Originally Aboriginal

[Ed: This is a continuation of this. Also, the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous have been used interchangeably. Click on timestamp for complete post.]

The meeting at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was quite an experience. It was my first visit there, and I was all riled from hearing Sarah speak about the Indigenous injustice in Australia earlier this week, and was eager to learn all I could about it.



The Aboriginal Elder we met with talked about the history of the Tent Embassy, the various departments that run under it, and the myriad of issues facing (and continuing to marginalise) the Indigenous people: Lake Cowal and other sacred land threats; lack of education and health provisions; land rights and forced incapacity for self-determination; police violence on Aboriginal people, and - the clincher - the stolen generation.

I wanted to share this bit from then-PM Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Speech:

It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

The idea of the stolen generation, in particular, filled me with a convulsive stew of guilt and repulsion. The fact that it was actual government policy to sanction acts like these:

The Australian government literally kidnapped these children from their parents as a matter of policy. White welfare officers, often supported by police, would descend on Aboriginal camps, round up all the children, separate the ones with light-colored skin, bundle them into trucks and take them away. If their parents protested, they were held at bay by the police.

Sometimes, to avoid harrowing scenes of parents clinging to the sides of the trucks, and to frustrate attempts to hide the children when the trucks drove into the camp, the authorities resorted to subterfuge. They would fit out the back of a truck with a wire cage and a spring door -- like an animal trap. Then they would park the truck a short distance from the camp and lure the children into the cage with sweets scattered on its door. When enough children were in the cage, they would spring the trap door and drive rapidly away.

Sarah was telling the bunch of us that when she was dealing with many Indigenous youths in her youth worker days, she was immersed in such a strong sense of guilt that she didn’t really know what to do with it. I will always remember the response of the Indigenous Elder she confided this to:

Don’t be guilty; be angry.

***


Listening to the Elder speak, I remained standing on the dry, grainy dirt plain, feeling the slight burn on my cheeks from the unusually intense rays of an afternoon autumn sun. There was something that felt profoundly symbolic about holding - almost humbly cusping - a sprig of eucalyptus with both hands, standing in a circle surrounding the ceremonial fire of peace and justice.

As I looked straight at the flaming symbol of the undying Aboriginal spirit in the centre, and all that it has come to represent, I could not help but feel an oddly deep respect for the strength, tenacity, and sheer determination of the Indigenous peoples of this land - to continue fighting against more than 200 years of dispossession and injustice by other people, on the very land that had always been their own.


For the keen:

Amazing pictorial history of the Embassy

Guardian, 19 Aug 02: Raising the sovereignty stakes

Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation


Technorati: Indigenous rights, Aboriginal, Australia politics