Kaytetye Erotic

The Kaytetye are a small Aboriginal people of central Australia whose country lies about 300 kilometers north of Alice Springs, around Barrow Creek, on either side of the Stuart Highway. They number in the hundreds, not thousands, and they have held on to a language and a body of ceremony that outsiders have been writing about since Spencer and Gillen sat down with the Kaitish at the Barrow Creek telegraph station in 1901. Today most live at Ali Curung, Tara, Stirling, Ti Tree and Tennant Creek, on or close to their own land. Karlu Karlu, the Devils Marbles, sits at the northern edge of that country and is shared with Warumungu, Alyawarr and Warlpiri neighbors.

Kaytetye belongs to the Arandic branch of Pama-Nyungan, a cousin of Arrernte, Anmatyerr and Alyawarr, but it split off early and its neighbors cannot simply follow it. Linguists prize it for its oddities: by some analyses it gets by on two vowels, and its pronouns change shape depending on how the people being spoken about are related, by generation and by moiety. Speakers number in the low hundreds at best, and most also use Alyawarr, Warlpiri, Kriol or English. A full dictionary appeared in 2012, built with Kaytetye speakers over many years. Alongside speech runs a hand-sign language, used for hunting, for talk across distance, and above all by women observing the silence that follows a death.

Life is organized by skin names, the subsection system that assigns every person a place, tells them whom they may marry and whom they must avoid, and ties them to particular Dreaming tracks and sites. Land is held through the father's line, with a managing role passed through the mother's, and the songs that go with it are still sung. Kaytetye women's ceremony, awelye, became widely known through Diane Bell's work at Warrabri, as Ali Curung was then called, in the late 1970s.

The hard date in Kaytetye history is 1874. In February that year Kaytetye men attacked the Barrow Creek telegraph station and killed two of the staff. The police reprisals that followed ran for weeks and killed far more people than were ever counted, many of them with no part in the attack. Pastoral leases then took the waterholes, and Kaytetye men and women became the unpaid and later underpaid labor of the cattle stations. The 1928 Coniston killings reached Kaytetye families too. Land claims from the 1980s onward returned parts of that country as Aboriginal freehold, and Kaytetye people now co-author much of what is published on their language and song.