Paper short abstract:

Contemporary indigenous communities are making increasing use of representations of their traditional water serpent beings to express their cultural vitality, and promote their beliefs and values. This paper considers how serpentine stories and images are used to empower indigenous uprisings.

Paper long abstract:

In medieval Europe, Christian saints embarked upon an orgy of serpent slaying in their determination to extinguish the 'heretical' beliefs of nature religions and consign their deities to Hell. In the colonial era, settlers in Oceania, Africa and Asia sought to repress local beliefs in non-human deities, including the serpentine beings that, for many indigenous communities, manifested the elemental and creative powers of waters held within and beneath the land. In both cases, worldviews valorising reciprocal human-environmental relations and deep attachments to place were forced underground by patriarchal religions extolling human dominion over 'nature', establishing the authority of an all-powerful male deity, and imposing instrumentally coercive relationships with non-human beings and environments.

Today, as indigenous communities seek to reclaim their rights to land and water, and to critique the unsustainable lifeways of larger societies, many are making use of representations of their traditional water serpent beings. These powerful generative figures readily encapsulate and express the vitality of indigenous peoples, and their cultural ideas and values. Thus in New Zealand, taniwha arise in debates about water ownership and management; in Australia, the Rainbow Serpent resurfaces in efforts to articulate Aboriginal worldviews; in Europe, the Welsh dragon is summoned up to express a vision of Celtic identity and pre-Christian lifeways. Drawing on extensive comparative research examining water serpent beings in multiple cultural and historical contexts, this paper considers how serpentine stories and images are presented to empower indigenous uprisings and promote alternate values about human-non-human relations.