That the term ‘native’ featured in the expression ‘native title’ was not lost on some Warraberans. Initially, those persons who regarded themselves as neitiv asked me privately if the claim related specifically to them; that is, if they were the ‘natives’ being referred to in ‘native title’. However, as the importance of female neitiv ancestors among poren residents within the claim became widely apparent, those regarding themselves as having apical male neitiv ancestors did not advance their suspicions that native title may have referred only to them. It became locally understood as involving every resident possessing either male or female neitiv ancestors.

The first successful Warraber native title determination occurred on 6 July 2000 with a special local session of the Federal Court of Australia, presided over by Justice Drummond.^[15] At this event there were signs that many residents were tending to ignore the specific framing of the native title claim as a Warraberalgal event, while embracing the general recognition of shared emplacement it offered to the community. Residents—both neitiv and poren—have tended to refer to the event and to native title itself as affirming the earlier Gau Clan claim, rather than acting in any way to distinguish residents along lines of ancestral emphasis.

In any case, as I have described, those identifying as neitiv envisaged the descendants of foreign male ancestors (porena) to be legitimately of Warraber. They had acquired land from neitiv figures and thus belonged to Warraber. In addition, they regarded each other as kin, sharing their lives, religious practices and work interests for over a century. In this sense, Warraber thinking about the ‘total condition of recognisable indigeneity’ can be said to diverge from the preconceptions informing native title. But at the same time, the emergence of ‘Warraberalgal’ as a form of collective representation distinct from, but as encompassing as the Gau Clan, marks an instance of native title as a field of representational engagement where the ability of the Warraber community to maintain a commitment to their core terms of local relatedness was relatively succesful (the notion of a Warraber population that was ‘ol wan pamli’).

The naitiv/porena or autocthonous/non-autocthonous distinction may not be directly relevant to views concerning indigeneity among Aboriginal communities. But the wider relevance of the Warraber situation, outside the realm of native title, may simply be in reminding us of the historical part played by the European presence in shaping multiple modes of being indigenous, some of which are likely to have been as much a productive expression of indigenous/outsider interaction as they draw on extant aspects of pre-colonial lifeworlds. And that these modes may vary between specific locations, specific groups and specific sets of historical interactions (indeed, this is so even within Torres Strait itself). While certain modes are unlikely to be intuitively recognised by state-sponsored processes like native title, such processes may nevertheless play a part in continuing forms of expressing a ‘total condition of indigeneity’ that exceeds the expectations of the processes themselves.