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Articles on Aboriginal culture

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May Nango sharing stories about Mamukala wetlands with her grandson, in 2015. Anna Florin (courtesy of GAC)

65,000 years of food scraps found at Kakadu tell a story of resilience amid changing climate, sea levels and vegetation

The Kakadu region has gone through immense transformation throughout history. How can archaeological food scraps tell us about how the First Australians adapted?
This sketch depicts the Waterloo Creek massacre (also known as the Slaughterhouse Creek massacre), part of the conflict between mounted police and Indigenous Australians in 1838. Godfrey Charles Mundy/National Library of Australia

Enforcing assimilation, dismantling Aboriginal families: a history of police violence in Australia

Police played a unique role in many settler colonies executing assimilationist policies designed to dismantle First Nations families.
Caroline Spry

How a stone wedged in a gum tree shows the resilience of Aboriginal culture in Australia

An Aboriginal tree on Wiradjuri Country is much younger than anybody thought.
Uncle Fred Deeral as little old man in the film The Message, by Zakpage, to be shown at the National Museum of Australia in April. Nik Lachajczak of Zakpage

An honest reckoning with Captain Cook’s legacy won’t heal things overnight. But it’s a start

An honest reckoning with Captain Cook’s legacy won’t heal things overnight. But it’s a start. The Conversation41.4 MB (download)
The impact of 1770 has never eased for Aboriginal people. It was a collision of catastrophic proportions.
A scene from the author’s film The Message, commissioned by the National Museum of Australia. At the first encounter in Botany Bay, two Gweagal warriors threw stones and spears at Cook, saying ‘warrawarrawa’, meaning ‘they are all dead’. Nik Lachajczak of Zakpage

‘They are all dead’: for Indigenous people, Cook’s voyage of ‘discovery’ was a ghostly visitation

Incidents from Cook’s first voyage highlight themes relevant in Indigenous-settler relations today: environmental care, reconciliation and governance. This collision of beliefs, it seems, wasn’t lost on Cook.
Regrowth one month after fires at Colo Heights, NSW. A legacy of displacement and racism inflames bushfire trauma for Aboriginal Australians. Vanessa Cavanagh

Strength from perpetual grief: how Aboriginal people experience the bushfire crisis

As Australia picks up the pieces after the fires, we must understand the unique grief Aboriginal people experience from a loss of country.
B.C. green-lighted an exploration permit to a mining company, despite the fact that plans for a mine were rejected both federally and by the Tsilhqot’in National Government. (Garth Lenz/ Tsilhqot’in National Government)

Tsilhqot’in blockade points to failures of justice impeding reconciliation in Canada

Dasiqox Tribal Park offers a powerful example of what true reconciliation can mean for Canada when Indigenous peoples and their rights are respected and upheld.
Normanton Aboriginal rangers and archaeologists reburying the skeletal remains of Gkuthaarn and Kukatj children back on country. Michael Westaway

Where did you grow up? How strontium in your teeth can help answer that question

How do you return Aboriginal remains to their place of origin when you have no record of where they came from? Look to a chemical element that’s laid down in teeth as people grow up.
Detail of the Connecticut Inscription, with image enhancement. Centre for Rock Art Research and Management database

Rock art shows early contact with US whalers on Australia’s remote northwest coast

Etchings over much earlier Aboriginal engravings show foreign whalers made contact with Australia’s remote northwest long before colonial settlement of the area.
An image of the landscape around Bairnsdale in the late-18th century. D. R Long (Daniel Rutter), between 1856 and 1883. State Library of Victoria

Recovered Aboriginal songs offer clues to 19th century mystery of the shipwrecked ‘white woman’

Aboriginal songs found in the notebooks of a Victorian anthropologist shed light on the mystery of a ‘captive white woman’ that has been debated for generations.
“New Hollanders” depicted in a 1698 edition of the explorer William Dampier’s journal. Courtesy of the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai'i-Mānoa

Found: the earliest European image of Aboriginal Australians

The image, depicting a group of Indigenous people resisting their enslavement, predates the next oldest image by 75 years.

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