Australian Cultural Genocide

The Australian treatment of the aborigines was cultural genocide, and there is no way to make amends for their actions. Cultural Genocide (or in this case ethnocide) is a term used to describe the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people.

“Article 7 of the вЂ?United Nations draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples’ (26 August 1994) defines вЂ?Cultural genocide’

Indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;

(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;

(c) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;

(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;

(e) Any form of propaganda directed against them.”(Exert from the Wikipedia entry for Cultural Genocide)

If you know about what happened to the aborigines you can see that all of these apply. The Australian mind set was that they were helping these people by forced assimilation into the “proper” culture of the Australians. The term stolen generation is one used for describing the method that they used to achieve this. The stolen generation was the Australians taking any mixed (half caste) children from their aboriginal families and putting them into schools that taught them to forget their culture. Another way the Australians had their way was by making themselves look much better by saying that the aborigines gave up without a fight in history books and that most runaways were not reported to anyone other than officials in order to look strong.

Trying to make amends for this issue would be impossible and a waste of anyone’s time to attempt. The truth of the matter is that you can’t give back a couple of generations of people, and any other method of making amends will just be a futile effort. This