LogFAQs > #941417062

teepan95 posted...

MrMallard wanna clear things up? :D

I appreciate the tag! I'm just some random white 20-something, so I don't think I have a huge insight into indigenous history or culture - pretty much everything I know is from high school and from like the most barebones glance at indigenous activism.

My understanding is that the indigenous population had their own territory and communities and stuff, and they travelled across the continent a lot in a culturally significant process that we know as "walkabout". There's this massive deposit of uranium in one of our natural parks, and one thing I've heard is that aborigines would avoid this particular area because they regarded it as a cursed place - people who travelled through there would get sick from the radiation there, and the knowledge of this sickness was known among the indigenous population and phrased in their beliefs.

The indigenous population had a big emphasis on oral tradition and dance. They would pass their stories down by word of mouth to their children, who would pass it down to their children, and so forth. Their history was their spoken history and their culture. That's not to say that indigenous Australians didn't have culturally significant landmarks or anything - in fact, a dozen or so sites of indigenous importance stretching back 14,000 years were recently destroyed by the mining company Rio Tinto in their pursuit to open a new mine. They also have art that depicts significant moments in their individual cultures, with symbols depicting groups of people and the customs they would take part in when they would gather.

Indigenous Australians were a very tight-knit population. They had hundreds of tribes, and these tribes weren't always friendly with each other - but they had a history, they had a culture. Just because it wasn't written on a piece of bark, it doesn't mean there was no culture in Australia until the 18th century.

For example, do you know any Aboriginal beliefs? They had a concept called the Dreamtime, where the world was shaped and where the creatures of the land had their own principles and squabbles. Indigenous Australians had aesops and fables, just like the Greeks did. Just like Native Americans did. Like countless cultures on Earth have had.

It's easy to just go "well they weren't writing anything down that late into the modern world, that suggests a lack of culture". But they had stories. They had dances. They had art, and fables, and culture. They had community and language. Written history began in 1788 because that's when the "settlers" arrived, and from that point on the indigenous population was under constant attack.

Well into the 20th century, aborigines were still meeting in speaking circles, trying to pass on their legacy to their children in the way that their ancestors had done. White, British settlers had been putting them in plantations for years, trying to stamp out their culture. And one way that they would punish indigenous Australians for not assimilating to the British standard was to take their children and raise them in white families. This would ensure that they wouldn't hear their history from their community, being raised in a "civilised" manner, and it was merely one of the later stages of genocide that was foisted among the aboriginal population. They had been introduced to alcohol to destabilize them, they had been infected by disease to try and wipe them out, they had been enslaved and they had been raped by white settlers in an attempt to breed out their race. And this manifestation of genocide, which we now refer to as the stolen generation, was to interrupt the indigenous traditions of speaking circles and destroy indigenous culture in favour of the British standard.

Australia had history and culture prior to 1788. And it has been an uphill battle to catalogue and pass down what remains of that history due to the genocide of our indigenous population. Would you gawk at Maori culture, or any other Polynesian culture with a strong emphasis on imagery and spoken word?

---

The pretty things are going to hell, they wore it out but they wore it well
Now Playing: ACNH, Asdivine Hearts, For the King