Whirling barefoot in a sand circle, Clark Webb leads a class of school children as they dance to clapsticks and the songs of the Gumbaynggirr, an Aboriginal Australian people.
"Opening our own schools, that's sovereignty in action," said Webb, one of those seeking to revive the Indigenous language spoken in Coffs Harbour, a coastal town about 500 km north of Sydney.Webb was referring to a procedure called the "Voice to Parliament", which will go to a referendum onto decide whether Indigenous People get recognition in Australia's constitution for the first time.
Many of Australia's Indigenous people see the revival of language as critical to ensuring the survival of their cultures, in one of the most important years for Indigenous rights in the country’s history.OLDEST CULTURE Authorities often relocated Indigenous people from their traditional lands, known as Country, and forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, resulting in a "stolen generation" because of policies that ran from the mid-19th century to the 1970s."I think, growing up, I knew there was something missing from my life," Webb said. "And as I got older, I realised that the missing link for me was our language.
Ray Ingrey is one of a handful of people fluent in Dharawal, the first language heard by British explorer Captain James Cook when he landed in Australia in 1770. The arbitrary government policies of those days dismantled the transmission of language from one generation to the next, he added.
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