Gija land holds an extremely sacred significance for the Gija people, who have been dispossessed from their land for the past 150 years. For Gija, the land holds the burial sites of their ancestors, ceremony grounds, hunting and fishing places, and sacred locations for both men and women.

The landforms are all part of the Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming) – many hold special importance for local people. As custodians of the Dreaming stories on the land, they have certain obligations to conduct ceremonies, to care for the land and ensure that it continues to be plentiful. To satisfy these cultural obligations, access to land is required.

The Land; the Dreaming; the People – in the Gija view, these three things cannot be separated. Even with diminished access to country, Gija people have managed to keep parts of their culture, law and ceremony.

For Aboriginal people there is a common belief that people came from the land on which they live, and that they have occupied that land since the creation era known as the Dreaming. It is believed that during this time, spirit beings roamed across the land performing certain actions that modified or created natural features, made waterholes, springs and rivers, and filled the whole land with a spirituality that remains vitally potent to this day.

There is no, one Dreaming that is accepted by all Aboriginal people as the ‘creation story'. This concept is recognised by different names in different areas. The local Gija people refer to the concept as ‘Ngarrangkarni'.

While the Ngarrangkarni provides a framework for Aboriginal people to explain and relate to the past, it also provides an important link to the present. Aboriginal people do not think of the Ngarrangkarni in the past tense; it is something that is, was and will continue to be, due to the fact that people are linked to the Dreaming from their birth and their day-to-day activities and relationships with others.

In many Dreaming stories the Ancestor beings metamorphosed during the story to become a natural landmark that may still be in existence today. Mountains and rock formations are often said to represent Ancestral beings, and their existence is often explained by a Dreaming story. Similarly, caves and hills, watercourses, lakes, trees and celestial formations also are often linked to Dreamtime stories. Dreaming stories also provide a set of rules governing and explaining behaviour and relationships among people and animals, and with areas of land.

Warmun art evolved in the late 1970s from the painted boards used in the Gija people's Gurirr Gurirr song-dance cycle. The Gurirr Gurirr ceremony was revealed to Rover Thomas after the death of a woman to whom he was spiritually related in 1974. About a month after her death, Thomas was visited by her spirit and she gave him a series of songs and dances about her travels after her death, visiting many sites of sacred or historical importance in the Kimberley .

After several years of Rover telling these stories, they evolved into a song-and-dance ceremony called the Gurirr Gurirr performed by the Warmun community. This ceremony includes the carrying of painted boards by dancers. These boards initially were painted by Thomas' uncle Paddy Jaminji, under Thomas' instructions, and only several years later did Rover Thomas take up painting independently himself.

These paintings led to the remarkable growth of the East Kimberley style of painting.