To be Sorry or not be
Right now in Australia, people are divided. Some believe that an apology to the ‘Stolen Generation’ is necessary, while others are vehemently against it believing that as a person they themselves were not responsible and so should not apologise.
For those who need a refresher course on the Stolen Generation:
From: http://www.eniar.org/stolengenerations.html
Aboriginal children — as well as those from Torres Strait Islands – between the years of 1910 - 1975 were forcibly taken from their homes. Most were raised on ‘missions’ church or state run institutions. They were forbidden to see their families and letters written by them were destroyed.
why were they taken?
It was Federal and State govt policy to take the Aboriginal kids away from their parents.
- The main motive was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.
- Speaking their languages and practising their ceremonies was forbidden
- They were taken miles from their country, some overseas
- Parents were not told where their children were and could not trace them
- Children were told that they were orphans
- Family visits were discouraged or forbidden; letters were destroyed.
what were the results
The physical and emotional damage to those taken away was profound and lasting:
- Most grew up in a hostile environment without family ties or cultural identity.
- As adults, many suffered insecurity, lack of self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, depression, suicide, violence, delinquency, abuse of alcohol and drugs and inability to trust.
- Lacking a parental model, many had difficulty bringing up their own children.
- The scale of separation also had profound consequences for the whole Aboriginal community - anger, powerlessness and lack of purpose as well as an abiding distrust of Government, police and officials.
what is being done?
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10th anniversary of the |
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‘Sorry Book’ launched in UK |
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A National Inquiry was set up in 1995. Its 1997 Report ‘Bringing them Home’ contained harrowing evidence.
It found that forcible removal of indigenous children was a gross violation of human rights which continued well after Australia had undertaken international human rights commitments.
- It was racially discriminatory, because it only applied to Aboriginal children on that scale, and
- It was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide, (which forbids ‘forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group’ with the intention of destroying the group.)
The Report made 54 recommendations, including opening of records, family tracing and reunion services and the need for reparations’ (including acknowledgement and apology by Governments and institutions concerned, restitution, rehabilitation and compensation).
The previous Liberal/National Coalition Government increased some funding but has refused to apologise or offer compensation. Australia elected a new Government on 24th November 2007 - it’s policy is to make a formal apology to the Stolen generations.
A Senate committee has investigated the Government’s response to the Report.
People of the Stolen Generation have started legal actions for compensation against the Government .
The cases have been hard fought, as Government lawyers are arguing that removal of children was done for their own good.
A statement by the former Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron which denied existance of the ‘stolen generations’ caused distress and anger among those affected. Denial has marked much of the commentary.
‘Moving forward: achieving reparations’ is a project conducted in partnership with ATSIC, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the National Sorry Day Committee and Northern Territory stolen generation groups.
It’s report ‘Restoring identity‘, proposing a reparations tribunal for the stolen generations, has widespread support by Indigenous people.
Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia issued public statements welcoming the report and detailing their initiatives to implement the recommendations.
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I am sorry.
I do not think the fact that i personally had nothing to do with it has got anything to do with the issue.
And the mid-1970s was not ‘back then’. Just because Howard did not implement the Act does not mean that he had to continue implementing it. He would not acknowledge the fact that he was in government at the time when children were still being stolen. And that he could have done something to stop it - or at least draw attention to it.
The act of saying ’sorry’ is in part, an act of *acknowledgment*. An acknowledgment of the pre-meditated idea of destroying a country’s native inhabitants - taking away their land, their language, their culture and their sense of family and belonging.
And then denying that it ever happens (as some of his government have done in the past). Indigenous Australians are asking - as well as the rest of Australia - well, mot - are asking for an apology from the Australian GOVERNMENT not Howard personally, and the fact that Howad took is personally is not very good leadership at all. He had his chance to apologise in 1997, but he didn’t.
Of course i know that an apology is not going to make a magic wand wave and we all to be alright. I know that it is up to Aboriginal Australia to accept the apology when it comes from PM Rudd tomorrow — as is their right.
My God, Australia sickens me sometimes.
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This debate is a huge part of what it means to be an ‘Australian’ - whichever side of the fence you all on. And theloss of cultural identity is something we can all sympathise/empathise over.
What i have learnt of Australia is that they feel pride over Gallipoli (where ANZAC and other countries’ troops) battled against the Turks and got annihilated. It said that they were strong and hearty and didn’t back down etc.
But (some) refuse to show guilt or shame or even acknowledge the wrongs Australia has done. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t feel pride over something ‘labelled as ‘great and heroic’ and feel all Australian and not feel shame over the terrible acts European settlement had upon the Indigenous peoples.
I’m sorry its a ‘hot’ topic atm and i just needed to vent.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
When I was very little my family played ‘host’ to an Australian teenager who was travelling around India. I don’t know if he was there with a specific purpose but he stopped over in Calcutta for a few weeks.
I don’t remember very much of him (I must’ve been 2) but I happened to be talking to my mum about the band Midnight Oil (perhaps you know of?) recently and my mother brought that guy up - apparently he’d been very strongly for Aboriginal rights - I don’t think my mum knew very much about the situation until speaking to him and she’d found what he had to say shocking.
I know that there’s a similar kind of thing going on in India - until the last 60 years or so the ‘caste’ system was license for ‘higher’ caste members to deny ‘lower’ castes many/most of their rights. In many pockets of the country today, there is still a great divide.
Anyway.
I completely can relate to your last statement of having it both ways. You can’t feel pride (for what your forefathers achieved, and not you) and then claim to not acknowledge the injustice (for which your forefathers were responsible, and not you).
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February 12th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
wow, yeah, have you seen ‘rabbit proof fences’? hectic.
anyway, for once i will be brief; i do not believe in guilt but i am a big believer in applogies and compensation fo previously diadvantaged groups. especially when the evidence of the disadvantage is so obvious still…
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February 12th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I think part of the issue here is perception.
Australians, as well as most of the world, is used to seeing Australia as being one of “the good guys” in the world. They’re a democracy, they did at least sign the charters, and they fought on the winning side of WW2, and so on.
The USA has a similar perception. They saw, and many still see, themselves as defenders of the free world. Yet they’ve done their fair share of genocidal acts, and curtails of human rights.
I think people just need to wake up and remember that democracies can cause atrocities too, which is somehow worse than autocracies doing it because THE PEOPLE AGREE WITH IT.
I’m willing to bet that over the 1910-1975 period that there were those movements of Aborigines, a reasonable majority of Australians might have agreed with it. Just like any number of Americans might have agreed to lock up Japanese citizens during WW2 on security reasons. Or land theft from the Native Americans.
It is entirely unfair, and the result of what people think are “hard measures for hard times.” All we can do is be on the watchout for it because it should never be justified.
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February 12th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
What is happening in Australia is happening or has happened in various other places. In Taiwan we have the government wanting to honor the aborigines by naming certain geographical land or major roads after their tribal names. In the States, we have the Indian reservations - let the Native Americans rule their own community (maybe for other reasons as well but one of the reason was to compensate for what happened during the colonization, if I got my facts straight LOL). It surprised me that Australia is still going through this. I think making a public apology is a start and it is too early yet to say how people really perceive things.
When I was in Thailand back in the mid-90s, I had an Australian classmate who would lowly regard the Australian aborigines (we had a family of Australian aborigines at the time as well). I was shocked to hear him talk about them that way.
I am not very good with facts but I believe many of these “recognitions” only happened in the past 20-30 years or so.
No one like to admit their mistakes. Yes Germany did apologize for what happened during WWII. But there are many others that don’t. We have Japan who as of today still does not fully admit they did anything wrong in the Nanjing Massacre. China and Korea are still furious. I don’t know what the recent situation is as this is sort of outdated info from 4 years or so ago, but my point is people do not generally like to admit to any wrongdoing. It will take lots of time fermented in order for the proper procedure to happen - apologizing and admitting with shame that they did something wrong to the world, that is with enough pressure from the world.
So it is not surprising that Australia does not want to admit to their mistakes.
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February 12th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Yeah. Women from all over Asia want to sue Japan for stealing them to be “comfort women”.
I really do think that the West has a problem with human rights though, not because they break it so often, but because they have a hard time seeing themselves as breaking it. They’re used to calling other countries evil, but when they do similar things, they call it something different.
People are just as stupid, regardless of nationality.
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February 13th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Right on, Uncle Dan.
If we’re going to get into apologies - what about apologies from Great Britain? Apologies from France? Apologies from Spain? Apologies from Portugal? Apologies from Holland? Apologies from the mainstream Chinese race to all the minority races in China should be put in there too. What about apologies from the South Koreans to the North Koreans? I’m not sure the Vietnamese are too happy with many people either for making their country into a war zone. I’m sure they want an apology too.
The list would include most countries in the world that have ever run over the border or have had tribal conflict within their own borders. Soldiers don’t behave well during peace or war - so during peace American soldiers have repeatedly raped Japanese school girls in Okinawa. Maybe they should apologize too? How much worse are soldiers during war time if they can’t even leave school girls alone during peace? There are decent soldiers surely, but there will always be badly behaved ones…and this goes for military in every single country of the world.
Oh and yes the mainland Japanese surely owe an apology to the people of Okinawa for putting the American soldiers there and subjecting them to this…and to the Ainu who were there FIRST. The people who call themselves Japanese aren’t even from Japan originally - they are a mixture of Mongolian, Chinese and Korean races blended with Ainu. It’s probably even more mixed than this because Chinese annals have records of Japanese people having tattoos all over their bodies when they came to pay the Emperor of China homage and this sounds Polynesian to me. Contrary to Japanese propaganda during WW2, they are anything but a ‘pure race’.< —Gee I hope I don’t get shot for saying this. If you don’t hear from me again you’ll know what happened.
Frankly I don’t think there’s much point in discussing apologies though if people are going to focus on what was done during WW2 only and give amnesty to anything that happened before that….and AFTER that.
I went to an American International School in the Philippines, so I heard a rehash of how EVIL the Japanese and Germans were and how good everyone else was over and over again as I was growing up. I grew up being told over and over again how I belonged to this EVIL race. Boy did that feel good!
American soldiers would never stoop to rape anyone because they are born good you see…and they eat Wonder Bread. It’s only Japs and Krauts who rape people is what I was hearing. In fact they managed to brain wash me so well I was terrified of the Japanese military (Self-Defense Force - it’s all the same to me) for a long time.
It also saddens me greatly that even though it’s quite clear that far eastern civilization all comes from the Chinese if you trace it back far enough before it spread to other areas - the region continues to quarrel and allow certain western countries to ‘divide and rule’…and all parties are guilty in perpetuating this.
Intelligent and well-educated Japanese people know and appreciate Chinese history. The ignorant masses as in any other country have no clue. There has been propaganda in Japan regarding this where they underplayed the glory of Chinese civilization so that people over 75 years old with a good education know their Chinese (yes it was required that they could read and write it fluently at university level in those days), but anyone under this is pretty ignorant because the government started their WW2 propaganda so there are generations of Japanese people who are entirely ignorant about Chinese history. This continued until things eased up a bit for people who are under 40 now.
People became interested in Chinese history again because of Anime, Manga and videogames - and this happened because the censorship doesn’t take this media too seriously :p Some went and read proper history books after they discovered this whole new (actually very old) China out there that they didn’t see in their text books. Same goes for Korean history. There are beautiful ‘manga’ out there about Korean history.
And this is why I’m not too interested in discussing politics, because well nothing seems to change however much we dig up old wounds and rub salt into them…
lol
Sorry - that was a long rant…
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February 13th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Wow you guys-good but HOT topic!
It seems to me that this is exactly why TCKs are so much more sensitive in regards to social-cultural-ethnic identity issues. It’s really where we get it WAY before others do.
I can tell you some not so nice stories about moving the States in ‘79 at the height of the Iran-US conflict and living in a predominantely Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood at the time. Coming out of Iran at that time and being German were not in my favour and at school, at the tender age of 7, I really felt the lash of hatred for something I had no control over or was any fault of mine. Like Ayako was made to feel she was part of the “EVIL” race, my being half-German made me feel like I was par of the bad seed. And I only had fond childhood memories of my summers and winter holidays with my Gemran relatives. I grew up feeling somewhat ashamed and aplogetic all the time and only when I reached my mid-twneties did I get to a point where I started to put things in perspective.
Anyway, the point being, that it doesn;t take much for the oppressed to become the oppressors and it is a sad cyclical thing. It takes an act of responsibility and yes, courage, to own up up to having done somehting wrong or horrendous to a people and take an active roles in healing the wounds that a nation or people can inflict upon another. I still have yet to hear a public apology and real effort but the US towards the attemptive genocide of the native-indigenous people, towards the enslavement and inhumane mistreatment of Africans and towards Japanese-Americans being placed them unjustly concentration camps during WWII.
Anyway, there is some good news in that finally today the Australian government and it’s PM, Rudd made a formal apology and reocgnition of what was done to the Aborigines. If you are interested, check out the Guardian article online http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/13/australia
No, this doesn’t make everything OK, but it is a first important step forward to working things out and serves as an example to other nations.
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February 13th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I read the article in the newspaper today… But one thing that people forget about cultures and geography is that it changes constantly.
Who lived in Italy first? The Eritreans were there before the Romans, and then the gothic tribes moved in and through it. And what do the modern Italians claim to any of these older cultures? Not much at all. So when people think about “Italian culture” as a defined thing, they’re forgetting that it didn’t exist, even 200 years ago.
That’s why these kinds of cultural change arguments are a bit tricky.
So White Australia was destroying Aborigine Australian culture. It’s not the first time that’s happened.
I lived in their neighbor, Indonesia. In order for Indonesia to exist, they had to promote the idea of being *Indonesian*, rather than being sectionalized in the different tribes and islands. Indonesia had some real trouble with that in recent years too. Aceh was pretty serious about it until the Tsunami swept through (and they realized that it’s really, really nice to have a federal government to send them aid, instead of standing alone). But the question is raised “Where does it stop?” The process of that Nationalism is the squashing of lots of smaller cultures. It’s been done through history by lots of nations as far back as civilization, and still is.
America is a terrific example of this, whether it means to or not. People come from all over the world to live and work there, and after some time and a bit of rough and ready lessons, possibly a generation or two, they become somewhat American. Is that right or wrong? Is it only right because they’re not killing people to do it? People might argue that it’s not government sanctioned, but it’s still happening. Is it different when it’s done with free will?
I highlight them because I happen to know a bit about it, but Asian Americans in the US are particularly worried about their sense of identity. Should they be more Asian, or more American? Usually there’s a generation difference between them, and who’s in the right? Does it even matter? But it goes as far as that boy William Hung, who got famous for singing badly. Americans loved it, but Asian Americans didn’t. They said it was because people are buying it because he’s “FOBBISH”, and therefore cute in a foreign, Asian way that they feel is misrepresentative.
Should America be Americanizing its people so much? Are they really doing it? People worry about the Americanization of the world, though less so nowadays, but why is that? Cultures flow. As Ayako said, China is the source of a lot of Asian culture, whether we admit it or not. Maybe they’re not anymore, and the locals can jump up and take the spotlight, and maybe they will be again.
Really, cultural arguments all falter with the idea of continuous flux. People move, and grow, and change. We may feel sorry for the aborigines, and it doesn’t excuse the pretty horrid atrocities done to them, but who remembers the Champa? Or the hundreds of different peoples who got swamped by bigger cultures/peoples?
Native Americans in the US today are held with a kind of mythological status, even though they ethnically still very much exist. The US Army likes to name its weapons after them, to symbolize the fierceness they had in warfare, even though 100 years ago they were still slaughtering them. What about the Aborigines in Australia? Would they be relegated to a similar status? Should the newest building in Sydney be named after a particular Aborigine, even though they still walk the streets? Does it matter?
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February 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am
yeah, you are right uncle dan, stupidity reigns everywhere.
just recently in botswana there was a huge court case because the governement kicked out the people of the kgalagadi (native bush men) from the central kgalagadi game reserve. it was a big stink because this was their home, but it had been turned into a game reserve, and people can’t live in the game reserve. anyway, they recently won (the bush men) and were allowed to return to their homes, but the conditions of their winning were that the governement is not responsible for them now. so the governement does not have to put up water stands, schools, clinics that sort of thing. also thy still have to get hunting liscenses in order to hunt, and so far the gvmt has not been forthcoming with those. the bushmen in botswana, those of the desert and those of the river are highly marginalised!
and someone said something about it being a viscious cycle, absolutely. i mean so many poeple do not know that during the boer war, it was the brits who had afrikaans women and children in concentration camps (it has been said that this is where hitler got the idea). the brits had the black african fight in their army against the afrikaans, and some south africans argue this was the start of the devide between black africans and afrikaaners which later lead to aparthied once the afrikaans gained power. even now, there is a lot of tension between english south africans and afrikaans people.
but i will say it again, i don’t think guilt is worth anything, it doesn’t solve anything, but i guess i feel like an apology gives validity to the atrocities. ok, maybe not an apology, but some sort of acknoledgement of what happened. i truly believe we can’t move on until we do this. and if that means every country in the world acknowledging some horrendousness they were a part of, so be it.
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February 13th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
People forget.
All the indigenous peoples of the world don’t make it to the history books. And even the stuff that does filter down to the school textbooks gets forgotten.
If societies learned to place more value to history - both in celebrating and learning from past injustice - perhaps we could at least make sure mistakes are not repeated.
As another aside - my own ancestors (the grandma/grandpa generation) were forced to leave the part of the world now known as Bangladesh and set up new lives in India during the massacres/turmoil when British imperialists left India. They themselves have mixed feelings about it, but they’ve always expressed some kind of ‘gratefulness’ to the larger Indian people for letting them stay and make new lives.
However, I came across this shocking article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/05/india.theobserver ) about exactly the same kind of people as my grandparents, who never left one of the ‘temporary’ refugee camps - there is STILL a refugee camp in India dating back from 1947!! Wherein STILL live the grandchildren of those original refugees. I could’ve been one of them!! It just boggles the mind. Apparently they’ve just been forgotten about by the ’system’ - no papers, hence no chance of benefitting from whatever limited social services the Indian government can provide, little chance of obtaining proper employment and completely reliant on the camp. How can people be treated this way? Clearly many of the original refugees ‘made good’, but this lot seem to have been failed by the system. I found it a heartbreaking read, more so because I kept thinking how easily it could have been my grandparents.
No one in India beyond the families of those who were displaced seem to remember even the exodus itself, let alone this group of totally unfairly treated people.
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