Stolen Generations

Heyhey guys :)

Do you, by any chance, know the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence? (Or maybe you know it as Long Walk Home, which for some weird reason is the German title.)

  

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama that is based on a true story.

The plot is set in Western Australia during the 1930s where three half-Aboriginal and half-white children happily live with their mother and grandmother. But their happiness doesn’t last long.

The Anglo-Saxon government believes so-called half-caste children to be neglected, abused or even abandoned by their families. In addition, there’s an increasing fear of miscegenation among the white population (for those of you who don’t know what the hell that is: MacMillan dictionary explains it’s the process by which children are born to parents who are of different races). The government even calls Aborigines a “danger to themselves”.

That’s why one day, the three girls are literally kidnapped from their home and taken to a far-away camp set up by the government.  The aim of those camps is to raise Aboriginal children far from their traditional roots in order to assimilate them into white culture. 

Nevertheless, it is not intended to educate them proufoundly. Rather, they are supposed to become laborers or servants to white families – which, according to the government, is way better than leading an independent Aboriginal life.

Suffering from the separation from their family and the new, foreign and cruel life they are supposed to live, the three girls soon decide to flee and walk back home all the way along the Rabbit-Proof Fence…

Watch the trailer here to get an impression of the movie yourself:

Now, why am I telling you all this?

I wanted to share this story because it’s no exception. When I was working on my culture project on American Indian boarding schools, I suddenly came to think of Rabbit-Proof Fence – because these two historical incidences are almost interchangeable, even though they happened on two different continents, in two different countries, by order of two different governments.

Still, the effects they caused are very similar. For instance, both American Indian and Aboriginal children were severely traumatized by their forced confrontation with the white population. Both policies didn’t work out as planned but took from the children that were concerned the chance to live a happy life. Both ethnic groups have been deprived minorities from the moment the first white settlers arrived onwards. Both cultures were desecrated and almost extinct by the assimilation policy and are on the brink of extinction today.

The Aborigines’ appalling fate is today known by the term Stolen Generations. There’s no such term for what happened to American Indian children, but in my eyes, it fits just as well.

If you thought about it, you could probably come up with many more examples of how parochial educators abuse(d) defenseless children all over the world. Writing about this is not much, but I always hope that it at least helps a little to raise our attention and ring a bell when we come across such or similar topics.

Let history be a warning to us, and a reminder that nobody should ever be in a position to decide about the lives of others.

Have a lovely Sunday evening!

Bye-bye :)