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Sorry
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leecetheartist who asked that her flist write about the apology to the stolen generations on this day.
I'm sorry.
Sorry. Good intentions or no, taking kids from parents with no reason but skin colour/heritage is not on. It's way too much White Man's Burden. I've thought and thought about how things could have happened differently and end up bashing my mind against the wall of my skull. You have to go back too far. Not just before white settlement but way back in our own evolution. We would have to have been a different kind of being. This may sound like more angst but it's not meant that way. I believe we are becoming different, it is just taking a bloody long time.
I said "generations" deliberately because it looks to me like it was more than one, even though I think the apology uses the singular. I heard one woman talking about being taken away as a two-year-old in the '30s because she was mixed race and I know the practice was still going on in the '60s and maybe the '70s. I only know about the '60s for sure because it happened to me.
I'm not Aboriginal, of course; anyone who's seen me knows about the blotchy pink and freckled hide I have but I do share one trait with the stolen generation. I was taken from my natural mother because she was not married, in the year 1963. There was no question of whether or not she was a fit mother, so far as I know and I don't have many facts at all. All They looked at was that she didn't have a husband. I was "shifted" within my own culture, white to white and may well have been better off. Folks have said some of the Aboriginal children taken away were better off and perhaps that might be true too. That's not the point, guys! When you take children away, you don't KNOW what they're going to. Unlike me, most of those Aboriginal kids didn't go to couples who desperately wanted a child. They went to orphanages, training camps for housemaids and labourers. A lot of them never learned about families and perhaps that's why there's such a huge problem with a lot of today's Aboriginal kids. I'm thinking of something Bella Bropho wrote, saying how her community tried so hard to keep their kids out of trouble.
I do think it was a clusterfuck of a policy to take the Aboriginal kids away and I'm sorry to the gut that it happened. It does make me cry. Sure, we can't be emotional like this all the time or life wouldn't go on but I think it's good to do it, at this one special time and place.
leecetheartist who asked that her flist write about the apology to the stolen generations on this day. I'm sorry.
Sorry. Good intentions or no, taking kids from parents with no reason but skin colour/heritage is not on. It's way too much White Man's Burden. I've thought and thought about how things could have happened differently and end up bashing my mind against the wall of my skull. You have to go back too far. Not just before white settlement but way back in our own evolution. We would have to have been a different kind of being. This may sound like more angst but it's not meant that way. I believe we are becoming different, it is just taking a bloody long time.
I said "generations" deliberately because it looks to me like it was more than one, even though I think the apology uses the singular. I heard one woman talking about being taken away as a two-year-old in the '30s because she was mixed race and I know the practice was still going on in the '60s and maybe the '70s. I only know about the '60s for sure because it happened to me.
I'm not Aboriginal, of course; anyone who's seen me knows about the blotchy pink and freckled hide I have but I do share one trait with the stolen generation. I was taken from my natural mother because she was not married, in the year 1963. There was no question of whether or not she was a fit mother, so far as I know and I don't have many facts at all. All They looked at was that she didn't have a husband. I was "shifted" within my own culture, white to white and may well have been better off. Folks have said some of the Aboriginal children taken away were better off and perhaps that might be true too. That's not the point, guys! When you take children away, you don't KNOW what they're going to. Unlike me, most of those Aboriginal kids didn't go to couples who desperately wanted a child. They went to orphanages, training camps for housemaids and labourers. A lot of them never learned about families and perhaps that's why there's such a huge problem with a lot of today's Aboriginal kids. I'm thinking of something Bella Bropho wrote, saying how her community tried so hard to keep their kids out of trouble.
I do think it was a clusterfuck of a policy to take the Aboriginal kids away and I'm sorry to the gut that it happened. It does make me cry. Sure, we can't be emotional like this all the time or life wouldn't go on but I think it's good to do it, at this one special time and place.
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