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This article discusses the diversity, distribution, and qualities of materials and substances categorized as red among Pitjantjatjara‐ and Yankunytjatjara‐speaking Western Desert Aboriginal people: Anangu. Valued red materials and substances include elements of the encultured landscape – country – such as ochre, timber, food, blood, and fire, alongside cloth and other industrially produced materials. Previous scholarship defines reds among central Australian Aboriginal cultures only in static symbolic terms as representing blood. Based on long‐term fieldwork, this article discusses how Anangu employ a system of analogy across domains which connects together red materials and substances with particular affordances. I argue that Anangu conceptualize these red materials and substances as making visible kurunpa/spirit. This has implications for concepts of health and for constructing the local cultural value of consumer goods and substances found in country. Reds connect the mental and the material. The article contributes to studies of how contemporary Anangu mediate relationships between kin and country and participate in a wider market economy. It addresses anthropological knowledge about, and the importance of, the materiality of colours and the role of coloured materials and substances in shaping local ontologies and epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water has been a critical resource for Anangu peoples across the remote inland for millennia, underpinning their ability to live in low rainfall environments. Anangu biocultural knowledge of kapi (water) developed in complex ways that enabled this resource to be found. Such biocultural knowledge included deep understandings of weather patterns and of species behavior. Kapi and its significance to desert-dwelling peoples can be seen in ancient mapping practices, whether embedded in stone as petroglyphs or in ceremonial song and dance practices associated with the Tjukurpa. While in the past the sustainability of kapi was facilitated by mobility that spread human dependence on this resource across multiple sites, since the 1940s Anangu have been coerced by the settler-colonial state to live a sedentary lifestyle in remote communities such as Haasts Bluff, Papunya and Yuendemu. In many of these communities the supply of kapi is becoming increasingly insecure in terms of viability of supply, cost, quality and threats from mining. This paper provides a brief insight into how kapi has become devalued in the context of contemporary remote communities with particular reference to my area of expertise - Aboriginal identity, well-being and Australian sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of Aṉangu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby Aṉangu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within Aṉangu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for collaborative approaches has both an ethical and pragmatic imperative in the fields of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, education and research. It has been argued that both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous people are not adequately equipped to address inequity in contemporary Australia without an understanding of both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. Towards developing this capacity, a collaboration between differing knowledge systems can result in a kind of 'gestalt leap' or 'third space'. Examples of this exchange include Anangu concepts such as Malparara and Ngapartji Ngapartji. Mindful of this argument, the authors of this paper have found a limited literature on the process and benefits of collaborations that bring together the disparate knowledge systems of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures. This paper contributes to the development of such a literature and focuses upon the processes by which these benefits may be maximised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a set of exchanges between members of Australia’s Indigenous Western Desert culture, in the Pitjantjatjara dialect of the Western Desert language. The analyses are designed to illustrate how social relations in the culture are enacted with resources for interpersonal meaning in the language. The paper begins with a brief overview of social and linguistic theory underpinning the analyses. This is followed by a survey of Pitjantjatjara language resources for structuring exchanges, and for realising exchange moves in the grammar of clauses and the tones on which they are spoken. An overview of the Western Desert kinship system is then followed by analyses of five extended exchanges, that show how these resources are deployed to enact various types of kin relations. They illustrate some of the elaborate ways that Western Desert speakers negotiate their relationships and social goals, within the framework of their community’s kinship traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and communities are diverse and complex sites shaped by contrasting geographies, languages, histories and cultures, including historical and ongoing relationships with colonialism, and connected yet contextually unique epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies.This paper explores the history of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra) populations, including the establishment of incorporated communities and schools across the tri-state remote region of central Australia. This study will show that Anangu have a relatively recent contact history with Europeans and Anangu experiences of engagement with colonisation and schooling are diverse and complex.By describing historical patterns of population centralisation and decentralisation, I argue that schooling and broader education policies need to be contextually responsive to Anangu histories, values, ontologies and epistemologies in order to produce an education approach that resists colonialist social models and assumptions and instead, works more effectively towards a broader aim of social justice. Through assisting educators and policy makers to acquire a clearer understanding of Anangu histories, capacities and struggle, I hope to inform a more nuanced, contextually responsive and socially-just consideration of the provision of Western education in the tri-state region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the social status and works of Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NYP) women in the central desert region of Australia. It states that social enterprise Tjanpi Desert Weavers has been established by the NPY Women's Council to help women who wanted to have a meaningful and appropriate jobs. It adds that the Tjanpi Toyota basket created by women workers from Tjanpi has received the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2005.

Mainstream Australian society tends to assume that the purposes of schooling and aspirations that school should enable are universal and roundly accepted. The authors of this paper examine the issues with these assumptions and consider what "imagined futures" (Nakata, 2007a) mean for young people in Aṉangu (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara) schools and communities today. They pose the question, "How might remote educators enable a space for re-imagining the future on Aṉangu terms and what potential does remote education offer in this regard?" This paper emphasizes the strong self-determination stance and action that is required by Aṉangu in both articulating Aṉangu values in the education process and in instilling a positive perspective about the opportunities for young people into the future. The authors also interrogate the role of Piranpa (non-Indigenous) remote educators in how they might position themselves for student imagination, aspiration and hope, pointing students back to the intergenerational capacities that are critical in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]