Kariera people
The Karieri people were an Indigenous Australian people of the Pilbara, who once lived around the coastal and inland area around and east of Port Hedland.
With the arrival of white settlers, disease decimated most of the Kariera. By the late first decade of the 1900s, the Kariera tribal system had almost disintegrated, the oldest informant in one case being the last member of his clan. A hundred at that time lived on and around the sheep stations that had been established on their land.
The Kariera lands ran along the coast from a point east of the Sherlock river to Port Hedland and inland, for about 50 miles over the De Grey area and the Yule and Turner rivers. In terms of tribal topography, the Ngarla lay east, the Ngarluma to their west, while the Yindjibarndi and Nyamal dwelt respectively up to their southern and south-eastern frontiers, encompassing an area of around 3,400-4,000 square miles (10,000 km2).
Much of the traditional Kariera landscape, marked by aboriginal rock art, of which several examples have been discovered from Port Hedland into the interior, was inscribed in the 'Minyiburu' songline, which was only recorded as late as 1977 by Kingsley Palmer.
Radcliffe-Brown's analysis of their kinship structure was drawn, perhaps with the assistance of earlier notes made by Daisy Bates, and in was intended as challenging some key premises of Émile Durkheim's classic study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) it provided a sophisticated model of 'interlocking complex of beautiful and symmetrical kinship systems', though it was pieced together from stray informants from the broken Kariera tribal world. Ironically, it has been observed, as the tribe disappeared, what remnants of their lore survived to be recorded began to make an important impact on anthropological thinking, with elements of it anticipated by some decades the core approach of structural functionalism decades later.A. P. Elkin described the Kariera structure as one of 5 kinship types in north Western Australia, and a type also found among the Wailpi aborigines of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The re-analysis of this Kariera theory played a significant role in Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949).
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