QCAA ATSI Studies key terms

The lands, waters, skies and ecosystems to which an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group holds enduring spiritual, cultural and custodial responsibilities, understood as a living relationship rather than property ownership.

The ongoing physical, spiritual, emotional and cultural relationship a person holds with ancestral lands and waters, which sustains identity, health and obligations to care for the environment.

The inherited duty to protect, maintain and speak for particular Country, including its sites, species, stories and law, held collectively by a group rather than owned by an individual.

A person recognised by an Aboriginal group as holding inherited rights and responsibilities over particular Country, determined by descent, adoption, marriage or long-standing association under that group's own rules.

A person respected within an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community for knowledge, cultural authority and service, whose role includes teaching younger people and advising on decisions affecting the group.

A person entrusted by their community with specific cultural knowledge, such as ceremony, song, ecology or language, and authorised to decide how and to whom that knowledge is passed on.

A system of relatedness that defines a person's rights, obligations, marriage rules, caring roles and social behaviour towards others, extending beyond biological family to whole communities and to Country itself.

A named social category assigned within many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship systems that determines marriageability, ceremonial roles, avoidance rules and how people address and care for one another.

The body of rules, obligations, ceremonies and consequences handed down from ancestral beings that governs relationships between people, Country and the spiritual world, often described in English as the Law.

A term used in many regions for the ancestral creation period and the enduring spiritual order it established, which continues to shape land, species, law and human responsibility in the present.

A route across Country recorded in sequences of song, story, dance and art that trace ancestral journeys and mark water sources, sacred sites and the boundaries of group responsibility.

A structured gathering involving ritual action, song, dance, body decoration or exchange that marks significant events, transmits law and knowledge, and affirms relationships between people and ancestral powers.

A term of south-eastern Australian origin widely used for a gathering involving dance, song and ceremony, often bringing together several groups for social, diplomatic or ceremonial purposes.

The recognised right of particular people or groups to speak for and make decisions about specific cultural knowledge, sites or practices, based on inherited position, seniority or community endorsement.

An approach in which services and institutions examine their own power and assumptions so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people feel respected, secure and able to participate fully without having identity or knowledge diminished.

The developing capacity of an individual or organisation to understand their own cultural position, build knowledge respectfully and adjust practice so that it works effectively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

A lifelong stance of self-reflection and openness that accepts one cannot master another's culture, so practitioners continually examine bias and share decision-making power with the communities they serve.

The taking and use of another group's cultural expressions, designs, stories or knowledge by people outside that group, especially without permission, payment or acknowledgement, often for commercial gain.

Unauthorised use or disclosure of restricted or collectively held cultural knowledge, such as sacred designs, stories or images of the deceased, which breaches the owning group's authority and protocols.

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property: the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to control their cultural heritage, including knowledge, arts, language, designs and human remains, under their own laws.

The right of Indigenous peoples to give or withhold agreement to projects affecting their lands, cultures or lives, based on complete information provided in advance and without pressure.

The right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to decide their own political status and pursue cultural, social and economic development, including control of the organisations and services that serve them.

The inherent authority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over their lands, laws and affairs, which was never ceded through colonisation and continues to be asserted alongside Australian state sovereignty.

A model in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities own, govern and staff their own organisations, setting priorities and being accountable to their members rather than to external funders.

An earlier policy approach that gave Indigenous organisations limited administrative responsibility for government-funded programs while retaining government control of funding, policy and objectives.

The process by which a colonising power claims, occupies and reorganises another people's lands and institutions, dispossessing and governing the original inhabitants and imposing its own law and values.

The legal fiction that Australia was unoccupied land belonging to no one when Britain claimed it, used to deny recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law and land rights until 1992.

Sustained violence between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and settlers, police and military across the colonisation of Australia, including massacres, reprisals and resistance warfare.

The deliberate killing of multiple Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, often unarmed and including women and children, by settlers, police or military units during and after colonisation.

A colonial policy, operating from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, that placed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people under government-appointed protectors and controlled where they lived, worked and married.

A twentieth-century policy aiming to absorb Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into non-Indigenous society by discouraging language, ceremony and cultural practice and separating children from families.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed from their families by governments, churches and welfare agencies under race-based policies, causing lasting trauma across generations.

The 1997 report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, which documented removal policies and recommended reparation and healing measures.

The transmission of distress, grief and disrupted attachment from those who experienced removal, violence or dispossession to descendants, affecting health, parenting and educational engagement.

A holistic Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander understanding of health that connects body, mind, spirit, family, community, culture and Country, rather than focusing only on individual illness.

The recognition in Australian law of rights and interests in land and waters held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples under their own traditional laws and customs, confirmed by the Mabo decision.

The 1992 High Court ruling in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that rejected terra nullius and recognised native title, leading to the Native Title Act 1993.

The expectation of mutual obligation and balanced exchange between people, and between people and Country, expressed through sharing food, ceremony, gifts and care rather than one-sided accumulation.