by the Whose Knowledge?

“ Well, there are a couple of different things that are resources, et cetera, that are online, and they're available to our community, generally speaking only. So there is a database, it's called Mirima. It was developed by one of our first languages in Australia, members, actually. So that is a database that has every word history that we have produced, for every single word that has been revived on that database. And so you can do a search on the database in English or in Palawa for a particular word, and it'll bring up the word histories. ”

“ I am a Pakana woman. I'm a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman from lutruwita, which is the proper name for Tasmania. I've worked in the language since 1997 and worked within the community since before then, grown up in our community. We are a saltwater people. I work for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, which has responsibility for reviving the language in lutruwita. And as a result of my involvement with working with language, I do the linguistic research and analysis for the Palawa language program. ”

“ A word history is a document that's been a working document for like 20-something years, which we've developed basically for the community to be able to look at and see, you know, the process of reconstructing a word, but also why that word was chosen, who recorded it. ”

“ We don't limit welcomes to elders, obviously, it's always great to get an elder to do a welcome, but we encourage our young people, so school-aged children or, you know, anybody within our community really to provide welcome to country and the organization. The TAC provides support to people to write those welcomes in our language. And so that is probably, the main way that people have become introduced, I suppose, and a little bit more fluent with language by, you know, being able to do those welcomes in Palawa. ”

“ And so in modern-day Australia, that applies to, I guess it's a modernization of those permissions that were required back before invasion, in that we acknowledge that we are on our land, on Aboriginal land, no matter where we are. So Aboriginal people do a Welcome to country, welcome to Aboriginal land. ”

“ It's probably, we're actually, our community is actually looking for another way to describe, or something else to call a welcome because a welcome to country is around the old agreements, I suppose, made between different tribal groups to be able to access someone else's country. ”

“ So we're at Decolonizing the Internet's Languages, and there's a group of folks who have different but also shared backgrounds and interests and concerns. How are you finding the experience of being here at the conference? ”