Milpirri, a biennial whole of community performance event, has engaged youth in the remote Warlpiri community of Lajamanu in new Hip Hop and contemporary iterations of Warlpiri knowledge drawn from ceremony since 2005. The experimental ceremony Milpirri is directed to teaching Warlpiri youth to feel ngurra-kurlu – “at home,” to feel and know Country through the body (Patrick & Biddle 2018). This article outlines the historical development of Milpirri before discussing how specific performances of Wardapi Jukurrpa ‘Goanna Dreaming’ teach young Warlpiri ngurra-kurlu demonstrating the vital importance of proprioceptive knowledge imparted through Milpirri, and ecosomatic intersections of Warlpiri and Hip Hop frameworks. Milpirri advances capacities of Hip Hop culture to facilitate deeply embodied, sentient and enmeshed relationality with Country – sites, animals, plant species, and Jukurrpa; a critical move beyond representation of place/identity – a core ethic within Hip Hop culture. These collective political capacities of Hip Hop culture to ‘sample’ Country provide immersive contexts for sensory attunements to place. This paper is based upon Warlpiri and Milpirri conceptual frameworks (Pawu), and long-term ethnographic fieldwork on Hip Hop cultures (Dowsett) and in Lajamanu with women’s ceremony and art (Biddle). We situate Milpirri and the work of Milpirri Hip Hop within a growing number of desert-based, arts-engaged platforms for Indigenous “survivance”, following First Nations scholar Gerard Vizenor (1999) or “remote avant-garde” as Biddle models elsewhere (Biddle 2016); emergent arts of living heritage taking shape within settler colonial contexts of occupation and governance, precarity, and climate crisis.
Research undertaken for this article was funded by ARC Linkage project (LP190100552) Indigenous Futurity: Milpirri as Experimental Ceremony under NSW Human Research Ethics approval no. HC210165. We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on the article.
We are all parts of existence. It is who we are. And it is what we are. We are all parts of the same body. A body of people. A body of law. The body of our community. The body of humanity. The body of earth.
(Wanta Jampijinpa Patrick, Milpirri 2018 voiceover)
Milpirri is a Warlpiri way to get Country to express itself.
(Wanta Jampijinpa Patrick 2015: 121)
Hip Hop culture has been taken up by First Nations and Indigenous artists the world over. This uptake has transformed the role of place in Hip Hop in ways that extend beyond urban contexts and beyond representation (Dowsett and Pawu 2024).1 The focus of this article is Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop culture emerged from African American and Caribbean cultural milieu in the South Bronx, New York, in the 1970s (Rose 1994), with important diasporic political imperative and reach. Originally comprised of the four elements of Hip Hop culture – MCing, DJing, Breaking and Graffiti – Hip Hop spread globally in the early 1980s at a time when all four elements were still organically connected. In this sense, Hip Hop is more than and different from simply a genre of music. Various genres of music have been utilised by Indigenous musicians to express Indigeneity and identity, to critique dominant narratives, and promote social change (Bracknell 2019; Martin 2019). Hip Hop culture has distinct capacities tied to it's own internal ethics and multimodal embodied practices. A fifth element of Hip Hop, known as Knowledge of Self, encourages self-reflection, self-realisation and an understanding of one’s own cultural roots, as well as an appreciation of the socio-political context and history of Hip Hop.2 The imperative to Represent! place, who you are, where you come from, your community and Hip Hop culture itself (Forman 2002; Smitherman 2006), encourages cultural connection and connection to place, from and within the cultures in which Hip Hop is practiced.
Hip Hop is increasingly being taken up by some First Nations and Aboriginal artists through specifically Indigenous frameworks of place: to revitalise and maintain ways of being on land; to engage with Country-as-kin; and to markedly move away from dichotomous Western logics that would locate humans outside nature, separate bios from geos, life from non-life, and the health of community from the health of Country. Traditionally rooted in urban contexts, Hip Hop practices and productions by artists who reside in, or maintain connections to, rural and remote areas reveal capacities of Hip Hop not yet fully explored or documented in the literature.3 These contexts and adaptations of Hip Hop highlight the culture’s well-known potential as a powerful tool for re-presenting place (Forman 2002). As Chang (2005:xi) models, Hip Hop gives “young people a way to understand their world whether they are from the suburbs the city or wherever.” This article gives shape and form to the “wherever” – an unspecified location that Chang leaves open to multiple Hip Hop futures.4 We provide new insights into First Nations contexts where Hip Hop adaptions – refitting for new purpose – serve to hold, maintain and advocate for ecological knowledges through embodied practices of caring for, identifying with, belonging to, and celebrating Country, culture and community.
New forums for Indigenous cultural production through Hip Hop are emerging, providing global platforms for place-based practice and performance. Taking shape within colonial contexts of displacement and marginalisation, including extractive industries, mining and environmental devastation, Indigenous communities worldwide live at the forefront of climate change. Indigenous Hip Hop artists are increasingly tuning-in to place-based ecologies, attention and forms of care for Country in crisis. Hip Hop culture holds unique capacities to attune embodied attention to place-based heritage and crises of culture. It’s uniquely collectivising kinaesthetic form – active, participatory, agentful – can not only empower Indigenous youth voice and identity but can enhance intergenerational-knowledge exchange, including place-based environmental knowledges (Dowsett 2021; Dowsett & Pawu 2024). These vital aspects of the responsibilities of Country, care and reciprocal obligations for community, are actively practiced in the Australian Warlpiri biennale event Milpirri. Milpirri is a rain cloud and part of Ngapa Jukurrpa ‘Rain/Water Dreaming’ “owned” by Jangala/Jampijinpa patricouple. Milpirri is formed by hot air rising from the earth combining with the cool global air and stands as material manifestation of the clash of the intercultural contemporary of Lajamanu Warlpiri.
First Nations Murrawarri/filipino Hip Hop artist/scholar Rhyan Clapham aka DOBBY and Benjamin Kelly have explored how Hip Hop is Aboriginalized through their analysis of language use, references to contemporary Aboriginal popular culture, political struggle and enduring values of family and community in rap lyrics and music videos (Clapham & Kelly 2019:10–12; see also Mitchell 2006; Minestrelli 2017). Following this conceptualisation, Milpirri Hip Hop is a unique, distinct, Lajamanu Warlpiri-informed and shaped practice of Hip Hop, bringing Hip Hop practices and principles into Warlpiri kinship, language, Country, Jukurrpa and Law. Hip Hop practices in Milpirri – remix, sampling, representing, rap, breakdance – are collectivised, distributed and subject to collaborative co-production and decision-making. Hip Hop in Milpirri relies upon an active engagement of collective bodies on Country, in place. A key contribution this article makes to Hip Hop studies is an ecosomatic perspective. Ecosomatics is not a Warlpiri concept or term and is used in this context to explore what is in fact distinctively Warlpiri: connections between Country as sentient Ancestral environment (“eco”) and co-relational, sensory bodies (“soma” or “somatic”, cf. Hanna 1986). We offer this framing to highlight the ongoing contributions of Warlpiri cultural experimentation, and global Hip Hop becomings (as Hip Hop evolves through transcultural re-imaginings), to contribute to expanding the fields of Ecomusicology (Allen 2018:6) and Ecosomatics (Fraleigh & Riley 2024).
Milpirri is developed and led by senior ceremony leader Jerry Jangala Patrick, Milpirri Creative Director (and co-author of this chapter) Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu (Jampijinpa from here on), and senior female elders and community members, as a long-term intercultural collaboration with Tracks Dance Company (Tracks), a Darwin based community arts organisation who have worked with Lajamanu community for over thirty years. Non-Aboriginal Hip Hop artists have been brought to Lajamanu for Milpirri to facilitate workshops with Warlpiri Lajamanu school students since 2005. This chapter explores how Hip Hop operates in Milpirri as an explicit Warlpiri-driven, co-designed, and co-led initiative to engage young people in traditional ceremonial forms and activities in a context where there are limited opportunities for ceremonial participation today. The disciplinary, participatory rigour and ritualised repetition of Milpirri as an all of community, collectivised performance, modelled on, as well as incorporating traditional ceremony, provides a critical context for the transmission of living heritage, as this chapter explores; a capacity uniquely enabled by the work of Hip Hop in Milpirri. Our chapter develops from a long-term collaborative Australia Research Council project on Milpirri – a collaboration between Tracks, Lajamanu Warlpiri community, Jampijinpa and UNSW researchers.5 The article draws on Sudiipta’s long term ethnographic research on, and participation in, Hip Hop in South Africa and Australia as a Kardiya (non-Indigenous) first generation Australian of mixed European descent, Jampijinpa’s insider expertise as Milpirri Creative Director and scholarship of Warlpiri culture, and Jennifer’s Kardiya/American three decades collaborative relationship with Lajamanu Warlpiri and scholarship on women’s Yawulyu ceremony, art and aesthetics. This article is written with the intention of Wunguwarnu wantarri which Jampijinpa translates as “family-friends together sharing the gift of knowledge”.
Milpirri is a complex, hybrid, multisensory event. Difficult to define, it has been described as an experimental ceremony (Biddle 2016; Patrick & Biddle 2018): a song, dance and visual performance that (only) takes place in the remote Warlpiri Aboriginal community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory, once every two years. It was inaugurated in 2005 in response to community distress following the first youth suicide in the community, to redress what Jampijinpa identifies as a crisis for Warlpiri in keeping younger people safe, connected and at home. As an intercultural experiment in tradition, focused on youth participation and active learning, Milpirri consists of sampled selections of traditional dances/songs from much longer song cycles and ceremonies – what are high ceremonial public song/dances from traditional Purlapa and Yawulyu – performed by older generations, with original bilingual rap compositions, breakdance and contemporary dance routines – new interpretations of the same Jukurrpa being performed by the adults. Linked to each two-year cycle, thematics from Purlapa and Yawulyu Jukurrpa are selected, taught, learned and performed by school age children, such that four generations of Warlpiri co-participate and dance together on the night itself, in a large-scale, celebration. Milpirri teaches school aged children, from grade 3 onwards, embodied forms of Warlpiri knowledge of kinship and Jukurrpa.6 Performances are accompanied by stagelit visual iconography of the major land owning group’s kuruwarri (Ancestral marks/designs) on sixteen large scale, hand-painted banners (Figure 1) representing each of the four Warlpiri patricouples, to stage-set for, and herald in emblematic terms what is at stake in the ceremony.
A key intention of Milpirri, from the beginning, has been, in Jampijinpa’s words, how to teach young Warlpiri “knowledge of country as muscle memory” (Patrick & Biddle 2018:30). That is, Milpirri operates to prime perception for Country (Dowsett 2023). Intensively immersive and multisensory, Milpirri operates through complex and layered forms of intelligibility and sensibility: pre-recorded voice overs mix with atmospheric sounds of Country including storms, rain, fire, birds, animals, creating a spectacular soundscape and visual experience. Milpirri visual design developed a strategic use of four colours to visually encode and simplify the greater Warlpiri patrilineal kinship system. Blue, green, red, yellow, representing the four patricouples, are utilised across body designs, banners, tee shirts, skirts, loincloths, bras; armbands and headbands, adorned as corporate ‘skin’ affiliation.
The impetus for Hip Hop in Milpirri arose from the popularity of Hip Hop music and dance in Lajamanu in the 1990s and early 2000s, alongside long-standing Warlpiri media production and activism. Warlpiri have a long and distinguished role in Indigenous media history for their production of film, video, television, music and performance in Warlpiri language, on Warlpiri Country, to ensure against language and televisual colonisation, pushing back to ‘fight fire with fire’ as early Warlpiri media maker, artist and activist Andrew Japaljarri Spencer put it, against commercial broadcasting and commercial airwave English language dominance by the production of Warlpiri media (see Michaels 1994; Biddle 2016). Jampijinpa had himself been a member of one of the early rock and roll Lajamanu bands to emerge in the 1980s. Described as desert reggae, the North Tanami Band recorded Warlpiri and bilingual compositions for their first album with CAAMA (the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) in 1988 .7
During this same period, Jampijinpa was acutely aware of the work of Tracks in the school. Since 1988, Co-Artistic Director of Tracks, Tim Newth had produced a series of works in collaboration with Lajamanu community. Newth had a close family relationship with the Patrick family, and Jampijinpa had participated in, and toured with more than one early production with Tracks. Significantly, Jampijinpa travelled with Tracks to his Kirda (boss or owner) Country of Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming, which forms the basis of Milpirri) for research development for Track’s bilingual/bicultural production Ngapa - Two Cultures One Country, produced and performed in 1996 at Browns Mart Community Centre in Darwin.
Jampijinpa had at this point, spent years working in Lajamanu Community School. He could see problems inherent in the bilingual education programs operating within Lajamanu and elsewhere, despite what was then official bilingual policy of the Northern Territory, and extensive work of Warlpiri and bilingual educators, to generate bilingual resources and educational materials, and ensure Warlpiri teacher training, during this period (prior to the imposition of English-only mandates of the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention in 2012). Jampijinpa’s concern was not only with the loss of Warlpiri language but the loss of what Warlpiri language does in generating knowledge and connection to Country in Warlpiri distinctive terms, as he puts it “it is very hard to tell our children that their language is important, that their ceremonies are important, that their skin names are important, and that these things stem from the land” (Patrick 2015:123). Out of this concern, while working as a Lajamanu Community Liaison Officer, in conjunction with Lance (Alan) Box a teacher at the time at Lajamanu school, and Miles Holmes, a long-term consultation anthropologist, Jampijinpa developed a comprehensive bilingual or two-way Warlpiri model he calls ngurra-kurlu (Patrick, Holmes & Box 2008).
Ngurra-kurlu, as he explains:
[…] consists of Family, Law, Land, Language, and Ceremony. Once we lose these five elements we become homeless people – people without the ability to understand our home. We become feral in our own land. We live in our home without really knowing how to look after it, and we run the risk of desecrating our home. So we must look for a new way to teach our kids so that they understand their home through Ngurra-kurlu. (Patrick 2015:123)
He elaborates:
Once we desecrate our home, our home will desecrate us. Forgetting Country is like neglecting a family member leaving them missing us. Like the Lajamanu Teenage Band song Yarrungkanyi (2006) about being homesick for home while home is also homesick for us – it goes both ways. (Pawu, personal communication with Dowsett, 2024)
Jampijinpa saw that a new language for ngurra-kurlu was needed to provide a means for young people to feel Country, and proposed to Tracks’ Co-Artistic Directors Tim Newth and David McMicken, the idea of a whole of community performative event that might help engage young people. He relates his initial reservations about Hip Hop as a new method for teaching the complex interconnected relationships between land, language, kinship, Law and ceremony:
I didn’t like Hip Hop, but I saw it was the language of the young people as they see it on television in the 1990s. I knew it was going to upset the old people but some of them started to see it’s the same story but in a different form – It’s how young people express the same Jukurrpa story. (Pawu, personal communication with Dowsett, 2024)
Negative stereotypes of Hip Hop can stem from the popularisation and promotion of specific forms of rap music (gangsta rap) by the music industry (see Rose 2008). In the context of Australia, George Morgan and Andrew Warren (2011) attribute negative stereotypes within some Aboriginal communities to a disconnection between youth and parent cultures, a conflation of commercial rap with Hip Hop culture, and a lack of appreciation for how narratives of police brutality, racism and social ills in gangsta rap resonate with experiences of Aboriginal youth.
Since the introduction of Hip Hop workshops in Indigenous communities in the late 1990s, there is evidence of Hip Hop facilitators playing a key role in promoting and teaching Hip Hop cultural values to youth participants already engaged in popular forms of commercialised rap music (Morgan & Warren 2011; Dowsett 2021).8 Many Hip Hop workshop facilitators, including Elf Tranzporter and Monkey Marc (interviews with Dowsett, 2022; also Dowsett 2006) have shared experiences of their early work in urban and remote Indigenous communities, where initially young people would mimic American gangsta rap in their lyrics but through learning more about Hip Hop cultural values and ethics, developed their own unique style and expressed their own cultural roots (also see Beckett 2005; Morgan & Warren 2011). To be authentic in Hip Hop you need to Represent!
Youth breakdancing in the first Milpirri demonstrated to Lajamanu Warlpiri Elders that young people could be disciplined and committed to learning their culture. Using Hip Hop practices to engage youth in Milpirri has played a key role in addressing the disconnect between elders and youth in Lajamanu and the crisis this disconnect presents for the future of ceremonial knowledge (see Dowsett & Pawu 2024). Newth has stated that prior to the first Milpirri it had been difficult to engage young men and teenage boys in his and Tracks’ previous collaborations on community productions. Using breakdancing in the first Milpirri was a very effective means of engaging this group. During the five-week Milpirri development period in 2005 where Tracks ran dance workshops in Lajamanu School, Year 11 and 12 classes saw a 78% increase in attendance (Tracks Dance Company 2005: 4). Tracks further reports:
The young adults (15–30) showed remarkable resilience and ingenuity in creating their own sections of performance based on traditional dances and structures but reinterpreted for the stage. This was done almost entirely by them with minimal guidance. This level of activity was exciting as it had not been there in the past. This group of men usually only play football (Ibid.)
Milpirri saw a marked shift for young people in Lajamanu to engage with Warlpiri culture. The creation of breakdancing routines for Warlawurru (wedgetail eagle), Wardapi (goanna), and Pirlapakarnu (waterbirds) in the first Milpirri indicated significant capacities of Milpirri Hip Hop to build collective attention for Country, Jukurrpa and culture. Parallel to other contemporary forms of dance (cf. Swain 2020) but in this instance, the global popular culture of Hip Hop was able to reorient younger Warlpiri interests. Milpirri has sustained high levels of youth and community participation and engagement averaging over 200 performers each Milpirri over the lifetime of the biennial event.
Working in partnership with Lajamanu community, Tracks engaged established Hip Hop artists and contemporary dancers to produce original Milpirri choreography through collaborative workshops with Lajamanu School students. From 2012, Milpirri involved the development of original rap songs in this same process. As outlined in Dowsett and Pawu (2024), the development of Milpirri youth songs and dances is an intercultural process that relies on the collective work of translating, summarising and condensing complex Warlpiri Jukurrpa stories and themes, led by Jampijinpa and Jerry Jangala Patrick, as well as senior Warlpiri women, working with Tracks and later working closely with producer Monkey Marc and Victoria-based rapper and community worker Mantra. Artists involved include breakers Nick Power aka BBoy Rely, Lajamanu’s own Caleb Japanangka Patrick, Aaron Lim and Spillet, and contemporary dancers including Jessica Rosewarne, Jess Devereux, Kelly Beneforti, and rappers Elf Tranzporter and Mantra. Internationally renowned Hip Hop/dub/dancehall producer, activist and dedicated community arts worker, Monkey Marc, co-produced original soundtracks and youth rap songs with Jampijinpa, Jerry Jangala, Elf Tranzporter, Mantra, and students in Lajamanu School for each Milpirri cycle. These Hip Hop compositions, based upon Jukurrpa thematics, form the soundtrack to the youth dances on the same themes.
As an experimental aesthetics, Milpirri nevertheless relies upon a distinctive Warlpiri proprioceptive framework for a situated beingness with, and becoming in relation to, Country. Country here is defined as First Nations Aboriginal people define and use the term, as an all-embracing term including not only land and geography mass but associated geological features, sites; flora fauna; seasons, weather patterns and more specifically, the recognition and appreciation of such so called ‘natural’ epiphenomena as Ancestrally made, named and marked. For Warlpiri, Country is comprised of viscerally marked and made signs and traces of Ancestral activities, travels, activities and orientations as they travelled and transformed from species to human to weather to geological formation (cf. Munn 1970; Biddle 2007).9 As anthropologist Miles Holmes states, in his 2012 evaluation report on Milpirri, “Each dance in Milpirri, both adults and young people, is in relation to a particular Country and is often based on a particular plant and animal. Performing in Milpirri exposes people to the land and the plants and animals within it” (2012:32). This capacity highlights the global relevance of the transformative power of Hip Hop culture in Milpirri to maintain and reimagine vital Warlpiri ways of being and perception of, Country, place and ecology.
It is not arbitrary that Milpirri developed in the Warlpiri community of Lajamanu. Lajamanu, as an enforced settlement, is located on Gurindji land in the northern Tanami Desert. This location has presented challenges for Lajamanu-based Warlpiri. It is the only major Warlpiri community today that is not located on traditional Warlpiri Country, and thus, Lajamanu Warlpiri have continued to have to adapt ceremony and other forms of cultural production to meet the specific challenges of the context of not only enforced settlement but colonial displacement (Wild 1987) as part of settlement, including the practice and development of Jukurrpa that is expressly concerned with making and accepting Lajamanu as a new Warlpiri-specific place of residence (Glowczewski, Patrick & Laughren 2020; Biddle 2019).
Lajamanu community was established in 1949. Originally named “Hooker Creek”, Lajamanu was created through forced displacement (Meggitt 1962:29; Hinkson 2014). Northern Warlpiri famously left Lajamanu, walking miles to return to their home country, before being corralled again in cattle trucks, and removed (again) back. As Kumanjayi Jangala, prominent ceremony leader in Lajamanu recalled “This was not our country, this was Gurinji country, we didn’t have our dreaming sites here, and especially the old people were not happy.10 So they simply walked back, all the way to Yuendumu, Mt Doreen and Granites” (cited in Hinkson 2014:126–129). Lajamanu Warlpiri face specific challenges in caring for Country and for intergenerational knowledge transfer, given this context. Ceremony has been a critical means for reworking, renegotiating and maintaining connection to Country since the 1950s, once Lajamanu had been established (Wild 1987). Biddle models how a major intention of Milpirri is the extending and activating of Warlpiri Jukurrpa on what is traditional Gurindji lands (2019; see also Biddle & Patrick 2018).
A more recent challenge has included the passing of key ceremony leaders in Lajamanu over the past decade and a sharp decline in ceremony performed in Lajamanu over the past 20 years. Milpirri is now the main context in which forms of Yawulyu and Purlapa are performed in Lajamanu. Milpirri was initiated in 2005 due to a lack of opportunities for young people to learn through ceremonies (Tracks Dance Company 2005). Ceremonies are considered endangered and at-risk by Warlpiri (Biddle 2019:354; Gallagher and Brown 2014; Curran et al. 2024:12–15).
For Warlpiri historically, learning on and from Country directly has been critical. Not only for teaching how to live and survive in specific, localised places where people travel, hunt and camp today (where to find food sources, where and how to hunt what species when, where to source water etc.) but to ensure Ancestral connections and responsibilities for the healthy reproduction of the same Ancestral Country, flora, fauna, species, demonstrating the deep human-social co-relation of contemporary health, intimately tied to place-based practices and ways of being Warlpiri on Country, in place. Place is made and kept alive, healthy and “safe” through being attached to the bodies of Warlpiri through everyday activities and the living-on in post-settlement (Biddle 2019). Povinelli (1994) stresses the importance of speaking language, of labour and of sweat on Country, specifically as the active/re-activation work required for northern Aboriginal displaced Karrabing. Everyday practical knowledge of how to live in place, and knowledge of Ancestral activities in these same places and sites, that is, the living and practice of Jukurrpa, are intimately related and co-existent.
Petronella Vaarzon-Morel and Kasia Gabrys argue in relation to fire (Warlu Jukurrpa) that: “It is through practical knowledge of Country gained by living from the land, travelling through it and observing long-term transformations … that older Warlpiri have come to understand fire’s potential” (2009:472). Simultaneously, they note how, “Warlpiri knowledge about fire is found in different but interrelated modes, such as dance, song and narrative which concern Jukurrpa” (Vaarzon-Morel & Gabrys 2009:472). Curran et al. (2019:360) model how the interpretation of ethnobotanical knowledge contained in and passed on through song, which often take the form of short phrases or repeated words, are “aided by knowledge of the ecology of plants, seed preparation from harvest to consumption, and the mythological origins of the species.” Ceremony is a critical context for learning how Jukurrpa links to Country (Curran et al. 2024:1–2).
Historically, learning on and from Country, and learning about County through ceremony, have been complimentary and intertwined. However, such intertwinings are now compromised. Ceremony is infrequently performed. Travel to specific countries and sites are often considered dangerous because they have not been able to be visited or cared for and potentially, are more dangerous now in the absences of senior kirda ‘owners’ associated with Country who have passed away. Long distance travel for Lajamanu Warlpiri, displaced to the north of traditional Warlpiri Country, is particularly challenging. Key sites closer to Lajamanu including Mirrirrinyungu and Kurlingalinpa have been inaccessible due to flood damaged track conditions since at least 2018. Other key sites for families in Lajamanu are farther to the south, hundreds of kilometres away, with some younger kirda (traditional owners) never having been to places that may be named and known by acrylic paintings practices they might witness or paint themselves even, in the school or community Art Centre. Or know about from the songs, stories, their Aunties or Grandmothers tell, sing or paint on acrylic canvases. Or indeed, they may have learned about these places through Milpirri.
Hip Hop culture has long been understood as a powerful medium for place-based identity formation and representation (Forman 2002; Rose 1994) which has to date, largely focused on urban contexts. Hip Hop maintains its characterisation as a quintessential urban aesthetic and phenomenon. The literature on Indigenous Hip Hop artists in Australia focuses on urban Indigenous culture and identity within rap music (see Mitchell 2006; Minestrelli 2017; Clapham & Kelly 2019 among others). The distinctive place of the urban is a centralising aesthetic, a practice of urban attitude and orientation, between constitutive collective and individualised bodies, activities and attunements. Leading independent Hip Hop researcher James Spady recognised the vital role of the body in the connection to place within Hip Hop aesthetics, language and practice. Spady (1999:3) models how Hip Hop emerged from deeply embedded and embodied knowledge of place or “how to act” in the specific “environment” of the ghetto. Spady & Alim (1999:ix–x) describe the lived world of North Philadelphia as “hiphopological” in relation to how a place-based ontology emerged to inform Philadelphia Hip Hop:
You never knew [what might happen]. Had to be streetwise. Had to be alert. Cautious, Watching. Armored. Timing is everything. This is a highly sedimented ground of hiphopological activity. Whether you are grabbing the ball or the mic, you had to be quick.
While the context of Philadelphia street-based Hip Hop culture is a radically different context to the north Tanami Desert context of Lajamanu Milpirri, Spady’s work demonstrates the capacity of the bodies to signal place, to carry place through gesture and enculturated ways of being in, of, from, and with place in Hip Hop cultural practice. Murray Forman highlights the adaptive capacities of Hip Hop culture where, as Hip Hop culture spread globally:
[…] in each spatial juncture […] hip-hop underwent processes of transformation that reflect the influence of sociospatial difference and produce the contexts for adaptation […] reinventing hip-hop according to entirely contingent and locally relevant logics (2002:24).
How one moves through a street, or over particular Country, is evident in Hip Hop performance, for those who know how to perform and/or read such embodied and embedded codes of behaviour (culturally-locally-specific).
Proprioception or the unconscious organisation of bodily motilty is shaped by culture and sedimented layers of experience in place over time, a lifetime or a childhood of growing up with habits, practices, formed in situated, proximate, correlation with others. Newth recalled a conversation between himself and Jampijinpa that illustrates effects of enculturation of his own Kardiya (non-Warlpiri) body. Tim had stated that he “didn’t know Warlpiri” (that is, didn’t know how to speak Warlpiri language fluently). Jampijinpa responded that Newth “does know Warlpiri” – that you can see it when he walks in Lajamanu, meaning Yapa (Warlpiri) can see that he knows and understands something of Warlpiri through his body language and gesture (personal communication Tim Newth and Dowsett, July 2024). As Breakdance spread throughout the world, local gestures became incorporated into the “intercultural body” of Hip Hop (Osumare 2002). In her analysis of the practices and lifeworlds of early breakers and Hip Hop dancers in the South Bronx, Imani Kai Johnson recognises the correlation between “how we are socialised to move through our worlds and how one physically moves through dance” (2018:64). The form that breaking and other styles of Hip Hop dance take in Lajamanu is a highly Warlpiri form of Hip Hop.
First Nations Hip Hop artists have reclaimed the urban as sovereign Indigenous place (Mays 2018; Recollet 2014). Hip Hop artists redress staid stereotypes of Indigenous land and land rights as only existent on Reservations (in the USA) or in so-called remote Australia, where Aboriginal identity is equally often seen as remote, premodern, past, or locked up in musicological collections, archives and artefacts. As a highly visual and declarative performative, Indigenous Hip Hop artists reclaim the city and urban scapes as unceded Aboriginal territory with Aboriginal artists and activists very much present today (also see White 2009). As Black/Anishinaabe scholar and Hip Hop artist Kyle Mays states, “Hip hop allows for Indigenous people, through culture, to express themselves as modern subjects,” echoing here Jampijinpa’s statement (in Harrison nd) that Milpirri is a method for making “Jukurrpa relevant for the 21st century”.11
Land rights and connection to Country are a common “trope” (Minestrelli 2017) and theme (Clapham & Kelly 2019: 19) in the lyrics of urban Indigenous Hip Hop artists in Australia and globally (Raheja 2017). While the work of Indigenous Hip Hop artists has only begun to be explored on sensory terms in Australia (Dowsett & Pawu 2024), this topic has received more attention in Turtle Island/North America. First Nations Papachase, Amiskwaciy Waskahikan and Kikino Metis Settlement Cheryl L’Hirondelle (nd), notes how First Nations and Indigenous Hip-hop shares with ceremony somatic sonority. Both privilege meter, tone and pace. Cree scholar, Karyn Recollet (2014), centres the body and gesture in continuations of traditional Indigenous aesthetics in her discussion of Cree BBoy CreeAsian’s incorporation of grass Dancing into his breakdancing and Anishinaabe BBoy QRock’s (Que Rock) “eagle step” move.12 She notes the influence of Native “fancy dancer” moves in early breakdancing through the Indian step (Recollet 2014:416). Hip Hop practice can incorporate and expand the capacities of tradition, what Recollet calls “a legacy of Indigenous motion” in contemporary urban Indigenous practice (ibid.). Oglala Lakota scholar Joshua Thunder Little and Hip Hop scholar Liz Przybylski (2022) provide a reading of Hip Hop water activism through the Lakota concept of Wolakota and frame this as “listening for Wolakota” (2022:52). Their analysis of lyrical content and symbolism in music videos builds an in-depth Lakota interpretation of the work of Sicangu Lakota rappers Frank Waln, in his music video for the song “Oil For Blood,” and Prolific’s “Black Snake.” Both songs and music videos advocate for kin-based-relationality with the environment (a key feature of the concept of Wolakota), stewardship of land and water, and critique settler-colonial capitalist relationships with land and specifically with Native American reservations.
In Australia, sensory connections and relations with land feature prominently in new ways in recent works of prominent and select, Indigenous Hip Hop artists. Their focus demonstrates how Hip Hop can extend capacities for embodied sensory connections to Country and tradition, and extends shifts in perception of how Country is perceived by non-Aboriginal Australian publics.
Putting into practice his own earlier theorising about the “Aboriginalisation” of Hip Hop, DOBBY’s debut album WARRANGU: River Story (2024) samples recorded interviews of discussions with Elders and direct sounds of Country. The first track on the album, “River,” begins with the sound of crunching stones on a dry riverbed integrated with a conversation between DOBBY and Ngemba Elder and language and culture educator from the remote outback town of Brewarrina, Brad Steadman, who can be heard explaining that expanded domains of perception beyond “two dimensional” storytelling are accessible to Indigenous subjects, through being on Country. This perceptual accessibility, as it is narrated, is a methodology made possible through connecting the meaning of Ancestral stories through perceiving, interpreting, listening to and knowing Country if “taught to listen differently, feel differently” (in DOBBY 2024). Sounds of Country permeate the entire album with birds and river sounds forming the core soundscape, returned to repeatedly throughout the track, and inviting a sensory attunement to place among listeners. In the concluding track called “Story,” Brad Steadman and DOBBY’s conversation continues with Brad stating that, referring to the river, and more broadly to Country, “if you let it be what it is, it will bring you information”. With the sounds of footsteps featured across the tracks, the album holds listeners in the distinctive embodied sensibilities of travelling by foot across Country, and of being in the riverbed. This is disrupted and antagonised as described in the stories, experiences, memories, critiques and pleas sampled throughout the album of devastating and violent cultural and environmental impacts of colonisation, cotton farming, and Water Trading schemes including man-made droughts, mass fish deaths, pollution from agricultural run-off and the forty mineral mines across the Murray-Darling basin and climate change.
Wangan and Jagalingou Hip Hop artist and activist Gurridyula takes a direct-action approach to protecting his Ancestral water sites and lands. In August 2021, Gurridyula set up a continuous ceremonial fire and camp on Country, opposite the main access road to the Adani Carmichael Coal mine in central Queensland, some 1150km north-west of Meanjin/Brisbane. Gurridyula’s father, Senior Wangan and Jagalingou Nagana Yarrbayn Cultural Custodian and musician Adrian Burragubba, has led a long campaign opposing the mine which led to a blockade of the access road in August 2020. When Queensland police arrived to disperse the protestors, Gurridyula performed a freestyle aimed at, and directly in front of, “50 cops” issuing a scathing critique which at once, refuses colonisation, indicts the criminal justice system, and places due blame on the mining companies and extractive industries. The performance was filmed and initially uploaded to the social media platform Facebook, and later, to YouTube. Initially garnering local interest, the video has since “gone viral” with now over one million views. Gurridyula’s videos have since included a series of one-take rap music video clips filmed on Country in which he is painted up for ceremony (such as “G’eed Up,” and “Onamission,”), commentary and updates on the campaign, appeals for support, anecdotes, humour and sharing knowledge of Country including Dungmabulla springs and local animal and plant species. He has set up a make-shift bush studio at camp where he has recorded and independently released rap songs. As he states in “Dear Adani/Bravus,” “using rap as my weapon to get it past y’all,” the intersection of new ceremony and Hip Hop on/from/with Country have become a key strategy in Gurridyula’s activism.13
Dowsett and Patrick (2024) argue that Milpirri models and provides embodied capacities for the Hip Hop ethic of representing place to extend and enhance Warlpiri traditional forms and sentient connections to Country. It’s newness as necessity is stressed. Jampijinpa himself qualifies Milpirri as “not really a ceremony. […]Well, not a ceremony that comes straight from the past” (Patrick in Patrick & Biddle 2018:31) but rather an “experimental ceremony” (Patrick & Biddle 2018:28). The highly situated, site-specific, new iterations of Milpirri Hip Hop demonstrate how Aboriginal Hip Hop can prepare younger bodies, and attune sensory perception, for ceremonial participation and to the greater work of Ancestral intentionality. High Warlpiri ceremony, sampled on the night of Milpirri, serves to (re)animate and (re)activate original Ancestral potency to (re)generate human-Country-Ancestral relationships and effects. This includes health-making capacities of Country, specific to Milpirri, of replenishments that Ngapa (water) uniquely provides as primary eco-soma.
Milpirri engages collective bodies in the performance of key teachings from Ancestors and Jukurrpa, including themes from older Warlpiri ceremonies. The intention is to teach, in age-stage appropriate terms, what are uniquely embodied, experiential aspects and orientations to Jukurrpa stories, place figures and activities of Jukurrpa. The emphasis is on collectivised dance, visual and unified sound experiences which centre and prioritise intercorporeal relations between people and specific flora, fauna, weather and other living aspects of Jukurrpa. Jampijinpa states that Milpirri teaches young Warlpiri, “how to react to situations”. He uses an illustration of learning how to be a hunter where “[y]ou know the kangaroo, you know the environment and are united and uniting together in a way that you can really feel and know it, like you know yourself” (Patrick and Biddle 2018: 29-30). Among other key Jukurrpa, Warlpiri youth have engaged in Milpirri Hip Hop embodiments of wardapi (goanna), kalarra (west wind), kirrkilanji (Brown Hawk), pirlapakarnu (waterbirds). These are not isolated linkings made between discrete objects or subjects (the body and a goanna) – not “just” any body acting out any animal action - but Lajamanu Warlpiri bodies acting collectively in immersive contexts of multimodal, multisensory, responsibilities for (re)activating Country, culture and Jukurrpa.
Biddle describes Milpirri as a “Warlpiri interanimation of people, Ancestors, and country”:
The potent capacities of Jukurrpa to mark and make bodies and country ngurra-kurlu (at home) through intercorporeal intertwining: the rhythmic clapping of boomerang and beatbox, the pounding of breasts, feet, backflips; the gluck-gluck call of the emu (kurdungpa in Warlpiri, a glottal cough); the pulse of rap; the rustling of the Witi; the glistening of oil and ochre: the poetics and aesthetics of country as lived and heard in sonorous sound and feel (Biddle 2019:364).
Intercorporeal intertwining between bodies and Country/Jukurrpa/Ancestor is evidenced by animal activities and gestures in Milpirri dance. Sudiipta describes how Yapa (Warlpiri) identify in the youth dances in Milpirri, the activation of Jukurrpa or making Jukurrpa present in the youth-based Hip Hop version of Wardapi (goanna) dance, saying, when the dance action is to turn to look over the shoulder like a goanna, “that’s Jukurrpa, that’s Wardapi” (personal communication with Dowsett 2023). The salience of this seemingly simple gesture, micro moment as it seems, can hold great meaning in the intergenerational interpretation and memory-activating aspects of Warlpiri ceremonial dance and knowledge-exchange, that Milpirri instigates.
In 2024, anthropologist Miles Holmes (2024) discussed the performance of the formal, adult version of traditional Wardapi purlapa in Milpirri with Jerry Jangala and other senior men or men from Japanangka/Japangardi patricouple, who are traditional owners, or kirda for Wardapi Jukurrpa. During the discussion, and re-playing of the Milpirri video clip of this ceremony, this same gesture, apparent in the shortened Milpirri version of the dance, was considered by the men in detail:
The men talked for a long time about this simple song. Although the song is a brief few words it evokes such an embodied memory in the men. While telling the story they mime the goanna digging, pointing to their own fingernails, and discussing how the goanna uses it claws to dig into the ground. Jerry also talks about the women’s song, and how that song represents the goanna tilting it head and eye towards the sky looking for an eagle or a person that might be a danger. While telling us Jerry becomes the goanna cocking his head to the side his embodiment of such a small motion is impressive, he feels to me, in the moment, like a goanna. Note, it is a very particular motion I’ve seen goannas (and birds) do often. A human looks up to the sky by lifting the face and chin, but a goanna rotates its head around because its eyes are on the side. Imagine your eye was where your ear is, and you wanted to look at the sky.
The recent Central Lands Council tracking project Yitaki Maninjaku makes clear how familiar Wardapi – goanna – are to Warlpiri, known intimately from their abundance across Warlpiri and related desert Country.14 Wardapi are a preferred and readily available form of kuyu (meat), and are considered relatively easy to hunt, with well-known and trackable seasonal habits and habitats.
Wardapi are known by the same markings and makings in Country as in kurruwarri, that is, the Ancestral markings and traces left by Wardapi Jukurrpa, as Holmes describes:
… as [one of the men] often pointed out, the designs on the body, show the footprints and tail, and that is another part of wardapi that is so familiar to Warlpiri, the recognition that the tracks are irrefutable evidence of the animal being here (Holmes, personal communication with Dowsett, May 2024).
Milpirri youth performed a Hip Hop version of Wardapi Jukurrpa in 2005 and 2014. Figure 2 shows the start of the 2005 “green group” dance, representing the Japangardi/Japanangka patricouple, based on the key theme of purami (to follow) or guidance, which involves groups of teenaged boys moving around the stage, as themselves Wardapi, enacting Wardapi actions: following the footsteps of the dancer in front, to ‘follow’ an older brother’s footsteps, to ‘stay on the right path,’ and looking back over shoulders in the manner of Wardapi, described above.
To enter, become, or be with the world of animals through gesture, or here, the world of Wardapi (an Ancestor as well as everyday secular animal) enacts and engenders collective and reciprocal relationships between human and non-human, the everyday living with the supposed Ancestral past; the here of Lajamanu with the there of Wardapi Country and place (to the south) – bodies and materialities entwined in relations otherwise assumed not to be the same. Here, for Warlpiri, collective bodies act as, and become with, Wardapi, serving to unite human orientations and intentions with Ancestral; a co-relationality that equally serves to unite the everyday now with the Ancestral ‘”everywhen” (Stanner’s 1956 original term for the spatial-temporal endurance of Dreaming, see Stanner 2009). Gestures are not simply co-shared but constitutive of culture in distinctive soma-responsive terms, in this sense.
As Biddle notes historically for women’s ceremonial dances of Yawulyu (2007:73–74), Warlpiri praise a successful or ‘good’ Yawulyu: “[…] not for portrayal or depiction but for the corporeal becoming that is enacted. ‘There’ Warlpiri might say, there is Kurlukukuku (Diamond Dove), that Ancestor, that Dreaming, there now.” The aim of ceremony is the greater care of Country that takes shape by a certain re-rendering of collective bodies commensurate with Ancestral activities, sentiments and sensibilities. Wardapi Jukurrpa youth dances indicate a greater Jukurrpa narrative that is told in story, sung, painted on body and on acrylic canvas, all through the transitive verb ‘yimi-purrami’ to follow, as Yapa today ‘follow’ Ancestral (re)marking and (re)making in Milpirri.
Milpirri Hip hop is not the same as Yawulyu or high ceremony. Senior Warlpiri women elders identify Milpirri Hip Hop as manyu-wana (playing around). Nevertheless, Hip Hop in Milpirri serves to orient and en-world gestural, sonorous, tactile and visual orientations to the Ancestral or ‘prime’ bodies for Country (Dowsett 2024). Following Merleau-Ponty, Warlpiri bodies in this sense might be thought of as intercorporeal, open to Ancestral bodies and their transformative manifestations; what feminist phenomenologist Rosalyn Diprose (1994:105; see also Biddle ibid:74) defines as ‘sets of habits, gesture and conducts formed over time in relation to other bodies.’
In this sense, Milpirri Hip Hop, serves to extend this capacity to the young, bringing intergenerational bodies together in and through shared activities, orientations and couplings; activities and orientations shared with Elders and with Ancestors and thus, serves to activate, (re)animate and prime young bodies for primary identifications with Country.
Gerald Japanangka Robbo is painted up for the adult’s performance of part of Wardapi Jukurrpa, kuruwarri marks made in traditional ochre, which has its own proprioceptive materialities of Country. Ochre is highly valued, understood to be Ancestral viscera, sourced from specific ochre beds and sites as well as traded extensively for ceremonial and other cultural purposes historically (cf. Biddle 2016). The expectation and ritualised practice of Milpirri, mimicking the repetition of high ceremony in this sense, itself structures collective experience and expectations for Warlpiri in Lajamanu, as people have now grown up with Milpirri. Three generations of youth have now participated in Milpirri since 2005.
Learning through story as strictly verbal instruction alone has never been how ceremony, law and knowledge are passed on, Jampijinpa points out. Milpirri has provided a Warlpiri-centric method, for engaging children and youth in a sensory, embodiment of intention of teaching yapa children how to feel Country, how to sense and become Country, through performance, while being historically displaced, off-Country, in contemporary community settlement today in Lajamanu.
Collectivized mimicry and enactment in Milpirri engages collaborative intentionality with Country, an expanded understanding of a distinctive sentient sociality as Nancy Munn first modelled (1973), allowing for an understanding of embodied coupling with Warlpiri intentionality that has active potency for the revitalization and healthy making propensities of ceremony itself, to replenish and ‘increase’ flora, fauna, species; to generate rain and/or transform weather; to heal and to harm are some of these material effects, as part of a greater series of what has been described as ‘increase’ ceremonies (Dussart 2000; Biddle 2007). Country, place, sites remain significant no only becuase important things happened there in the past but the capacity they continue to provide for human activities today (Myers 2002). A collectively enacted intentionality for Warlpiri is more than simple connection to place. Milpirri provides a rejuvenating potential in post-settlement context where traditional Country is no longer inhabited for northern Warlpiri, where new kinds of relational practices are now critical. Jampijinpa’s model of ngurra-kurlu is comprehensive and extensive in identifying what for Warlpiri makes for healthy life world: Law, Land, Language, Kinship and Family, bound together in active re-relation. As Franca Tamisari argues for the work of ceremony for Yolŋu, ‘the learning of the law is an intellectual process which must be, nevertheless, literally absorbed through one’s body” (Tamisari 2005: 54).
Milpirri and First Nations Hip Hop provide capacities for priming perception for Country. Community engaged performance practices support and maintain embodied knowledge, and connections with Country. Milpirri is a powerful ecosomatic practice. Considered within the global context of Hip Hop culture. Milpirri opens up a distinctive Hip Hop concept of “representing place” which functions as a vital way for young people to engage with Ancestral cultural practices and knowledge in contexts of profound and systematic language and cultural disruption, displacement and ongoing colonialism, including climate colonisation, with manifest disconnection from land, performance traditions and perceptive sensibilities required for the critical stewardship of caring for Country, culture and community or what Ginsburg and Myers (2006) have called the activist making of “Aboriginal histories of the future”.
Importantly, utilising Hip Hop cultural practices in Milpirri equally serves to provide capacities for making Warlpiri sensibilities relevant to global popular culture, embodying feelings of home and living heritage, to claim space in a global popular culture that prioritises vernacular, embodied, forms of knowledge-practice. As Jampijinpa states, “Milpirri has taught us that there can be a blending of the old and the new” (2008:57). Globally, many Indigenous artists use Hip Hop to articulate their connections to land/the environment, asserting sovereignty and resisting the erasure of connections caused by ongoing settler-colonial occupation, forced displacement and environmental destruction. By doing so, Hip Hop artists contribute to the urgent need to radically rethink the dominant extractive capitalist human-environment relationships that currently prevail. This article has explored the diverse and nuanced ways in which First Nations and Indigenous artists globally are employing Hip Hop to sustain and revitalize relationships with place.
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