Abstract
Warlpiri people have lived in their homelands for countless generations. Western Europeans began to intrude into these places only a century ago. Since that first contact, kardiya have shot, poisoned, forcibly relocated, and enslaved yapa. They have imposed foreign ideas upon yapa, and despised yapa ways of being—ceremonies, language, relationships, connection to country, cosmology, and law (Reynolds 1987, 1989). Some Warlpiri call this ngurra-kurlu (Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu et al. 2008). It is the Warlpiri way of being, and order of things.
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Notes
- 1.
Aboriginal people have been on the continent of Australia at least 57,000 years (Thorne et al. 1999).
- 2.
Kardiya is a Gurindji word that Warlpiri have adopted that broadly means non-Aboriginal people (Swartz 2012), but can have particular meaning depending on the context; here we mean western European-descended, settler-colonisers in Australia.
- 3.
Yapa literally means ‘people’; often used to mean only ‘Warlpiri people’, in context it can mean ‘Aboriginal people’ in continental Australia. Cf ‘Kardiya’ above n2.
- 4.
Milpirri is a bi-annual festival held in late October in Lajamanu. This discussion of pulyaranyi is drawn from discussions with collaborators in Lajamanu in 2012, when the theme of Milpirri was Pulyaranyi (see Patrick 2015). Jerry Jangala Patrick described pulyaranyi as a ceremony in which he participated as a young man, before Warlpiri people were forced to move to Hooker Creek ‘Native Settlement’ (now Lajamanu) around 1952 (personal communication with Williams 2011, 2012).
- 5.
Other dialects call ‘country’ ngurrara. For example the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala, and Juwaliny peoples, who painted their ngurrara to claim native title (O’Donoghue 2001, ix).
- 6.
There are earlier cases in the Northern Territory courts where defendants claimed ‘payback’, but were not, in fact, instances of lawful processes of yaru mani-kujaku.
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Patrick, W.S.J., Williams, M.S. (2018). Thoughts on the ‘Law of the Land’ and the Persistence of Aboriginal Law in Australia. In: Hendry, J., Tatum, M., Jorgensen, M., Howard-Wagner, D. (eds) Indigenous Justice. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60645-7_10
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