Asleep in her childhood sleep, Nayola Bond learned a spiritual world that was exciting and fascinating, full of non-human life, compassion and community — even though it was deeply unsettling and foreign to her own.
“I was told on a daily basis that I was weird, strange, and strange,” Ms. Bond said. She was constantly bullied in school and at home. The rampant language barrier and cultural challenges left her alone at the most vulnerable moments in her life. In her teens, she started to treat herself like an experiment, recording her ideas and movements and trying out experiments with which she could “learn how to be,” to make herself a project rather than “just myself.”
In her late teens, she got a cell phone and used the phone to connect to her family back home in Australia, which was then on the brink of an epidemic of childhood obesity. She became a powerful advocate for healthy food, establishing a school garden and a healthy snacks program for kids. She discovered a community of Indigenous Australians who practiced Indigenous traditions and connected to their Indigenous history through drumming, dance and song.
Ms. Bond’s life began to fall apart around the time her third child was born. At her worst, she thought she was going to kill herself because of how much she disliked herself. But her experience with the old world only brought more questions about the present world, which made her more determined to heal her internal pain. She began to practice elements of Indigenous culture, such as carrying her ceremonial headdress in her pockets and passing these aspects of her culture to others who wanted to learn from it.
“I wanted to be better, and give back, and I wanted to help heal the world,” she said. Ms. Bond decided that the only way to do this was through a movement called Indigenous Spoken Word, designed for educators and teachers. She traveled from town to town in Indigenous Spoken Word programs, hosting drum circles and workshops for hundreds of students, local community members and a wider audience. This international and Indigenous Spoken Word movement has reached hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including Ms. Bond and dozens of other Indigenous speakers from New Zealand, Canada, Europe, Australia and the U.S.
“The intangibles that came from learning through drumming helped to give me the courage to connect with my parents more,” she said. She was given a microphone and made a point of connecting with her mother each time she stopped speaking to her. That’s when her mother told her she felt like she was talking to someone “born in hell,” and she became convinced that God had answered her prayers.
Ms. Bond’s mother became close to Ms. Bond, and soon decided to bring her entire family to Ottawa for a visit — their first trip to North America. They spent three weeks learning about Indigenous culture and their own roots, working in workshops and sessions, learning chants and songs and drumming. They all grew closer, finding strength in connecting to each other’s brokenness and finding beauty in the many facets of their spirituality.
“I was really drawn to spirituality,” Ms. Bond said. “I had been raised on a really strong Christian background and I wasn’t very good at communicating how I was feeling. I saw being Indigenous as being a connection that I really needed, rather than a burden that I needed to hold.”
Ms. Bond eventually began to experience breakthroughs in her work — including a major awakening of her own year-and-a-half ago. Ms. Bond’s work has found its way to the stage and movies and has grown into a community of collaborators that gather every week and write traditional poetry and songs in a safe, safe space. A push from the artist Fiona Brookman to bring