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Dispossession Of Indigenous People Essay

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The dispossession of Indigenous people in early Australia has lead to years of suffering and disconnect for those across Australia. As European settlement began to spread, the Indigenous were forced off their land for claims of protection and assimilation. Since the first fleet, settlers were the ones with the power - they had weaponry, resources, and strength to build a modern nation. The colonists believed Indigenous Australian’s were racially inferior, giving them the means to claim ‘terra nullius’, starting the dispossession process, destroying their inextricable connection by destroying the land with livestock and disease. Bob Randall of the Mutitjulu, states in the documentary ‘Kanyini’, “It may look like bush to you but it is my family”, …show more content…

till we get back to our land and put them back where they come from.’ Not only does the forced removal of land from the Aboriginal people lead to loss of food, but loss of all connection to the spiritual power of the Dreaming. Dispossession didn’t just separate the Aboriginals from their land, but from their kinship groups, through forced separation or death at the hands of the settlers. Centuries old languages were lost, ceremonies were never acted on, kinship obligations and taboo vanished — and so too was their spiritual identity as Aboriginals. A National Inquiry into the ‘Separation of ATSI Children from Their Families’ based on stories of those who were part of the Stolen Generation concluded in 1997 that genocide had taken place when children were forcibly removed from their communities and put on reserves, orphanages or into foster care for the sake of assimilating them into ‘white society’. This planned extermination of the Indigenous race had major phycological affects on the generation that grew up separate from lineage of cultural transmission, feeling the loss of their heritage

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