#indigenous things

not at all! sorry this has taken me so long too, i nearly had it done and then tumblr deleted it and i spent quite some time shrieking in frustration over it.

anyway. i must preface this with the fact that i’m white-passing and this informs basically every aspect of my experience as an aboriginal person in australia, but it also puts me at an advantage and privilege because i look white.

if i had to compare us to any other group i’d say we have it a lot like indigenous americans do. even though we were only colonised 200 years ago most of our languages and traditions and knowledge have been decimated. many of us now live in cities or suburbs and look just like any standard white person.

in school i was taught that indigenous australians had died out “naturally” decades before i was born. this was despite the fact that my school had a fairly large population of indigenous students, aboriginal and torres strait islander both.

it’s only in the last few years that i’ve started seeing aboriginal characters in australian tv and movies, and even then a lot of it is magical black kid stereotypes. 

those of us who do ‘look’ indigenous are also commonly referred to as black even though we’ve never had many similarities to the peoples of africa.

like i don’t want to go into too much detail because it’s really hard to deal with sometimes but the way we’ve been treated historically and still are treated today is horrendous. like my grandad and his siblings grew up in the prime of the stolen generations era, which is pretty horrifying in some cases and was when children of indigenous and white parents were stolen and ‘raised’ by the government (follow the rabbit-proof fence is a beautiful book and movie of the true escape of some young girls from a mission and i highly recommend reading it if straight non-fiction is too much straight up), but possibly the only reason my grandad and his siblings weren’t stolen and separated and were lucky enough to grow up with their family, is that my great-grandmother managed to assimilate them well enough that the government passed them over.

my grandad was the youngest so he doesn’t really remember it, but when he was very young, they were raised as traditionally as could be managed. eating a lot of bushfoods like lots of native fruit and veg, things like kangaroo and goanna (which is a kind of large lizard) before they firmly assimilated to survive, as was common for many, many people.

it’s more common for aboriginal people to live more traditionally the further north-west you go in australia, simply because much of that part of australia is hot and dry and white people don’t like that. they colonised along the coast first which is why most of australia’s population is concentrated in the south-east where all the nice beaches and snow fields and stuff are, and that’s basically why our coastal tribes have suffered so much in the face of colonisation.

i don’t really know how but i’ve met a decent handful of white-passing indigenous people who are shockingly wealthy. like yknow generations of lawyers and doctors and things. i don’t understand how it’s managed to happen.

anyway. most of us you’ll find have been stuck in generations of poverty and addiction and varying kinds of abuse. also none of us on financial assistance are rich from it, we’re just as badly off as white people on assistance and also the thing about poverty is that it’s a generational thing. like if you have no money it’s because your parents had none, and their parents had none, and their parents had none, and their parents were denied it because the people in power were racist.

um i’m really rambling.

like all around it’s a pretty bum deal, i constantly feel like i’m too white but not white enough, the people who could have taught me when i was young refused to because we look white, it wasn’t until the late 90s early 2000s that australia actually acknowledged the fact that the colonial state did their best to commit genocide against us and people still refuse to believe it even though there are people who lived through it still alive and only like 60 years old.

just. yeah.

also lol there’s the fact that uhh i’ve been mocked for being proud of my heritage as ‘oh you’re one of the uwu i’m a special weshul white girl’ by white people who’ll crow about being fuckin uh irish 20 generations ago or something as if that makes them special or something.