, the echidna, the serpent must bring us back to earth. Where we see humanity as the responsible master of the living, the Dreaming sees it as the member that must above all be prevented from believing itself master.

The point of contact is narrow, and it deserves to be noted without forcing it: both stories do grant humanity a singular charge, a responsibility the other creatures do not bear. But one makes of it a sovereign who answers for their subjects, the other the species most prone to excess, which must be restrained so the world may endure. Two charges, two directions; they are not to be confused.

Then remains the question the emu, up there, keeps open. If our role were not to rule over the living but to keep it in motion, which of our excesses would the other species, right now, need to help us contain?