Genocide down under
Let’s be realistic: The odds of Prime Minister Stephen Harper conceding that the abuse and neglect of Aboriginal children at residential schools was “cultural genocide,” in the words of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, are slim. And the intense academic and popular debate about the appropriateness of the term is likely to continue for a while. In this regard, the Australian experience is revealing.
On May 26, as they have done so on that date since 1998, Australians marked their National Day of Healing, or what used to be called National Sorry Day. It is a solemn occasion to remember the terrible treatment of the country’s indigenous population, especially the approximately 50,000 children, who like in Canada, were forcibly taken from their families between 1909 and the early 1970s — all in the name of “assimilation” and “protection.” The children were placed in orphanages, boarding schools and taken in by white families. Many were emotionally, physically and sexually abused. In Canada, the official policy was to “kill the Indian in the child” (the phrase was never used by John A. Macdonald as is believed, nor by poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who oversaw the Department of Indian Affairs in the 1920s, but by a high-ranking American military officer who ran a residential school in Pennsylvania, according to writer Mark Abley), while in Australia it was the more eugenic-sinspired “breeding out the colour.”
National Sorry Day was a response to Australia’s version of the TRC report, “Bringing Them Home,” a 680-page study completed in 1997, which concluded that: “Indigenous families and communities have endured gross violations of their human rights. These violations continue to affect indigenous people’s daily lives. They were an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out indigenous families, communities, and cultures, vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of Australia.” The young victims became known as the “Stolen Generations,” a term that had been first used by Australian historian Peter Read in a 1981 study on the removal of aboriginal children in New South Wales from 1883 to 1969.
In 1998, Prime Minister John Howard, a social conservative and head of a Liberal coalition government, almost did the right thing: He conveyed his “deep and sincere regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations.” But he refused to issue an official apology. “I do not believe, as a matter of principle,” he explained several years later, “that one generation can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation.” Since then, he has also stuck to his position that “that there was no genocide of Indigenous Australians during the stolen generations era.”
In 2008, it was left to Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party (who succeeded Howard as prime minister a year earlier) to do what Stephen Harper also did that year, offer an
Australia received its painful truth and reconciliation report 18 years ago. There hasn’t been much improvement
unconditional official apology for the country’s appalling aboriginal policy — the product of European thinking and values that has left us to ponder our history of colonialism, imperialism and racism.
In an emotional speech, Rudd, urged all Australians to “honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history” and to “reflect on their past mistreatment.” Adding that, “We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations — this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.”
Yet, like Howard before him, Rudd would not go so far as to accept the Bringing Them Home report assertion that genocide had been perpetrated in Australia. Instead, his focus was on the future, and as he put it, on removing “a great stain from the nation’s soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land.” Sound familiar?
“The survivors know why genocide was buried in the national apology,” wrote Tony Barta, who teaches history at La Trobe University in Melbourne in a 2008 article in the Journal of Genocide Research. “The nation — the Australia constructed on their suffering — is not ready to face the historical truth of its foundation or the ways the original dispossession contributed to the destruction of not just one people, but many peoples who have disappeared during the two centuries of European triumph.” The key theme of Rudd’s apology, he added, was reconciliation to ease the guilt of white Australians. The apology did not “recognize the depth of the aboriginal historical trauma or give them a national memorial. It is meant to validate enough of their suffering to enable the celebratory memory of the Australian past to progress with less dissent into the future.”
Thus this past May 26th there were lots of sincere speeches and presentations about the mistreatment of aboriginal people. There is also a campaign to have them recognized in Australia’s constitution; t-shirts with a large “R” on them for “Recognition” (as Barta reports from Melbourne) are being promoted. At the same time there has been a continuing debate about assimilation as the answer to “closing the gap” in life expectancy and economic disadvantage. Youth unemployment and community reliance on welfare is endemic. As current Prime Minister Tony Abbott conceded a few months ago, the economic predicament of Australian aboriginals has not improved, and, in fact, has become worse.
Someday soon there might be a Canadian version of Australia’s National Day of Healing. Yet that is hardly enough to address the historic economic disparity of Canada’s First Nations through much better education programs that what is presently being offered, and more thinking-outside-the-box economic development (both are among the TRC’s recommendations). That would make for real reconciliation of Canada’s “stolen generations.”