Australian Style Genocide

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WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Genocide in Australia

Report details crimes against Aborigines

By Brett Stone

7 September 1999

Use this version to print

The genocidal practices perpetrated against Australian Aborigines were the outcome of policies adopted and implemented by all Australian governments from British settlement in 1788 until the present. A people who had virtually no contact with the outside world, were suddenly confronted with a hostile and alien force. Aborigines were forced out of their traditional homes, hunted like wild animals, poisoned or shot, and confined to the harshest and most desolate climes. The effect of British settlement upon these people led to near extinction within 120 years.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has published a report detailing this history. Entitled Genocide in Australia, it was written by Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Sydney's Macquarie University.

The report's timing is significant. Its release coincided with the first of the “stolen generations” legal actions brought against the Commonwealth and State governments by Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families. Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner are seeking compensation from the Commonwealth government for injuries received after they were taken from their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Tatz will provide testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, and thousands of such actions could be undertaken in the future.

The legal guideline for Tatz's study is Article II (a) to (e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(B.) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group.

Tatz's report asserts that the policies adopted by colonial administrations and both state and federal governments, as well as actions by settlers, from British colonisation up until the 1970s constituted genocide against the Aborigines.

He writes: “Genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations. In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four acts of genocide:

“(1) Killing by private settlers and rogue police officers, while the state authorities for the most part stood silently by.

“(2) The implementation in the twentieth century of official state policy, entailing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from one group to another, with the express intention that ‘ they cease being aboriginal'.

“(3) Twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed ‘half- caste' Aborigines.

“(4) A prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them severe bodily or mental harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women without consent.)”

The report provides compelling material to justify these assertions. Even though no official figures exist, estimates of the Aboriginal population in 1788 range between 250,000 and 750,000. By 1911 the number was 31,000. Aborigines have only been included in the National Census since 1971. In 1996 the National Census recorded that 352,970 or 1.97 of the population were of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.

Despite the substantial increase in the population of Aborigines since 1911, the conditions of life in which they find themselves remain impoverished and highly oppressive. Tatz states that according to every social indicator available Aborigines are found at the top or bottom. Diseases, such as coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory infections, are far more prevalent than 30 years earlier. Life expectancy is 50-55 years for males, approximately 55 years for females. The likelihood of an Aborigine being unemployed is far greater—22.7 percent as opposed to 8.1 percent. Fewer Aborigines own their homes. For Aborigines fortunate enough to have employment, their income is 25 percent less on average. Large proportions of Aborigines languish in prisons (14 percent of the prison population in 1997) and police watch-houses. This excludes those confined, through economic necessity, to black settlements, like Cherbourg or Yarrabah in Queensland.

The oppressed condition of Aborigines is marked in other ways—a prevalence of personal violence, lack of care for children, increased death from non-natural causes, as well as high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. It should come as no surprise that one manifestation of oppression—alcohol and drug abuse—is commonly offered as the explanation for all manifestations of oppression.

“Killing members of the group”

The report states: “In 1803, Tasmania was settled. In 1806 serious killing began. In retaliation for the spearing of livestock, Aboriginal children were abducted for use in forced labour, women were raped and tortured and given poisoned flour, and the men were shot. They were systematically disposed of in ones, twos and threes, or in dozens, rather than in one systematic massacre. In 1824, settlers were authorised to shoot Aborigines. In 1828, the Governor declared martial law. Soldiers or settlers arrested, or shot, any blacks found in settled districts. Vigilante groups avenged Aboriginal retaliation by wholesale slaughter of men, women and children. Between 1829 and 1834, an appointed conciliator, George Robinson, collected the surviving remnants: 123 people whom were then settled on Flinders Island. By 1835, between 3,000 and 4,000 Aborigines were dead.” And further: “They were killed, with intent, not solely because of their spearing of cattle or their 'nuisance' value, but rather because they were Aborigines.”

Between 1824 and 1908 approximately 10,000 Aborigines were murdered in the Colony of Queensland. “Considered ‘wild animals', ‘vermin', ‘scarcely human', ‘hideous to humanity', ‘loathsome' and a ‘nuisance', they were fair game for white ‘sportsmen'.”

The upshot of this slaughter was the appointment in 1896 of Archibald Meston as Royal Commissioner. In his Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland he wrote: “The treatment of the Cape York people was a shame to our common humanity.” He continued: “Their manifest joy at assurances of safety is pathetic beyond expression. God knows they were in need of it”. Aboriginal people met him “like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror”. His prescription for their salvation lay in “ strict and absolute isolation from all whites, from predators who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, take their women, sell them grog or opium”. Needless to say, none of the perpetrators of the slaughter were made to answer for their actions.

”Protection”: Segregation

The events in Queensland and Tasmania were typical of every colony. The result of Meston's Royal Commission was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Similar measures were enacted throughout Australia. In some colonies, “protective” legislation, enforced by Protectors, began earlier, from the 1840s.

Like the fences erected to keep dingoes (wild native dogs) off pastureland, similar fences were erected around missions and settlements for Aborigines. The segregation had two aspects, legal and geographic. The law was meant to keep whites out and blacks in. Geographic isolation was to ensure that nobody could get in or out.

The attitude of the Protectors towards Aborigines was one of utmost contempt, in both clerical and scientific guises. Father Eugene Perez, chief policy-maker of Catholic missions, wrote in 1879 that Aborigines corresponded to the Palaeolithic Age. He described them as “primitives dwarfed to the bare essentials of human existence”; people with “inborn cunning”, “lacking interest and ambition” with “undeniable immaturity”, forever seeking “the unattainable EL DORADO coming to them on a silver tray”; people “with no sense of balance or proportion” who “want ‘today' what cannot be given till tomorrow”; people to whom physical goods are “like the toy given to a child, which will soon be reduced to bits, and thrown into the rubbish dump”.

W. Baldwin Spencer, a professor of biology and the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, concluded: “The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious mixture: mentally about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper... He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative.” Spencer added that, “their customs are revolting to us” and they were “far lower than the Papuan, the New Zealander or the usual African native”. During his posting, he established the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, because he believed that “no half-caste children should be allowed in any native camp”. The Kahlin Compound specifically housed “half-caste” Aboriginal children, removed from their mothers.

Protection was dispensed in remote places such as Yarrabah, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Doomadgee, Bamaga, Edward River, Weipa, Bloomfield River and Woorabinda. Aboriginal morality was supposedly protected by controlling their movements, labour, marriages, private lives, reading matter, leisure and sports activities, even cultural and religious rituals. Income protection was the responsibility of police constables. They controlled wages, withdrawals from compulsory savings bank accounts, and rights to enter contracts of labour or purchase and sale.

In Queensland, protection included internal state banishment for periods ranging from 12 months to life, at the director's pleasure, for offences such as “disorderly conduct”, “uncontrollable” and “menace to young girls”. Other offences could only be committed by Aborigines. These included being cheeky, refusing to work, calling the hygiene officer a “big-eyed bastard”, and leaving a horse and dray in the yard whereby a person might have been injured. Committing adultery, playing cards, arranging to see a male person during the night, and being untidy at the recreation hall were also on the list, as was refusing to provide a sample of faeces required by the hygiene officer. Such offences brought three weeks imprisonment, which could be transformed into six, nine and twelve weeks, as prison terms were not served concurrently.

”Protection”: Assimilation

In 1928, the federal government asked J. W. Bleakley, Queensland Protector of Aborigines, to report on policy, including “half-caste” policy, in the Northern Territory. His report proposed “blood quotas” as a guiding principle. Those who possessed 50 percent or more of Aboriginal “blood” would “drift back” to the black “no matter how carefully brought up and educated.” Those with less than 50 percent Aboriginal “blood” could “avoid the dangers of the blood call” if they were segregated as the prelude to “their absorption by the white race”.

In 1937, 1951 and 1961 official conferences adopted policies aimed at the assimilation of Aboriginal people into the mainstream of society. Tatz points out that these policies were directed towards ensuring the disappearance of the Aboriginal people. Terms such as "breeding them white" indicated a biological solution.

Assimilation policies were not entirely new. Under the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act 1886 “aid” was restricted to “full-bloods” and “half-castes” over the age of 34. All others, regardless of their marital or sibling status, were forcibly expelled from missions and reserves. Children were not exempt. They faced relocation to white foster parents, white adoptive parents and “half-caste” or “assimilation” homes.

Tatz cites three senior officials to illustrate the thinking behind assimilation. One was O. A. Neville, the Chief Protector in Western Australia between 1915 and 1940. He could do nothing for Aborigines, “who were dying out”. However, he could “absorb the half-castes”. Neville had a three-point plan. First, the “full-bloods” would die out. Second, the “half-castes” would be taken from their mothers. Third, “half-caste” marriages would encourage intermarriage within the white community. The Chief Protector promoted the attractiveness of such arrangements. “The young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon [one quarter Aboriginal] is often strikingly attractive, with her oftimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure”. Elevation of these people “to our own plane” he deemed wise. To this end, Neville established, in 1933, Sister Kate's Orphanage. Its guiding principle was to take in hand those “whose lightness of colour” could lead to assimilation and intermarriage.

The indignities suffered by those taken in hand would have been obvious and many, but a proverbial carrot was dangled before them. The Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 (WA) made it possible for an Aborigine to apply, before a magistrate, for a Certificate of Citizenship. The successful applicant would have to show how “white” he or she had become. Dissolution of tribal and native association was only the beginning. He or she had to have an honourable discharge from the armed forces, or be deemed a “fit and proper person”.

“Fit and proper persons” had to have “adopted the manner and habits of civilised life” for two years and be able to speak and understand English. They had to be of industrious habits and be of a good reputation and correct behaviour. Those suffering from active leprosy, syphilis, granuloma and yaws (framboesia) were denied citizenship.

This outlook formed the basis of Commonwealth policy from the 1930s. The Northern Territory Administrator's report of 1933 said: “In the (Northern) Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of coloured aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.”

Throwing light on the “stolen generations”

This aim continued throughout the period of the “stolen generations” when Aboriginal children were taken from their families. In a 1983 monograph, historian Peter Read cited annual reports of the New South Wales Board: “This policy of dissociating the children from [native] camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem”. By placing children in “first-class private homes”, the superior standard of life would “pave the way for the absorption of these people into the general population”. Further, “to allow these children to remain on the reserve to grow up in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings would be, to say the least, an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State”.

Tatz writes: “In sharp contrast were the memories of the salvaged ones: there was little that was wonderful in the experience; there was much to remember about physical brutality and sexual abuse; and for the majority the homes were scarcely homes, especially in the light of the then healthy practices of kinship, family reciprocity and child rearing in extended families. There is considerably more recorded and substantiated evidence of abuse in the safe homes ... In 37 years of involvement in Aboriginal affairs, I have met perhaps half a dozen men who liked Sister Kate's or Kinchela Boys' Home. I have yet to meet an Aboriginal woman who liked Cootamundra Girls' Home or Colebrook. No one failed to mention the incessant sexual abuse, or the destruction of family life."

In 1990 the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care demanded an inquiry into child removal. A blank spot in Australian history was referred to; “the damage and trauma these policies caused are felt every day by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. We want an inquiry to determine how many of our children were taken away and how this occurred. We also want to consider whether these policies fall within the definition of genocide in Article II (e) of the United Nations Convention”.

In May 1995 the federal Labor government headed by Paul Keating established the “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families”. Tatz points to the ambiguities of this inquiry. The use of the term “separation” presupposed a degree of agreement by the families with the removal of their children. Further, “separation” suggests that the removals were of a temporary character with a door remaining open for reunification. This could not be farther from the truth.

In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published the results of the inquiry. It concluded that between 1910 and 1970 between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.

Genocide and Reconciliation

Tatz's study, Genocide in Australia, insofar as it deals with the historical record, provides a powerfully detailed and documented history of the relationship between Aborigines and official society. One is left in no doubt that what transpired, even within the parameters of the UN Convention, constituted a terrible crime against the Aboriginal people.

The major weakness of the report lies in its political trajectory. Tatz aligns himself with sections of the Aboriginal leadership, various middle class reformers, Governor General Sir William Deane, the church and leading sections of the mining industry and big business in advancing the perspective of reconciliation.

The term “reconciliation” implies that the interests of Aborigines can be squared with the present social order; that in some way, the crimes of the past, as well as those of the present, can be overcome if only the political will exists. What is lacking, claim its advocates, is a formal apology from the Australian government, led by Prime Minister John Howard.

In a revealing passage, Tatz writes: "It may be possible for a ‘softer', re-invented Howard to construct an observable strategy for ‘reconciliation', one that enables better relations with Aboriginal leaders and communities.” But, he continues, “the new strategy cannot work in the absence of a formal national apology”.

The attempt to wipe out the Australian Aborigines was not the result of some racist mindset on the part of unenlightened individuals in positions of authority. It was spawned out of the requirements of establishing private ownership in property, initially in land. Genocide emerged out of the need of the emerging Australian squattocracy to “clear the land”. And the appalling conditions faced by the majority of Aborigines today similarly derive from the requirements of the “market”.

“Reconciliation” accepts the private profit system, which remains utterly incompatible with the rights of Australia's indigenous population to justice, equality and basic human dignity. Indeed, one of the primary purposes of the “reconciliation” campaign is to help cement relations between mining companies, agricultural combines and Aboriginal entrepreneurs to facilitate planned large-scale mining projects and farming of Aboriginal land. Billions of dollars are at stake, with a small share destined for a select few Aboriginal leaders, while the living conditions of most Aboriginal people deteriorate further.

See Also:

Australian parliament "regrets" injustice to Aboriginal people

Behind the politics of "reconciliation"

[30 August 1999]

A damning report on Australian Aboriginal health and welfare

[14 August 1999]

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[Pink Mist]

Shall we go searching the net trying to dig up shit on each other, no worries, bring it on.

I know I can find a lot more about yank attrocities than you can on us.

Just remember the little dittie about people living in glass houses

[Pink Mist]

Should America Formally

Apologize to Vietnam?

January 15, 2001

By Rand Green

P&P Editor & Publisher

IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED -- by the government of Vietnam and by some Americans -- that the United States should apologize to Vietnam and even pay reparations for the damage we did there during the Vietnam War.

Should we do so?

The "Vietnam Era," as the period of U.S. diplomatic and military involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s, '60s and '70s is often called, continues to trouble the American conscience. As nearly every news story on the subject in the past year or so has reminded us, we a nation, and sometimes as individuals, still have mixed feelings on the subject. We have yet to come to grips with it; more than twenty-five years later, we can still not put it behind us.

Part of the reason for that is that has been our failure to examine the Vietnam conflict from all sides.

Oh, we think we have. For years, we as a nation have debated ad nauseam the conflicting American viewpoints that divided our nation like few issues in modern history. But we've also tried to look at things from the Vietnamese perspective, have we not?

Ah, yes. But therein, subtle though it may be, lies the problem: the presumption implicit in looking at things from "THE Vietnamese perspective," as though there were only one, that of our adversary in the war.

The thing that we have never truly done, not from the day our government made the decision to support South Vietnam's struggle against communism, was to see things through the eyes of our allies in Saigon.

As a consequence of that failure, in spite of all of the books and movies and articles and documentaries on the subject, in spite of the recently published memoirs of some of the key participants, in spite of the increasing detente between the two governments, in spite of the surfacing documents that expand our understanding of what took place at the highest military, governmental and diplomatic levels, we still don't have the full story.

Perspicacity & Paradigms will explore that subject in depth in a series of forthcoming articles.

But in that context, we ask again, should we, the United States of America, apologize to Vietnam?

Certainly. There are many things for which we ought to acknowledge our mistakes and our culpability, there are many things for which we should express deep regret, and there are things for which we ought to apologize.

The question is not so much should we apologize as for what should we apologize and to whom.

Do we owe apologies to the people of Vietnam? Indeed we do.

We should apologize first of all for our arrogance and our ignorance in assuming, from the outset, that we knew more than our South Vietnamese allies about how they should go about fighting their war.

We should not apologize for a well-intentioned desire to help the free people of South Vietnam in their effort to resist conquest by a despotic communist regime. But we should apologize for barging in and taking over and making the war our own.

We should apologize for not listening to the generals and civilian leaders of South Vietnam when they tried to tell us what kind of help they wanted and needed. We should apologize for making the presumption that those who spoke the best English were ipso facto the most intelligent and the most trustworthy. We should certainly apologize for creating puppit regimes comprised of people we thought most likely to do as they were told, and then criticizing them to this day for hiding behind our skirts.

We should apologize for stripping experienced South Vietnamese field commanders and indiginous troops of the ability to defend themselves against their enemy by insisting that they be trained to do things our way. We learned the hard way that our way didn't work. We have yet to acknowledge that maybe they knew something, after 150 years of jungle warfare including a successful campaign against the French, that we still haven't learned.

We should apologize for the thoughtless and often unscrupulous behavior some of our American GIs. Most of our servicemen and service women, surely, conducted themselves with honor and dignity. They deserve our respect and our deep gratitude. But there were far to many whose brawling and carrousing, distain for the locals, desecration of sacred shrines, and all too common instances, even, of abuse, rape and molestation created enemies of many of the people we had supposedly come to help and provided constant grist for the North's propaganda mill.

There are those who say we should apologize to the innocent victims of the war, the civilians who lost their lives or limbs as a result of ground fighting or bombing, the orphans left behind, the children who were born with deformaties due to the American use of Agent Orange. For these things, we should at the very least express deep regret and in some instances acknowledge culpability. But any such acknowledgement should be made to the victims, not to the communist government which has yet to apologize to the people of South Vietnam and, for that matter, to its own people for the almost unimagineable attrocities it committed both during and long after the war. Hanoi's hypocricy in asking for an apology from the U.S. should not go unnoticed.

There are other things for which we should apologize.

Wrong though we were to barge in and take over the war in the first place, having done so, we should not have promised the leaders and people of South Vietnam that we would never allow the Communists to take over unless we had every intention of keeping that promise. And having made such a promise, it was wrong of us to break it. For this betrayal, for this breach of faith which told the freedom loving people of South Vietnam that the solemn vow of the United States government meant nothing and which left them at the mercy of a ruthless enemy, we should indeed apologize.

And most certainly we should apologize for making a separate peace with our opponents in the war without ever including a representative of South Vietnam in the negotiations.

[Pink Mist]

My Lai is a very moving place. It was a small village which the US suspected of harbouring Viet Cong guerillas. So in March 1968 they sent in three companies of soldiers to identify the VC and eliminate them. Thus began one of the most brutal callous episodes in the war.Under the command of Lieutenant Calley, the soldiers began rounding up villagers from their huts, which they then burned to the ground. That day they shot 504 villagers in cold blood, then burned their crops and burned the bodies to try and cover their tracks.

A US army photographer recorded events for official records, but only handed over one of his four films to the authorities. The other shots found their way into the hands of the press, and thus aroused a storm of public outrage at what had happened, a defining moment for the US war effort. The photographs are on view inside the small onsite museum, (incidentally the only building there - everything else was destroyed.) These pictures are horrifying to look at. It made me both sad and angry, as I'm sure it's intended to do.

[Pink Mist]

Spiritual and Cultural Genocide...

Genocide by the provisions of the convention of the United Nations in Dec. 1948 is defined as:

"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, and includes five types of criminal actions: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Lyman Legters

"The American Genocide"

Policy Studies Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, summer 1988

Reference kindly provided by Loretta K. Carroll - Thank you, Loretta.

"...Let me remind you only of the witch-hunts of the middle ages, the horrors of the French revolution, or the genocide of the American Indians... in such periods there are always only a very few who do not succumb. But when it is all over, everyone, horrified, asks `for heaven's sake, how could I?' "

Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of war production, writing from prison in 1953.

"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." P. 202, "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland

Thanks to my Friend Peter for finding and sharing the above two quotes.

Silence, repression, and disinformation are used knowingly - and unknowingly - to conceal truth; by abusers to keep their victims silent; by society so that people do not have to look at unpleasant facts of life.

This is true of every culture and race on our planet. Sexual, physical, emotional - and cultural abuse - thrive in this atmosphere; abuse of all kinds is perpetuated, generation to generation - ending only when society is forced to see the abuse in such a way there can be no denial, no excuses, no rationalization.

Perhaps it is my own experiences of abuse that have made me sensitive to all kinds of abuse; maybe - had things turned out differently - maybe I too would have been one of the willfully ignorant, disdaining my roots and heritage.

I do know that something extremely painful was experienced by my paternal grandparents, something so painful that they knowingly hid their past, their heritage, their American Indian blood from society - and trained their own children to do so also.

I do know that the same methods my abusers used to keep me and my siblings silent has been used on my parents and grandparents to keep them silent about their heritage - and not just them.

In my mind - and the minds and hearts of many of my friends - the enforced silence and stereotyping of American Indians - and any other culture - is abuse; social, cultural, and ethnic abuse, perpetuatedand enforced by silence and repression; viciously fed by the disinformation and stereotyping created by the writers of history, fiction, and the media.

Do these terms and phrases sound familiar?

"Manifest Destiny, primitive savages, cowboys and indians, dirty injuns living in the dirt, bloodthirsty savages, can't even hold their liquor, the only good injun is a dead injun, Custer's last stand..."

Our culture, the American culture - and indeed the world culture - constantly propagates and perpetuates the stereotypical - and totally false - image of American Indians as backward, savage, brutal, uncivilized beings to this day. Talk to the people who are not natives, who live near any of the many reservations throughout North America - and you'll hear comments very similar to those heard throughout America prior to Martin Luther King... but directed at the American Indians... the "injuns," "drunken red men," the "uncivilized savages" who brutally murdered settlers...

Many will object, saying "but they were savage and brutal, not only fighting among themselves, warring with each other and more; but they were even more savage and brutal to the settlers!" - and use that as a justification for suppression and brutalization of American Indian culture and people.

Yes; those charges are indeed true -

But don't forget too that the settlers - with very few exceptions - were making a concerted effort, with the help of the American government, to completely wipe out the Native Americans.

Don't forget that the American government - and by extension, the American people - broke every single last one of the over 350 treaties signed with the American Indians; pushing the American Indians off into unwanted and unusable land - barren reservations - out of site and out of mind.

I challenge you to look at every other culture on this planet. Which nation has not been guilty of warring against their neighbors? Which culture has not at one time or another been guilty of horrendous atrocities against their fellow man? Which people have not fought fiercely, desperately against invaders to defend their own way of life?

The Romans against Carthage, the Gauls against Rome, Vikings and Gaels and Scotts and Eires and Mongols and Chinese; the War of the Roses and all the religious jihads of the centuries; the modern gang turf wars and the strife in Ireland; the pro-lifers against the pro-choicers:

No culture is innocent; no people is innocent.

That does not justify the spiritual and cultural genocide of any people anywhere; not the American Indians of both continents, not the Oranges or the Greens, not the Shiites or the Sihks or any other culture of this world.

To this day, nearly every one in the world knows of Custer - to this day, Custer and his men are glorified in print and film as heroic soldiers who were slaughtered by the "savages" - much of the world view of America and the American Indians has been formed by the media.

I've met many from other nations who absolutely believe the stereotype promulgated by the media of all nations - not just the American media; people who visit America and are very surprised to find there are no cowboys walking down the streets of New York, no "Indians" sitting on corners in their blankets, puffing away on a pipe.

It is not surprising, then, how few really know about how Custer treated, resolved the "Indian problem"...

How few people of the world really know that he and his troops mercilessly massacred entire villages, raping and killing the women, brutally executing every one without exception; the grandmothers and grandfathers, the men and women, the teenagers - and the children and babies?

Custer was not the only one who encouraged the atrocities and stood by as they were committed, not by a long shot. The history of the American Indians and the Settlers is rife with brutality and atrocities on both sides - But the bulk of the horror lays in the laps - and hands - of the settlers and the governments which encouraged the oppression and annihilation of the native populations.

True - there have been some articles that have spoken the truth; a few years back National Geographic printed an article that exposed the truth not only about "Custer's Last Stand", but also about Custer's active attempts to completely wipe out American Indians... There have been a few films that have shown - or attempted to show - the Truth as it actually happened - and those were panned by the non-native critics and journalists.

Many books have been written that expose the truth; that tell the story, the true story of how American Indians were ripped from the land, shoved off onto reservations that could not support them, made supplicants to a government that would rather ignore them - but how many really read those books?

Oh no, that is too disturbing, too upsetting to the noble sensitivities of most... "it's a dying and lost culture, if it really was worth something, it wouldn't die out" seems to be the justification.

Those books, articles and films are largely ignored by the masses of North America; at most, those who heard of or read of the attrocities only nod their heads sagely, commenting only "too bad that happened; yes, it was wrong - but it is in the past and there is nothing that can be done now."

And; nothing has been done, nothing is being done...

The languages, myths, art, spirituality, practices, and beauty of the Native American culture is fading into history to be lost forever; to be mused over in later years by the historically curious as a novelty...

Spiritual and cultural genocide... as the Native Americans are faced with either being totally assimilated by the Western Culture - or dying out on the many reservations... kept there, out of the way and out of mind, by supposedly beneficent governments; ignored and forgotten by the citizens of those nations...

Spiritual and cultural genocide, as the elders and parents helplessly watch their children leave to make a living in the "civilized" world, as those children and young adults willfully turn their backs on their heritage, language, and culture and willfully accept the stereotypical views of "civilization."

Spiritual and cultural genocide, as the great civilized masses of North America - and indeed the world - scurry pell-mell into the next century, focusing on technology and consumer goods... as "save the whales" and "save the children" and "save the earth" become the battle-cries of the various subcultures... not that those are bad things; they aren't, and they are needed.

But - the American Indian Cultures from southern-most tip of South America to the northenmost tip of Canada and Alaska are left behind, an afterthought, a mote of dust caught up in the tornado of "progress"...

Relegated to symbolic and denegrating mascots for sports teams, insulting icons for various holidays, and stereotypical villains for the movie industry; shoved off - out of site and out of mind - to die out on reservations.

Spiritual and cultural genocide by default and by intent, by marketing and media pressures, by willful and knowing ignorance... It is so easy to turn aside while saying "not my problem"...

True, in recent years there has been a very mild awakening in some; many non-native Americans - not just caucasians - are realizing the American Indian culture is rich, complex, full of beauty and spirituality, possessing and practicing ways of life that did not harm the earth and environment; and now some seek to learn. Unfortunately, many who profess to want to learn are only "in it" to make a dollar; preserving and indeed teaching and sharing the many cultures is the last thing on their minds...

Yet, there are some to whom preserving the culture; preserving the stories, art, ways of life, and spirituality of American Indian is indeed very important - and those few are doing what they can...

But; it is so little, and so late... it is my hope that as I - and others - speak out and share what we can that the loss can be averted, that the people of North America and indeed the world can be awakened.

In the years since 1950, many minorities in North America have had their causes heard, have had their injustices heard by the word; and have had some, if not all of their inequities addressed...

But not the American Indians of both continents...

Even my own Grandmother and Grandfather - he, a Cherokee; her, a Choctaw - turned their backs on their heritage because of the social, cultural, and economic pressures - as did their children, as did their son - my father.

One of my earliest memories was the "session" with my Father and his parents that occurred after I had shared with my classmates that I was part Indian, after I had shared with them how to tell what animals made what tracks... the teacher had called my Father and said that I had been telling "fairy tales" about being part Indian... my Father asked me if I had, and I told him "yes"; I told the truth.

He then told me to get in the car, and he drove to my Grandparent's house, where he told my Grandmother and Grandfather - his parents - what had happened.

My Grandparents became very silent at first - and then stood up and came over to me - Grandfather then kneeled and held me by the shoulders, and told me:

"NEVER let it be known you are Indian; you can pass for white, so BE white - forget everything you know about being Indian, forget all of it - because if you do not, you'll be treated worse than [blacks]."

My Grandfather did not say "blacks", but instead used a well-known epithet... He told my Father never to let me forget that, NEVER to let anyone know -

And my Grandmother, my father's mother, stood over me, shaking with anger, and told me "If you tell anyone you are Indian, I'll whup you so raw you can't sit down for a month"... I was six years old... only six years old...

I never forgot that afternoon - the incredible fear, anger, and confusion expressed in his eyes and face, her eyes and face; I never forgot the way his hands grabbed and hurt my shoulders - never forgot the incredible and devastating contradiction of his words compared to the oh-so-many wonderful and magical times he took me out in the desert to teach me Indian ways and skills...

He, who with my father gave me the birth name, the soul name that is so similar to my Tribal name of GhostWolf - caught in the paradox of wanting to maintain his heritage and pass it on; yet needing to make a living to support his family, his children - without being discriminated against...

He, who for the first six years of my life took great joy in taking me out into the Mojave, showing me how to read the sky for weather, read the phases of the moon for crops and hunting, showed me how to not only read and identify the tracks of so many different animals, but also how to tell how long ago they had been there...

Shaking, trembling, voice full of fear and anger - and yes, hate and shame - hurting me, telling me "NEVER let it be known you are Indian"... He, who had taught me so many truly wonderful things...

Never taught me anything about my heritage, OUR heritage ever again...

Thus this, my American Indian page...

it is my hope to learn what I can of my heritage; learn who my People the Cherokee and Choctaw are and were... learn my People's ways and beliefs and culture... that I may treasure The Ways, that I may honor my People even though I start on the Path so late in life.

That I may share with my son our roots, our Heritage - Our People...

May the contents of these pages; what I discover and the People to whom I link, show you the Truth - not only about the People, but also about the injustice, discrimination, and genocidal treatment of the People that continues to this day.

GhostWolf

For a very blunt and brutally honest view of the on-going discrimination and denegration of the American Indian, please go to Clem Iron Wing's Iron Wing's Children, A Souix Story on Racism.

This will be an uncomfortable site for many, for Clem Iron Wing pulls no punches as he shares very unpleasant truths that most would rather not face. It is said that "Truth Hurts" - keep that in mind as you read.

[Pink Mist]

"... every redskin must be killed from off the face of the plains before we can be free from their molestations. They are of no earthly good and the sooner they are swept from the land the better for civilization... I do not think they can be turned and made good law abiding citizens any more than coyotes can be used for shepherd dogs"-1866,

-Major John Vance Lauderdale, surgeon US Army. Attending physician at Wounded Knee Massacre; Green, Jerry, After Wounded Knee, (Michigan State University Press, 1996)

THESE ARE THE WORDS WHICH EXPLAIN THE MEANING OF REDSKIN. This is the language of genocide. They explain the intentions behind the practices of European Americans against Native Americans. The Native American family heritage is one of a Human Being stereotyped as an Animal.

starting to get the idea

[adjan jb]

No matter which country we come from, Australia, USA or France, we are all guilty of genocide.

[Georgie-Porgie]

WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Genocide in Australia

Report details crimes against Aborigines

By Brett Stone

7 September 1999

Use this version to print

The genocidal practices perpetrated against Australian Aborigines were the outcome of policies adopted and implemented by all Australian governments from British settlement in 1788 until the present. A people who had virtually no contact with the outside world, were suddenly confronted with a hostile and alien force. Aborigines were forced out of their traditional homes, hunted like wild animals, poisoned or shot, and confined to the harshest and most desolate climes. The effect of British settlement upon these people led to near extinction within 120 years.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has published a report detailing this history. Entitled Genocide in Australia, it was written by Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Sydney's Macquarie University.

The report's timing is significant. Its release coincided with the first of the “stolen generations” legal actions brought against the Commonwealth and State governments by Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families. Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner are seeking compensation from the Commonwealth government for injuries received after they were taken from their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Tatz will provide testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, and thousands of such actions could be undertaken in the future.

The legal guideline for Tatz's study is Article II (a) to (e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(B.) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group.

Tatz's report asserts that the policies adopted by colonial administrations and both state and federal governments, as well as actions by settlers, from British colonisation up until the 1970s constituted genocide against the Aborigines.

He writes: “Genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations. In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four acts of genocide:

“(1) Killing by private settlers and rogue police officers, while the state authorities for the most part stood silently by.

“(2) The implementation in the twentieth century of official state policy, entailing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from one group to another, with the express intention that ‘ they cease being aboriginal'.

“(3) Twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed ‘half- caste' Aborigines.

“(4) A prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them severe bodily or mental harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women without consent.)”

The report provides compelling material to justify these assertions. Even though no official figures exist, estimates of the Aboriginal population in 1788 range between 250,000 and 750,000. By 1911 the number was 31,000. Aborigines have only been included in the National Census since 1971. In 1996 the National Census recorded that 352,970 or 1.97 of the population were of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.

Despite the substantial increase in the population of Aborigines since 1911, the conditions of life in which they find themselves remain impoverished and highly oppressive. Tatz states that according to every social indicator available Aborigines are found at the top or bottom. Diseases, such as coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory infections, are far more prevalent than 30 years earlier. Life expectancy is 50-55 years for males, approximately 55 years for females. The likelihood of an Aborigine being unemployed is far greater—22.7 percent as opposed to 8.1 percent. Fewer Aborigines own their homes. For Aborigines fortunate enough to have employment, their income is 25 percent less on average. Large proportions of Aborigines languish in prisons (14 percent of the prison population in 1997) and police watch-houses. This excludes those confined, through economic necessity, to black settlements, like Cherbourg or Yarrabah in Queensland.

The oppressed condition of Aborigines is marked in other ways—a prevalence of personal violence, lack of care for children, increased death from non-natural causes, as well as high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. It should come as no surprise that one manifestation of oppression—alcohol and drug abuse—is commonly offered as the explanation for all manifestations of oppression.

“Killing members of the group”

The report states: “In 1803, Tasmania was settled. In 1806 serious killing began. In retaliation for the spearing of livestock, Aboriginal children were abducted for use in forced labour, women were raped and tortured and given poisoned flour, and the men were shot. They were systematically disposed of in ones, twos and threes, or in dozens, rather than in one systematic massacre. In 1824, settlers were authorised to shoot Aborigines. In 1828, the Governor declared martial law. Soldiers or settlers arrested, or shot, any blacks found in settled districts. Vigilante groups avenged Aboriginal retaliation by wholesale slaughter of men, women and children. Between 1829 and 1834, an appointed conciliator, George Robinson, collected the surviving remnants: 123 people whom were then settled on Flinders Island. By 1835, between 3,000 and 4,000 Aborigines were dead.” And further: “They were killed, with intent, not solely because of their spearing of cattle or their 'nuisance' value, but rather because they were Aborigines.”

Between 1824 and 1908 approximately 10,000 Aborigines were murdered in the Colony of Queensland. “Considered ‘wild animals', ‘vermin', ‘scarcely human', ‘hideous to humanity', ‘loathsome' and a ‘nuisance', they were fair game for white ‘sportsmen'.”

The upshot of this slaughter was the appointment in 1896 of Archibald Meston as Royal Commissioner. In his Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland he wrote: “The treatment of the Cape York people was a shame to our common humanity.” He continued: “Their manifest joy at assurances of safety is pathetic beyond expression. God knows they were in need of it”. Aboriginal people met him “like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror”. His prescription for their salvation lay in “ strict and absolute isolation from all whites, from predators who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, take their women, sell them grog or opium”. Needless to say, none of the perpetrators of the slaughter were made to answer for their actions.

”Protection”: Segregation

The events in Queensland and Tasmania were typical of every colony. The result of Meston's Royal Commission was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Similar measures were enacted throughout Australia. In some colonies, “protective” legislation, enforced by Protectors, began earlier, from the 1840s.

Like the fences erected to keep dingoes (wild native dogs) off pastureland, similar fences were erected around missions and settlements for Aborigines. The segregation had two aspects, legal and geographic. The law was meant to keep whites out and blacks in. Geographic isolation was to ensure that nobody could get in or out.

The attitude of the Protectors towards Aborigines was one of utmost contempt, in both clerical and scientific guises. Father Eugene Perez, chief policy-maker of Catholic missions, wrote in 1879 that Aborigines corresponded to the Palaeolithic Age. He described them as “primitives dwarfed to the bare essentials of human existence”; people with “inborn cunning”, “lacking interest and ambition” with “undeniable immaturity”, forever seeking “the unattainable EL DORADO coming to them on a silver tray”; people “with no sense of balance or proportion” who “want ‘today' what cannot be given till tomorrow”; people to whom physical goods are “like the toy given to a child, which will soon be reduced to bits, and thrown into the rubbish dump”.

W. Baldwin Spencer, a professor of biology and the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, concluded: “The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious mixture: mentally about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper... He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative.” Spencer added that, “their customs are revolting to us” and they were “far lower than the Papuan, the New Zealander or the usual African native”. During his posting, he established the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, because he believed that “no half-caste children should be allowed in any native camp”. The Kahlin Compound specifically housed “half-caste” Aboriginal children, removed from their mothers.

Protection was dispensed in remote places such as Yarrabah, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Doomadgee, Bamaga, Edward River, Weipa, Bloomfield River and Woorabinda. Aboriginal morality was supposedly protected by controlling their movements, labour, marriages, private lives, reading matter, leisure and sports activities, even cultural and religious rituals. Income protection was the responsibility of police constables. They controlled wages, withdrawals from compulsory savings bank accounts, and rights to enter contracts of labour or purchase and sale.

In Queensland, protection included internal state banishment for periods ranging from 12 months to life, at the director's pleasure, for offences such as “disorderly conduct”, “uncontrollable” and “menace to young girls”. Other offences could only be committed by Aborigines. These included being cheeky, refusing to work, calling the hygiene officer a “big-eyed bastard”, and leaving a horse and dray in the yard whereby a person might have been injured. Committing adultery, playing cards, arranging to see a male person during the night, and being untidy at the recreation hall were also on the list, as was refusing to provide a sample of faeces required by the hygiene officer. Such offences brought three weeks imprisonment, which could be transformed into six, nine and twelve weeks, as prison terms were not served concurrently.

”Protection”: Assimilation

In 1928, the federal government asked J. W. Bleakley, Queensland Protector of Aborigines, to report on policy, including “half-caste” policy, in the Northern Territory. His report proposed “blood quotas” as a guiding principle. Those who possessed 50 percent or more of Aboriginal “blood” would “drift back” to the black “no matter how carefully brought up and educated.” Those with less than 50 percent Aboriginal “blood” could “avoid the dangers of the blood call” if they were segregated as the prelude to “their absorption by the white race”.

In 1937, 1951 and 1961 official conferences adopted policies aimed at the assimilation of Aboriginal people into the mainstream of society. Tatz points out that these policies were directed towards ensuring the disappearance of the Aboriginal people. Terms such as "breeding them white" indicated a biological solution.

Assimilation policies were not entirely new. Under the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act 1886 “aid” was restricted to “full-bloods” and “half-castes” over the age of 34. All others, regardless of their marital or sibling status, were forcibly expelled from missions and reserves. Children were not exempt. They faced relocation to white foster parents, white adoptive parents and “half-caste” or “assimilation” homes.

Tatz cites three senior officials to illustrate the thinking behind assimilation. One was O. A. Neville, the Chief Protector in Western Australia between 1915 and 1940. He could do nothing for Aborigines, “who were dying out”. However, he could “absorb the half-castes”. Neville had a three-point plan. First, the “full-bloods” would die out. Second, the “half-castes” would be taken from their mothers. Third, “half-caste” marriages would encourage intermarriage within the white community. The Chief Protector promoted the attractiveness of such arrangements. “The young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon [one quarter Aboriginal] is often strikingly attractive, with her oftimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure”. Elevation of these people “to our own plane” he deemed wise. To this end, Neville established, in 1933, Sister Kate's Orphanage. Its guiding principle was to take in hand those “whose lightness of colour” could lead to assimilation and intermarriage.

The indignities suffered by those taken in hand would have been obvious and many, but a proverbial carrot was dangled before them. The Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 (WA) made it possible for an Aborigine to apply, before a magistrate, for a Certificate of Citizenship. The successful applicant would have to show how “white” he or she had become. Dissolution of tribal and native association was only the beginning. He or she had to have an honourable discharge from the armed forces, or be deemed a “fit and proper person”.

“Fit and proper persons” had to have “adopted the manner and habits of civilised life” for two years and be able to speak and understand English. They had to be of industrious habits and be of a good reputation and correct behaviour. Those suffering from active leprosy, syphilis, granuloma and yaws (framboesia) were denied citizenship.

This outlook formed the basis of Commonwealth policy from the 1930s. The Northern Territory Administrator's report of 1933 said: “In the (Northern) Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of coloured aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.”

Throwing light on the “stolen generations”

This aim continued throughout the period of the “stolen generations” when Aboriginal children were taken from their families. In a 1983 monograph, historian Peter Read cited annual reports of the New South Wales Board: “This policy of dissociating the children from [native] camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem”. By placing children in “first-class private homes”, the superior standard of life would “pave the way for the absorption of these people into the general population”. Further, “to allow these children to remain on the reserve to grow up in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings would be, to say the least, an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State”.

Tatz writes: “In sharp contrast were the memories of the salvaged ones: there was little that was wonderful in the experience; there was much to remember about physical brutality and sexual abuse; and for the majority the homes were scarcely homes, especially in the light of the then healthy practices of kinship, family reciprocity and child rearing in extended families. There is considerably more recorded and substantiated evidence of abuse in the safe homes ... In 37 years of involvement in Aboriginal affairs, I have met perhaps half a dozen men who liked Sister Kate's or Kinchela Boys' Home. I have yet to meet an Aboriginal woman who liked Cootamundra Girls' Home or Colebrook. No one failed to mention the incessant sexual abuse, or the destruction of family life."

In 1990 the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care demanded an inquiry into child removal. A blank spot in Australian history was referred to; “the damage and trauma these policies caused are felt every day by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. We want an inquiry to determine how many of our children were taken away and how this occurred. We also want to consider whether these policies fall within the definition of genocide in Article II (e) of the United Nations Convention”.

In May 1995 the federal Labor government headed by Paul Keating established the “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families”. Tatz points to the ambiguities of this inquiry. The use of the term “separation” presupposed a degree of agreement by the families with the removal of their children. Further, “separation” suggests that the removals were of a temporary character with a door remaining open for reunification. This could not be farther from the truth.

In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published the results of the inquiry. It concluded that between 1910 and 1970 between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.

Genocide and Reconciliation

Tatz's study, Genocide in Australia, insofar as it deals with the historical record, provides a powerfully detailed and documented history of the relationship between Aborigines and official society. One is left in no doubt that what transpired, even within the parameters of the UN Convention, constituted a terrible crime against the Aboriginal people.

The major weakness of the report lies in its political trajectory. Tatz aligns himself with sections of the Aboriginal leadership, various middle class reformers, Governor General Sir William Deane, the church and leading sections of the mining industry and big business in advancing the perspective of reconciliation.

The term “reconciliation” implies that the interests of Aborigines can be squared with the present social order; that in some way, the crimes of the past, as well as those of the present, can be overcome if only the political will exists. What is lacking, claim its advocates, is a formal apology from the Australian government, led by Prime Minister John Howard.

In a revealing passage, Tatz writes: "It may be possible for a ‘softer', re-invented Howard to construct an observable strategy for ‘reconciliation', one that enables better relations with Aboriginal leaders and communities.” But, he continues, “the new strategy cannot work in the absence of a formal national apology”.

The attempt to wipe out the Australian Aborigines was not the result of some racist mindset on the part of unenlightened individuals in positions of authority. It was spawned out of the requirements of establishing private ownership in property, initially in land. Genocide emerged out of the need of the emerging Australian squattocracy to “clear the land”. And the appalling conditions faced by the majority of Aborigines today similarly derive from the requirements of the “market”.

“Reconciliation” accepts the private profit system, which remains utterly incompatible with the rights of Australia's indigenous population to justice, equality and basic human dignity. Indeed, one of the primary purposes of the “reconciliation” campaign is to help cement relations between mining companies, agricultural combines and Aboriginal entrepreneurs to facilitate planned large-scale mining projects and farming of Aboriginal land. Billions of dollars are at stake, with a small share destined for a select few Aboriginal leaders, while the living conditions of most Aboriginal people deteriorate further.

See Also:

Australian parliament "regrets" injustice to Aboriginal people

Behind the politics of "reconciliation"

[30 August 1999]

A damning report on Australian Aboriginal health and welfare

[14 August 1999]

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Yeah, just what I thought. No addressing your own issues. It's all the Americans fault! SURE!!!!

[Pink Mist]

That was the curtain raiser