The Horrors of a Slave ship Nigerian kidnappers were the cause of many children missing as their parents left them home alone during the day to work in the fields. Kidnappers often took advantage of this time to take kids against their will and sell them to slave traders, thus becoming a slave at a very young age. Occasionally they would be caught in the act and dealt with however the grownups chose to do but not in Olaudah’s case. One day Olaudah Equiano, merely 11 years old, was left home alone with his younger sister while his parents were off at work and a group of people broke into their home with means of kidnapping them. The kidnappers succeeded in their plans and ran off into the woods with Olaudah and his sister leaving no trace for their parents to find them.
Aboriginal Peoples: Racism in Colonial Context * The agent was the sole authority in this community and they had all the power to punish or deprive, this worked to break down the traditional authority system , so it basically broke down their social structures * A second element of denationalization was attempted destruction of culture * Natives relied on government handouts because they could not sustain their own lives (they were only allowed to hunt and fish when the Indian agent said they could * The federal government still control when they natives can hunt and fish * Condition on the reserve: no employment, except for those who serve Indian agent therefore poverty and hunger arose and became a serious issue * People faced with
While I was aware of the holocaust against Native Americans that took place in 1492, I was never taught the truth about what was going on in recent years. An example of this would include the boarding schools that many Native American children were kidnapped and sent to. When Ruth was a child, she was kidnapped and sent to countless different boarding schools where she was tortured, beaten, burned, and forced to watch the same happen to those she was close to and had grown up with, in hopes that the children would assimilate to a culture unlike their own (the Euro-American culture). While this was a nightmare for Ruth, unlike many of her peers, she was able to escape boarding school multiple times and was able to come back alive after being sent across seas. Ruth attributes the reason why she was not killed after refusing to conform directly to her light skin color, and believes that if she were to have darker skin
The inquiry showed that many officials believed they were doing the right thing. Some Aboriginal children were taken away from their parents because they were mistreated. Some of the church missions, where many of the children were brought up, were caring places, and many Aboriginal people recall the goodwill and kindness they received from individuals and institutions. However, the inquiry also showed that the human and legal rights of indigenous people had been violated, sometimes brutally. Victims had been forcibly removed from their families and put into institutions or fostered or adopted.
History has been cruel to Native Americans. Slowly, new settlers forced the natives to migrate from their cultural tribal lands to unknown territory. These settlers also pushed the natives to abandon their native values and accept their European beliefs as true. The natives had no choice but to find a new place to call home, a new means of survival and a new way to preserve their culture. Fast forwarding these effects through time, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” a story of a homeless Spokane Indian named Jackson Jackson by Sherman Alexie, captures the drastic loss that Native Americans have experienced and the effects that their losses have created up to the modern day.
Short Extended Response - Dispossession Dispossession, that is, depriving the Aboriginal people of their land, identity and religious expression, has had a lasting impact on Aboriginal people and their spirituality. The forceful removal of the Indigenous Australians from their lands led to the forceful removal from their family and kinship groups, causing the destruction of Aboriginal spirituality. Through the eradication of the Dreamtime, the centre of their spirituality, their sense of identity and belonging was lost, status and land right continuously denied, and kinship groups were fractured. This loss of kinship ties, in addition to the perpetual impact of the Stolen Generation, resulted in the disruption of the passing on of the Dreamtime stories and tradition, which in turn prevented the spirituality being kept alive through the next generation. Therefore, the effects can be seen as physical, spiritual and psychological.
However one of the worst things I feel that Australia has done was the stolen generation, this time of our history I would say Is our darkest, it was when the government tried to extinguish the Aboriginal colour an look from the world, they would come an take the children away from there parents, like kidnap them an take them to these camps were they would be trained to be white ect. In class we have being watching a film called the Rabbit Proof Fence an its about a family of 3 young girls who have being kidnapped an taken to a place In western Australia, were they then decide to escape an track back to there familes. It’s a heart wrenching story but it also opens up our eyes to the horror an racism that the government
By integrating ‘half casts’ into white society, policy makes hoped they would marry white partners and eventually, over time, diminish any traces of Indigenous culture and identity. A graphic example of the impact of child removal policies can be seen through its impact on Malcolm Smith and his family. Malcolm Smith, a child of the Stolen Generation, was taken away after stealing a push bike, the state saw his parents ‘unfit’ and continued to tear apart their once big family. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Report of the Inquiry into the Death of Malcolm Charles Smith (1989) 1-5 stated
Other policies attempted to ‘breed-out’ Indigenous Australians by pairing an Indiginous individual with a white partner. These ‘half-castes’ where again viewed as inferior and often removed from government reserves and discouraged from interacting with Indigenous people, including their parents, in an attempt to remove the Indigenous culture from the general populace. These policies have created an enormous effect on the Indiginous experience of health. It has led to the loss of culture and identity to an entire generation of Indigenous people and therefore a severe lack of understanding of health amongst those affected. Further, many Indiginous Australians today still have deep seeded mistrust of Western medicine because of these historical factors.
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).