ABSTRACT
To understand how Warruwi Community came to be as it is today, we need to understand its history, which is the focus of this chapter. As an Indigenous community, it has a particular mix of people from different clan and language groups. The pathways that brought people’s ancestors to Warruwi remain relevant to their sense of belonging to Warruwi. Chapter 2 starts with the story of how Warruwi was created by the ancestral being Wurakak ‘Crow’ and then looks at the time before European settlement when Indonesian fishermen regularly visited Arnhem land. This was when Warruwi truly began to emerge an important place for intercultural exchange, prior to the establishment of a Methodist mission. Chapter 2 also considers the time of early European contact, the mission era and the self-determination era when a bilingual Mawng language program operated at Warruwi School (1973–1999). The chapter draws on mission records, Northern Territory education department records and oral histories. It traces how Mawng came to be seen as the language of Warruwi within a highly multilingual community.
