Tiwi people
Australian aboriginal ethnic group
The Tiwi people (or Tunuvivi) are one of the many Aboriginal groups of Australia. Nearly 2,000 Tiwi people live on the Tiwi Islands. The landmass of the Tiwi Islands is made up mainly of Bathurst and Melville Islands, both located about 48 kilometres (30 miles) from Darwin. The Tiwi language is a language isolate, with no apparent link to the languages of Arnhem Land or of other Aboriginal Australians beyond recent linguistic interaction as a result of the federal government's Stolen Generations relocation policies. Tiwi society is based on matrilineal descent, and marriage plays a very important part in many aspects of their lives. Art and music form an intrinsic part of their societal and spiritual rituals as the Tiwi people tend to follow a certain form of indigenous Dreamtime belief system alongside Roman Catholicism.
Language
Tiwi, the most polysynthetic of all Australian languages, is a language isolate with no apparent genetic link to the contiguous languages of Arnhem Land on the Australian mainland.
Country and history
The Tunutivi people are thought to first inhabit the island 40,000 years ago, and thought to have developed in relative isolation, In Tiwi Mythology an "old blind woman named Mudangkala created the Tiwi islands. She rose up from the sea cradling three infants. As she crawled in the dark, the sea and land filled the imprints of her body.
The public source identifies “Tiwi people” as australian aboriginal ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tiwi, people and Australian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tiwi people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.