It comes at a time when Aboriginal leaders are asking for their own representative body to be enshrined in the Constitution

Hundreds of Australian Aboriginal leaders gathered on Friday at Uluru, a massive sandstone monolith in Australia’s central desert, to call for a road map to a treaty and to enshrine an indigenous representative body in the Constitution. Around the same time, a new emoji was quietly added to Twitter: the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.

The emoji showing both flags together amounts to a small (very small) action, but the digital recognition carries deep significance.

“Emojis are huge,” said Luke Pearson, a digital producer of the indigenous radio unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “We use them all day, every day, on so many different platforms. They aren’t entirely insignificant, because they’ve become such a core part of our communications.”

The new emoji arrived the same week Australia is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the vote to include its indigenous people in the national census. In a week that includes National Sorry Day and the anniversary of the landmark Mabo case, which dealt with indigenous land rights, the flags amount to a form of recognition that can be easily shared; they become available on Twitter when users include certain hashtags, such as #IndigenousAU, #ReconciliationWeek, or #1967Referendum.

But as Australia’s indigenous peoples still struggle to overcome more than 200 years of colonisation, with a population that is grossly over-represented in prisons, and that has drastically poorer health and a lower life expectancy than the rest of Australia, does an emoji even matter?

Other issues seem much more important; the leaders who gathered in Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, have rejected mere constitutional recognition and are fighting for their own representative body, a ‘First Nations Voice’, to be enshrined in the document.

But representation in all forms is important for indigenous Australians, who have been pressing their case on many federal, state and local fronts for decades.

Significant move

Bronwyn Carlson, an associate professor of indigenous studies at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, says the inclusion of the flags is a significant move by Twitter.

“It means this corporate giant is taking notice of a small population of people, and also acknowledging that these people have something to say,” she said. Social media, particularly Twitter, is a democratic and accessible space for indigenous Australians. “Mainstream media generally ignores us,” said Ms. Carlson, who is an indigenous Australian. “But with Twitter, we have our own space, where we can continually raise our own stories and particularly talk about things that are important to us,” she said.

Mr. Pearson, who is also an indigenous Australian, and who set up IndigenousX, a Twitter account with rotating indigenous hosts, compares the flag icon to the recent addition of skin tones for some emoji.

“I think this is comparable, in the same way that all those flags are there for people to show pride in their flags,” he said, “and there wasn’t one for us.”

Twitter has been aware of calls for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag emoji for years, but adding one little emoji is trickier than it might seem.

Harold Thomas, the indigenous activist who created the Aboriginal flag in 1971, still holds the copyright to the design. After months of back and forth with Twitter, he granted the social media company permission to create the emoji. In an interview, Mr. Thomas said the flag expressed both the future of the Aboriginal people and their past. “The flag is central to our national identity,” Mr. Thomas said. “We are the first people here, for a very long time, and we’ll stay here until eternity.” NYT