Indigenous Speaker

Today was the first day in my indigenous people course that we actually got to hear about the indigenous people. We had a guest speaker who was very interesting to listen to because she is a woman of Aboriginal (Muruwari Murri) descent. She discussed the history of the indigenous Australian people upon contact with the Europeans as well as the more recent happenings that occurred within her parents' and grandparents' generations. She told us that her grandmother's two young children were taken away from her, to be "educated" and during her father's generation, people of Aboriginal descent had to be off the streets by 6pm or they would be imprisoned.
The history of the indigenous people is tragic and also gruesome since many were slaughtered and it wasn't considered a crime to shoot them. Parliament was even quoted as saying "There is no scientific evidence the Aboriginal is a human being at all." Eventually, as time passed certain rights were granted to the people who had Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal blood...but the government still wanted to rid Australia of the indigenous people by having them merge into society and "forget that there ever were Aborigines in Australia" (as quoted by AO Neville, who was in charge of Western Australian missions). During the 1960's-1970's, as I discussed in a previous blog post, children were taken away from their parents "to be educated," but most families were never reunited. They were taken away in hopes that the Aboriginal people would die out. Today, many Aboriginal people are viewed as alcoholics, but we were told that the majority of the alcoholics are people from that stolen generation who were forced to leave their families at such young ages.
I found the lecture to be very moving and it also made me better understand why it was such a big deal that Prime Minister Rudd recently apologized to the Aboriginal people.