Kija

Kija, also written Gija, names a people and their country in the East Kimberley of northwestern Australia. Their language belongs to the small Jarrakan family. Gija country includes the upper Ord and Dunham rivers, the country around Warmun and Halls Creek, and lands west toward Lansdowne and Tableland. Rocky hills, waterholes and riverbeds that fill in the wet season gave this landscape its particular patterns of travel and resource use.

The Ngarranggarni connects the formation of hills, rivers, springs and living things with the origins of law and social obligations. Stories passed between generations identify ancestral places and explain responsibilities toward them. Kinship, trade, ceremonial performance and custodianship of country belong within this same body of knowledge. Hunting grounds and ceremonial sites were therefore also places of inherited relationship and memory. For centuries this history was carried in language, songs and stories rather than written records, and the landscape was ordered through its own enduring institutions of law, knowledge and responsibility.