The Role of Animals and Plants in Maintaining the Links1

1 between Language, Identity and the Land. Survival in the bush is dependent on knowledge of the animals, plants and other resources to be found. For the Kija and Jaru people of the east Kimberley region of Western Australia this traditional ecological knowledge is of the utmost importance, both in terms of culture and survival. Animals and plants figure among the favourite topics of conversation; many stories on a variety of themes include details about animals and plants encountered in travels and what people ate when in the bush. This traditional knowledge is part of what it means to know the country. As well as enabling the procurement of food and water, it is a traditional mark of identity; it shows that you belong to the country, that you are a product of the country. Kija and Jaru people have great pride in the foods that have given them sustenance since time immemorial. This knowledge, like the languages that have conveyed it for millennia, is highly endangered. The concern is that both be preserved and passed on to younger generations. In this paper we examine how traditional languages and traditional ecological knowledge have fared with the transition from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary lifestyles and what the implications may be for the maintenance of cultural knowledge and traditional languages