Tiwi Strong Women perform ancestral song and dance for Canberra International Music Festival

The Tiwi Strong Women have travelled from Bathurst Island to not only take part in the festival but to also view and share some of the historic footage at the National Film and Sound Archive that depicts their ancestors and, in some cases, has helped keep their traditions alive.

The oldest of footage was taken by Baldwin Spencer on Bathurst Island in 1912 and shows men and women dancing Yoi, the dances that mark the Dreamings. There is also footage taken in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and features some of the women performing this weekend when they were children.

This footage will be screened in conjunction with some of the Tiwi Strong Women's performances this weekend.

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The footage first came to the attention of the Tiwi Island community in 2008, when Genevieve Campbell started to work with them as a cultural liaison. A group of the women then travelled to Canberra to view the footage at the archive.

In some instances, the songs and dances had fallen out of practice and the vision has helped revive them in the decade since.

"It is important for us to make us strong [as a community] and pass it on to young ones. It means me and my cousin, we can tell our family to pass it on," elder and Tiwi Strong Woman Regina Kantilla said.

Yirrikapayi Crocodile is one of the dance/songs performed in the footage, and the words captured in the corresponding audio are still sung today by Crocodile people. However, the lyrics are in an archaic form of the language that is no longer spoken in everyday life. The Tiwi Strong Women have created new songs of the ancestral crocodile story, in language, for Tiwi children to learn their Dreaming.

"Every individual Tiwi person has a dance. Some have crocodile dance, some buffalo, some shark, some turtle and that came from our ancestors," Tiwi Strong Woman Augusta Punguatji said.

As beneficial as some of the footage has been in maintaining culture and language, Dr Campbell also said the uncomfortable reality is that it also depicts power imbalance, cultural misunderstandings and prejudice. Some of the footage is offensive and patronising, and the Tiwi group - who are now the custodians of the material - has decided that it will not be seen publicly.

"Some of the Cinesound Movietone News newsreels that were taken in 1942 and 1957, in hindsight, are quite patronising," Dr Campbell said.

"Whether they were well-meaning or not, through our vision today there's a clear suggestion that they were primitive people, uncivilised people, and it was very much a voyeuristic look into an exotic island community.

"Some of the old ladies have found it quite confronting to see how they were portrayed at the time because their memories of those days - because it was their own childhoods and they knew no different - they have fond memories of."

The Tiwi Strong Women will perform a free performance at the Belconnen Arts Centre at 4pm on Saturday. They will also be at the National Gallery at 12pm and 2pm on Sunday. To book go to cimf.org.au.

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