The Tiwi killed all outsiders because they classified them as nonhuman

Evidence

To them, the dimly seen coastline of Australia was Tibambinumi, the home of the dead, to which all Tiwi souls went after death. It follows from this that they regarded the inhabited world as composed of their own two islands … Outsiders who landed on the island were massacred or vigorously resisted. Whether they were classified as Malai-ui (“Malays”) or W ona-rui (Australian aborigines from the mainland) they were not Tiwi and hence not real people, or at least not human enough to share the islands with the chosen people who owned them. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 42

Categorization

• XREF: The Tiwi as a concrete case of the ‘stranger = nonhuman’ principle — direct evidence for Lofland’s typology of stranger-handling that the reader may contrast with urban civil inattention.
• SHARE: The Tiwi’s conviction that Australia’s coastline was the home of the dead is niche and specific enough to delight someone interested in island ethnography.