These similarities allowed the Aboriginal funeral ritual and the Christian funeral ritual to merge. Colonization has changed the way Aboriginals carry out funerals in a dramatic way. In modern days it would be highly unpractical and illegal, to burn down the house of a deceased person, so relatives leave the house and close it up until the elders say the spirit has departed. Although the traditional process has not been lost, it is now accompanied by a Christian funeral procession. Usually, after burial, there is a wake where relatives and friends celebrate the life of the lost one; this wake may involve traditional dancing and songs.
From these two videos, I have a better understand of American Indian history overview. Especially from video Pride 101, Dr. Duane Champagne mentions the removal policy of Native Indians, and because of the policy, the tribes have to move from Southeast to Oklahoma. These two videos show audiences a long history and policy about American Indians and how struggled they had been through in a native land. After I finished from these two videos, I can see many parallels between the struggles the Native American Tribes and my people encounter dealing with the U.S. Government “You can never be part of Indian. You are or you are not.
Residential schools became federally active including involvement from the government in 1883, beginning with three schools on the prairies and spread through Canada. Previous to this the residential schools started in Canada in the 1840’s, but these schools were run strictly by the Church. In 1884 the Indian Act was amended to make residential schools no longer optional, but mandatory for all First Nations aged 16 and younger. Agents were employed under the government to ensure all children attended. By the end of the residential schools, the system was focused on complete cultural assimilation and “cultural genocide” and, “killing the Indian
[Accessed 10 May 2015]. Source C Evaluation (Picture of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam with Vincent Lingiari): Source C is a photograph taken during the time when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam handed a leasehold title to Vincent Lingiari, a representative of the Gurindji people. It represents a moment when Aboriginals who were mistreated and abused for the past decades reclaiming their rights to the land. During the time period, the Gurindji people were mistreated, had poor working conditions and were alienated over their land rights. The Whitlam government purchased the land on behalf of the Gurindji people.
During early settlement of Australia, Indigenous children were removed from their families to be conditioned to European values and work ethic to eventually take up positions in the service of “colonial settlers” (HREOC, 1997, pp.22). Despite being an acknowledged and engrained practice in Australia for a number of years before formal government acts legalising the removal of children, the Stolen Generations is a term coined to encompass those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families and communities as mandated by government policy between 1911 and 1969 (HREOC, 1997, pp.22). In an attempt to ‘merge’ the Indigenous population with the non-Iindigenous community, it was mandated that children should be removed from their families so as to lose their ‘Aboriginal identity’ (HREOC, 1997, pp.25). This policy was soon aimed towards ‘assimilation’ as opposed to ‘merging’; the major difference existing in the idea that all Indigenous people should live, work and be educated alongside ‘Whites’ (HREOC, 1997, pp.26). However, by the 1960s it was clear that the policy had failed to achieve its goal of forced integration; Indigenous people refused to “surrender their lifestyle and
The Removal Act stated that the United States Government had the right to forcefully move the Native Americans to different lands as long as they compensated them for the land that they had to give up in the east. The US Government did not give the Native Americans any say regarding their move. Once the Removal Act signed into place they had to follow it. The move negatively impacted on the tribes’ health, their population and their way of living. Out of about 15,000 Cherokee that were forcefully moved to the West, about 4,000 died on the road there.
Historically Institutional racism plays a major role in hindering the progress of Indigenous people. Institutional racism is addressed in the paper as a key factor in the social disadvantage and consecutive high unemployment rate amongst Indigenous Australians. Australia is privy to a history of wrongdoing against its Indigenous community. Andrew Armitage writes of the British invasion in 1788; ‘the land needed for the colony was obtained by an act of dispossession, assisted in British law by the convenient assumption that Australia was terra nullius (vacant, unoccupied land)’. The invasion was the cause of the ‘land wars’ that ensued and resulted in the massacre and decimation of the Aboriginal people (Armitage, 1995, p. 17).
There are many such justifications in the literature of the day (Stone 1974, p. 46). Social inequality Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new problem appeared for white Australia; how to treat children of mixed race. From the perspective of Social Darwinism, full-blooded Aborigines were dismissed as destined for extinction and isolated to ‘stations’, but it was feared that those of mixed race ‘would breed up to become a social menace’ (Beresford & Omaji, p. 34). The Roth Royal Commission (Western Australia, 1905) also reflected this fear. If [they] are left to their own devices under the present state of the law, their future will be one of vagabondism and harlotry … and [they] will spend their lives in gaol or as prostitutes.
The Indians had been persecuted, harmed, and removed from their land by whites ever since the very first years of colonization in America, and Western movement caused the final blow to these people. The Cherokees of Georgia made efforts to learn the ways of the whites by opening schools, adopting a written constitution, and even turning to slaveholding. For these efforts the Cherokees, along with the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, they were named the “Five Civilized Tribes.” But, these efforts were not good enough for the whites. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, providing for the transplanting of all Indian tribes then resident east of the Mississippi. In 1838, the US army forced the Cherokees from their homelands in the Trail of Tears into Indian Territory.
A majority of worldviews are developed through surroundings, so, culture. Before settlement of Europeans around the time of Captian Cook (1836), in Australia there were roughly 250 distinct languages, 700 different dialects being spoken, and in South Australia alone there were 54 different languages being spoken (Adelaide's recipe for life Wisdom of the Kaurna, 2000, p5). Though there was vast diversity amongst the Aboriginal people across Australia, there was also cohesion around the main beliefs and ideals of the Indigenous people, the most Influential being “The Dreaming”. The large number of groups of Indigenous across early Australia still had their own distinctive language,