Kuku Yalanji

TheKuku Yalanji, also known asGugu-Yalanji,Kuku YalandjiorKokojelandji, are anAboriginal Australianpeople originating from therainforestregions ofFar North Queensland.
The traditional language of the people isGuugu Yalandji. It has been comprehensively studied, with a dictionary produced by Hank and Ruth Hershbergerand a grammar by Elizabeth Patz.
The Kuku Yalanji, according toNorman Tindale, held roughly 2,200 square miles (5,700 km) of territory around the headwaters of thePalmer River. Their land ran east from Palmerville station to Mount Lukin, and stretched over the southern and western areas of theDividing Rangeas far as theupper Mitchell River. The eastern limits lay around east to Byerstown, and they were present atMaytown.
One of the oldest living cultures,dating back to the earliest human occupation of the continent around 50,000 years ago,the Kuku Yalanji began to have their homeland occupied extensively by European colonisers in 1877, after the Australian government opened up this area toselection,and as miners crowded into the area, where thePalmer River Gold Rushhad been underway since news leaked out of a discovery of that mineral in June 1873. Within a year, over 5,000 Europeans and 2,000 Chinese, mainly fromGuangdong, crammed into the Palmer River site, until then the sole preserve of the Kuku Yalanji people, to work its riches.
Attempts made to uproot the people from their homeland were resisted. ALutheran missionopened up on theBloomfield Riverin 1886, but it failed within 16 years of its establishment. Forced removals of more Kuku Yalanji people were undertaken again in the 1930s. The police and army transported them in dire conditions to missions atDaintreeandMossman. As late as 1957, a further attempt to relocate groups to a mission inBloomfieldtook place.
The gold rush lasted from 1873 to 1885, with the Palmer population of Chinese briefly skyrocketing to some 17,000 by 1877, until the opportunities for quick takings began to dwindle, with most Europeans leaving by 1880, and the Chinese numbers dropping drastically to 3,000.In response to this overwhelming invasion, the Kuku Yalanji set up a fierce resistance, virtually tantamount to guerilla warfare.
The Kuku Yalanji were eventually reduced to living inshanty townson the outskirts of the areas which the foreign populations developed, and developed skills for working in the new economy. Often, in trading their services with the Chinese, Kuku Yalenjis were paid inopium, which could be imported legally until 1906. According to contemporary European observers appointed asProtectors of Aborigines, such asWalter RothandArchibald Meston, consumption of this drug in the form of opium ash mixed with water accounted for thousands of native deaths, far more than those due to other introduced maladies such asvenereal disease.
Modern historians now consider that these early reports, like the tales of the Kuku Yalanji hunting Chinese for cannibalistic feasting, whatever partial truth they contain, functioned to assuage any guilt European settlers may have felt for their key role in the decimation of northern Queensland Aboriginal communities.
From 1897 to the 1960s, the Kuku Yalanji, like other Australian ethnic groups, faced the Australian government's paternalistic legislation that allowed for members of these ethnic groups to be placed under "protection" by placing them inAboriginal reserves. Ostensibly, it was to preserve their cultures; in reality this program was an element of the White Australia policy to remove them from the urban and other "white" areas. The Kuku Yalanji began concentrating around the Mossman Reserve around the time ofWorld War IIand the people in the Daintree region were forced to the northern bank of theDaintree River. They were further subjected to more expulsions and waves of relocations by the Australian government. The Kuku Yalanji are now concentrated predominantly in Mossman andWujal Wujal.
Survival was dependent on the exploitation of seasonal variation. It is believed that Kuku Yalanji lived in the rainforest region no later than 4,000 years ago.It is known that they had high population density, and lived in semi-permanentgunyahs. Their staples for obtaining carbohydrates were the toxic seeds ofCycas media, which were leached of their poisonous compounds before cooking; two species ofyam, with the variety known asbitter yamparticularly sought after, supplemented bybitter walnut,candlenutsandKuranda quandong.
They classified the annual climatic cycle into five seasons.
Early reports often wrote that the Kuku Yalanji were devoted tocannibalism, targeting in particularChinese immigrants, whom they calledkubaraormiran bilin(tight eyes). It is not infrequent to encounter early accounts of the eating of parts of the dead, which however was a restricted practice related to ritual mortuary customs. The vivid narrations of their killing their own women and children for eating to allay their hunger or of "feasting" on Chinese like "manna from heaven" in popular works like that of Hector Holthouse,are now considered wild exaggerations, since the actual evidence is skimpy. Christopher Anderson, who transcribed one account by an elderly fully initiated Kuku Yalanji man glosses the story by suggesting that:-
The Kuku Yalanji, believed to number some 3,000 people (2003),constitute one of the "Bama Rainforest Peoples".They are reputedly closely related to theWulpurarain forest dwellers on the plateau in the modern day Mount Windsor National Park.
The Kuku-Yalanji people registered aNative Title Claimover parts of their traditional land in May 1995.The eastern Kuku Yalanji people were eventually recognised as thetraditional ownersof their land in the form of 15Indigenous land use agreements(ILUAs) in April 2007, covering more than 230,000 hectares (570,000 acres) between Mossman andCooktown.In the agreements, signed on 19 October 2007, 64,000 hectares (160,000 acres) were designated as freehold land, partly for conservation and partly for residential or economic development use. The majority of the land would be managed by the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people and theQueensland Parks and Wildlife Service(QPWS).
In its determination, finalised on 9 December 2007, theFederal Court of Australiarecognised that the Eastern Kuku Yalanji People have exclusive native title rights over 30,300 hectares (75,000 acres) of unallocated state land, which means that they "possess, occupy and use the area to the exclusion of all others" and have rights of succession and inheritance. In most of the area, which comprise 96,600 hectares (239,000 acres) of timber reserve, term leases and special leases, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji People have non-exclusive rights to hunting, camping, conductingceremonies, burials, use of water and various other shared rights.The land is managed by anRNTBC, the Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation,which belongs to the Cape York Land Council.
In an agreement signed on 28 September 2021, the eastern Kuku Yalanji were handed back 160,108 hectares (395,640 acres) of land encompassing theUNESCOWorld Heritage-listedDaintree Rainforest, together with Ngalba Bulal, Kalkajaka andHope Islands National Park.