Collective Identity In Australia

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Collective Identity is an individual or groups set beliefs and rituals that make up there own personal identity. It is how one can belong or feel accepted by a group or create how a person is. Indigenous people here in Australia are an example of a very strong version of collective identity. Indigenous people belong to tribes or clans, and all the separate clans have different collective identities but they are all similar in some ways. An indigenous clan that you are apart of determines on where you are born and also your language group. There are many different things that make up the aboriginal identity one of the main thing being the Dreaming, which is the creation story of the aboriginals. The originally known as the Dream Time is the …show more content…

It said that aboriginal people should be treated equally with land rights, as indigenous Australians were the first on our land that we are on today. This challenged many different previous Australian legal statements to do with Aboriginals including one of the main ones being that Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island communities or people owned no land before the arrival of the British in 1788. This statement was called Terra Nullius, which means land belonging to no one. This Native Title Act of 1993 recognized native title and recognizing and that the aboriginal’s community owns the land, as they are the original owners. The Mabo decision was one of Australia’s firsts steps in recovering all the injustices towards the Indigenous people that were happening in the past and giving them back the land they hold so dearly that they own. The Mabo decision contributed to the collective Identity of Indigenous people as is gave back there cultural land and bringing the most major part back to the aboriginal culture which is the land and the connection between them and the land. This Native Title Act of 1993 allowed the aboriginals to enhance there collective identity due to the fact that it was the first time they were positively recognized and the first time they got something back that was once taken from them all making there beliefs, rituals stronger and overall enhancing there collective identity of being aboriginal. Since the Mabo decision there has been many other cases and different changes and different things added to the native title. The Mabo Decision first did the recognition and giving back of the aboriginal land and it was one of the first to recognize that the land title was wrong and that it did belong to the

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