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Article: 14661
[Society]
Date Posted:
1/1/2006
6:48:47 pm EST
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Views: 4,784
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Comments: 1
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The struggle for identity
Author: Neville Atkinson Source: The Age
Title: The struggle for identity
The Aboriginal communities of northern Victoria are battling for their identity in the long shadow of brutality and neglect, says Neville Anderson.
We have occupied this region since time immemorial. Our occupation of this land is something that is central to our being and inseparable from the hardship that continues to be endured by the indigenous people of the Goulburn Valley.
I am not trying to paint Aboriginal people as victims, but if we ignore our history then we are doomed to repeat it. Our history since European settlement has shaped our present generations and it will shape the next.
From our written history and from our oral tradition, we have a rich knowledge of our past. We know that the Europeans entered the Yorta Yorta nations in the 1840s and overtook the country of the Kalithavan, Walithica, Bangarang, Yalapa Yalapa, Ulupna, Kwat Kwat and Noorialum Nga Roong peoples.
Until then, we had a rich countryside and a prosperous and sustainable lifestyle and culture. We had effective and enduring methods of managing those assets available to us, of sharing our wealth between us and preparing our future generations for the joys and responsibilities that lay before them. We had an elaborate and well-tested method of maintaining law and resolving disputes.
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Community Thoughts: There are 1 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| Cultural Imperialism And Redress | Jan 1st. at 11:29:52 pm EST
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Mysteries Child (Garfield, West Virginia) - Email Me
First, the rant: I **hate** it when some nostalgic, ignorant, or rhetorical person paints a picture of indiginous cultures (for want of a better term, bear with it) as being some perfectly balanced, eutopic place where everyone always had enough and they all got along.
Didn't happen. In any culture. No matter how well you manage your resources, famine happens. No matter how well you choose your leaders, bad leadership happens. No matter how well you handle interpersonal relations and intergroup politics, wars happen. Human nature, for all its goodness and beauty, has a sucky side too. That needs facing, admitting, and accepting, on an universal level. It's my considered belief that we cannot truly remediate anything else unless we deal with that first.
OK. End of rant. On to response.
"I don't think this is a form of malicious or deliberate racism."
Uh, actually, yes it is. It may not be intentionally hateful, but it is an act of deliberate racism.
It's called "cultural imperialism," which means the adoption of the attitude that a given minority group will adopt the dominant culture or forgo the rights and opportunities enjoyed by members of the dominant culture.
It's not really a premeditated thing; I don't really think it ever was. I think it began as reactive self-interest on the part of colonists, and as a mutual misunderstanding between vastly different cultures back in the "colonial era."
Like most of the worst of human evil, it's not for the most part schemed or planned. It's just reactively, humanly, destructively STUPID. Stupid, and lazy, and self-serving on the part of those who have the power to most extensively serve themselves.
It sounds a lot like the situation indiginous ( indiginous relative to me, anyway) North Americans are in... and I don't know what to do about it.
I don't believe returning ancestral lands is the answer. I'd like to say I believe in that. It would make me feel every inch the Mighty Martyr. **I don't.** I'm not about to go back to living in starvation-level poverty in Scotland, Ireland, or Italy (pick your preference) in order to hand the 30-by-82-foot patch of North America I'm squatting on back to the original owners (being in North Central West Virginia, I'd guess those would be Shawnee... and that's another issue entirely...)
Share it with them?? Sure. According to past-life memories (validity inconsequential to the discussion) , the trailer I'm living in would in any other time or place have been known as a [longhouse] and been a multi-family dwelling in any case.
Most of my more, erm, capitalistic friends do not share my willingness to cohabitate. Their point of view is that it's theirs now, and it's by-gosh gonna stay theirs.
I'm not arguing that they're right... but I am stating that I woud fight for my clay yard and aluminum shoebox before I would willingly go to live in the street back "home" in Europe. I am arguing that going that route is pretty much tantamount to openly asking for genocide all over again.
There is the argument that sharing, because it would not preserve the culture in its original form, still amounts to cultural genocide. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't; I honestly do not know.
I do know that a culture, any culture, is an organic thing, living and therefore continually changing. There are always purists who bemoan any adoptions or adaptations; here in Appalachia, we call them 'hicks,' 'isolationists,' 'white supremacists,' or occasionally 'militia members.'
I do wonder what would have happened if indiginous and colonial culture had managed to meet peacefully, if colonists and colonizing forces had really been interested in simply a better and freer life instead of as much financial gain as possible, if we had realized (or cared) sooner that bringing the "Old World" ways to the "New World" would only serve to create a "New Old World."
But that's IF. It's great for a philosophical conversation (or a nice fight, depending on company) , but you can't make "food" out of "if."
I don't have a solution. I'm not a great thinker, nor am I wise. I'm a 27-year-old hillbilly with a BA in English. I don't even know how to start coming up with a solution. But I don't need the damned college degree to know that the world ain't getting any bigger, we ain't found a way to live anywhere else, and all of us-- as many among the human race as are willing to try-- had better get busy and work something out.
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