Ngalia/Mantjintjarra
From NativeWiki
Ngalia people are one of the Aboriginal tribes of the Western Desert. They are also known as Mantjintjarra. Ngalia peoples are one of the tribes who make up the Wangkatja or Wongutha Peoples. Wangkatja are in essence an Australian Aboriginal First Nation, this is not a term commonly used in Australia, but most accurately captures the meaning of the term.
Ngalia homelands were centred on the desert waters known as Mungkili. In times of drought the tribe would retreat back to live at Mungkili. In recent times many Ngalia people live in the town of Leonora in the North Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia and those Ngalia who identify as Mantjintjarra live at Mulga Queen.
Ngalia is a label not often found in anthropological literature to be associated with this region. Ngalia appears on Tindale maps at other locations across Australia, in the Northern Territory and South Australia. Berndt also records contact with Ngalia people at Ooldea. This leaves the Ngalia of today in one of those awkward quandaries "Do they really exist if they were not recorded?" There are some references to Ngalia people in Tindale at Warburton in the 1950s. Ronald Berndt mentions a Ngalia man at Cosmo, then nothing else. Ngalia as a term appears on the public record from the late 1980s onwards. This is when Elders in Leonora became politically active and sought to articulate their identity as Ngalia people.
The current generation of Elders, say that their ancestors were reluctant to divulge, their true name to outsiders, but were happy to retain the descriptor or labels like language terms and geographic terms. Mantjiltjarra, meaning those with the word on mantjila in their language through to rirrangkatja, means from the stony plains.
