Uw Oykangand

The Uw Oykangand are an Indigenous Australian people living on the southwestern part of the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland in Australia. Their neighbours to the northwest are the Yir-Yoront, Their traditional lands are around the Alice River and the Crosbie River, and further west around the Mitchell River and into Gulf Country.

Language

The Uw Oykangand language is, togther with its close dialect relative Uw Olkola, a member of the Kunjen branch of the Pama-Nyungan language family. It has a notable characteristic of maintaining a thorough distinction between the standard content forms of the language and those used in contexts where respect is demanded, such as speaking to those who have kinship relations with one’s mother-in-law. Tne register of respect changes nouns and verbs, for example, while leaving unaltered words that have a purely grammatical function.^[1] Bruce Sommer has argued that this together with other Kunjen languages is an exception to the principle advanced by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle in 1956 according to which consonant +vowel is a universal syllable pattern.^[2]

Ecology

The Alice-Palmer-Mitchell river system was situated in wide savannah plains, tropical forest and rich wetlands providing a rich diversity of food and before European settlement was one of the most densely populated areas of the Australian continent.^[3]

In the dreamtime narrative, the pathways the ancestral beings wriggled over as they moved across the landscape met at the junction of the Mitchell and Alice rivers.^[4] The Kunjen hold that the watercourses themselves were fashioned in this way by ‘rainbows’ or snake beings: thus the Inh-Elar (night pigeon) followed in the wake of the Ewarr (Rainbow) as it ploughed through tree roots, so that water bubbled forth until the Rainbow rested and opened its dillybag, releasing flying foxes, whose existence was thereby esrtablished.^[5]

Water is often a key element in aaboriginal birth narratives, and the Uw Oykangand, like other Kunjen, associate points in water courses as generative sources where the spirit child quickens into life the fetus.^[4] Each member of the community has a point in the waterscape that indicates their ‘home’, the point where a water spirit enlivened them, and the place is called a errk elampungk (home place of your image) where the placenta is buried.^[6]

History

As one of the Kunjen peoples, the Uw Oykangand suffered deeply from the sudden incursion of whites when the discovery of gold in their region caused the Palmer River Gold Rush in 1873. Cattle stations and pastoralists soon followed to cater for the golddiggers, and, as the indigenous peoples fought to retain a foothold on their tribal lands and resources, they were massacred and pushed westward. Missions were established, such as the one at Kowanyama in 1903, and there a remnant population of a thousand tribal people, mainly Kunjen, Kokobera and Yir Yiront congregated.^[7]

Gradually negotiations have been made to reestablish hunting and camping rights within their traditional territories, some of which have been turned into national parks, where hunting is outlawed. One elder challenged a ranger who explained the ban on hunting by reminding him that a hundred years ago whites shot aborigines like dogs, and now aborigines are not allowed to kill wallabies.^[8]

Notes and references

Notes

References