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Pintupi Erotic

Homeland

Western Desert and Gibson Desert on the Northern Territory and Western Australia border, Australia, around Lake Mackay, Kintore (Walungurru) and Kiwirrkurra

Language

Pintupi, today mostly Pintupi-Luritja, a dialect of the Western Desert Language (Pama-Nyungan, Wati branch)

Religion

Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) law and ceremony, held alongside Christianity introduced through Haasts Bluff, Papunya and other settlements

Subgroups

A Western Desert people, closely tied to Luritja, Kukatja and Ngaatjatjarra neighbors; main communities at Kintore (Walungurru), Kiwirrkurra and Papunya

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Pintupi People

The Pintupi are desert people whose country straddles the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia: sandhills, salt lakes and scattered rockholes around Lake Mackay, known to them as Wilkinkarra, and the Kintore Ranges. What holds them together is less a line on a map than a shared set of places, the waters and Dreaming sites they name, sing and paint, and a shared history as some of the last Aboriginal Australians to leave a fully nomadic life. Families were still living on foot in the Gibson Desert into the 1960s, and in 1984 a group of nine relatives came in near Kiwirrkurra and became known around the world as the Pintupi Nine. Their speech is a dialect of the Western Desert Language, a Pama-Nyungan chain spread across a huge share of the interior, so Pintupi speakers follow Kukatja or Ngaatjatjarra neighbors easily, while Warlpiri to the north is a different language. Over several decades, and especially through the welfare patrols of the 1950s and 1960s, families moved or were brought east to Haasts Bluff and Papunya. There they lived as newcomers among Luritja, Warlpiri and Arrernte people, and illness took a heavy toll. The blended Pintupi-Luritja that grew up in those settlements is still the everyday language. From the 1970s families pushed back west, first to outstations, then to Kintore, or Walungurru, in 1981 and to Kiwirrkurra soon after.

Papunya is also where the painting movement began. In 1971 senior men, many of them Pintupi, started putting ancestral designs onto boards, the origin of Papunya Tula Artists and of what the world now calls Western Desert dot painting. Painters such as Uta Uta Tjangala helped define it, and in 2000 artists from Kintore and Kiwirrkurra painted group canvases that were auctioned to pay for kidney dialysis close to home, the start of what is now Purple House. Law comes from the Tjukurrpa, the ancestral time whose beings made the land and still set obligations toward it. Much of that knowledge is restricted by gender and initiation, which is why public paintings of the Tingari cycle show circles and tracks without spelling out the story. Christianity came through the settlements and is held alongside the law rather than in its place. An eight-part skin name system also shapes ordinary life: a name like Tjapaltjarri or Nangala marks whom a person may marry and how they should behave toward everyone else, and it is why so many Pintupi artists seem to share surnames. After a death the person's name is set aside, and anyone else who carries it takes a substitute for a while.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Pintupi's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition. These are likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

Arrernte