Jawi people


The Jawi people, also spelt Djaui, Djawi, and other alternative spellings, are an Indigenous Australian people of the Kimberley coast of Western Australia, who speak the Jawi dialect. They are sometimes grouped with the Bardi people and referred to as "Bardi Jawi", as the languages and culture are similar.

Language

The Jawi dialect belongs to the western branch of the non-Pama-Nyungan, Nyulnyulan family. It is close to Bardi.

Social and economic organisation

The Jawi have historically been seafaring traders. The Unggarrangu furnished them with mandjilal wood for their catamarans, and the Jawi in turn supplied the Bardi with this buoyant mangrove timber for the Bardi people's log rafts. They in turn bartered shells in return for wooden spears from the inland Warwa and Njikena tribes.
Jawi and Bardi people have historically shared the same kinship system, social organisation and Law. This closeness led them to form one single group for their native title claim.

Country

Jawi traditional lands encompass Sunday Island in the King Sound and the wider archipelago.
Norman Tindale estimated that the traditional lands of the Jawi encompassed about of territory: including Sunday Island and Tohau-i, and extending to West Roe Island in the north and to Jackson Island in the west. However, there are problems with Tindale's estimates about territories in this region.
Historical maps are vague about the ownership of islands in this area.
In 1972 the Jawi and Bardi community of One Arm Point was established on the Bardi mainland.
In 2005 and 2015 the Jawi and Bardi people obtained partial recognition of their collective native title claim.

History of contact

Jawi people began to have sustained contact with non-Indigenous people in the 1880s, as pearlers came to the region's abundant pearling grounds.
Sydney Hadley, a one-time pearler and reformed alcoholic who had spent long stints in gaol, set up a nondenominational Protestant mission on Iwanyi in 1899. Towards the end of WW2, H. H. J. Coate, who was engaged in a study of Bardi, took over the running of the mission. The mission closed in 1962.
Many Jawi people died during an influenza epidemic on Sunday Island in the early twentieth century: by some counts, more than two thirds of the Jawi population.

Alternative names

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Citations