Strange and Unsettling.

Find a big chunk of post-colonial land and ask the people about their views of the natives. They will always make broad assumptions about them without realizing they live in third world conditions despite living in a first world country.

 

I don't know, Tasmania had a fairly good method of treating the natives.

 

The Native Americans over here started doing a lot better once they started building casinos.

 

The Native Americans on my side of the border were brutally raped and tortured in boarding schools until they forgot their language and had become proper English blokes. Up until 1995. And today, they live in ghettos and are a victim of constant racial segregation in a cyclical pattern where they're unable to get jobs because people think they're lazy bums because they don't work because nobody will give them jobs.

Seriously. I'd be kind of pissed off, too.

 

Your side..
Where are you from again?

 

Y'know, if that was directed at me I might appreciate it if you'd stop making such broad generalisations yourself and knew anything about the situation in Australia.

If they're living in third world conditions here it's by choice, the government now doesn't discriminate against anglo-saxon bums and aboriginal bums. If they're following tradition, fine, I could care less. They do need to understand that tradition evolves, however, and that they have no more claim to the land than anyone else. There is a small castle in Scotland that traditionally belonged to my mums family long ago, does that mean I should be over there bashing on doors as it's "rightfully mine"? Culture doesn't dictate who has more right to certain land than another. How many goddamn times have people lost land to conflict and colonisation, already?

Besides, i seem to remember history in school mentioning that aboriginals believe(d) no-one could own land. That's not hypocritical, is it?

You're right zanza, shooting the gold diggers does seem like a good solution.

 

Hint: Milk comes in bags there.

 

Oh, Muro, that made me love you just a little bit. The improper use of "could/couldn't care less" is a pet peeve of mine.

 

Charonte, you have a bad habit of flying off the handle and going in to a foam-at-the-mouth rage everytime somebody disagrees with you. I don't actually support reservations for aboriginals of any sort, because I see them as a form of racial segregation. Instead, I'd prefer to see Aboriginals be able to co-exist in society right alongside people from every other race.

But let's look at the bigoted things you just said: "it's by choice"

Okay, Charonte, I'll concede you've won. Most of us here on this forum have the ability to pull themselves out of an impoverished state, entering a workforce in which they are disadvantaged compared to other people because of their race, and pull off such things as owning a house, a car, and the same lifestyle as the average working class Australian family.

Well, you've really won if you can send me pictures of how not white you are and how poor your parents were. Until then, please keep in mind that most of us here came out of average, working class families and have a comparative advantage to people whose parents were unemployed.

I never said they did, I said that employers did. You'll note that in your country, employed Aboriginals make about 60% of employed non-Aboriginals. But, since you want to focus on the government...

Yes, the Australian Government has no recent history of racism. In fact, Australia hasn't been racist since the 60s! Ha, eat that!

That link is old, though! Man, Grake, in the past two or three years, the Aboriginals really have shown that all they want to do is steal from us good White Anglo-Saxon Protestants by remaining on the land we were nice enough to give them. What a bunch of assholes.

Strange, it didn't take any amount of controversy to give my Caucasian ancestors, the Acadians, were able to use the Grand Pre for their cultural purposes to this day. Indeed, it seems that the Canadian government was eager to do so. Not those damned Natives, though, they're a shame to our good society. And they're half-breeds. Gross.

I won't even go into what they named our country after they took it away.

I seem remember history in school mentioning that the Scots would sooner die than have their culture stripped from them. That's not hypocritical, is it?

Yeah, dude, their philosophy worked back when everybody believed it. Unfortunately, the beliefs of the European colonists (leaning more toward capitalism, which requires capital, which includes land) made it impossible to exist without owning land. It's impossible for you to raise a family in a developed nation without owning land, unless you live in an apartment building. That thing your house sits on is land.

And yeah, saying that Aboriginals should all be shot isn't racist.

 

I still find it hilarious how everyone here takes every last thing as a personal attack. I wasn't foaming at the mouth, I disagreed with your opinion and mentioned it. If you want to picture me as a a rampaging morn then fine, I couldn't care less (thanks Muro). What does my background have to do with this, anyway?

I also love how you're pulling these racist statememts out of no where when all I mentioned hating is gold diggers; y'know, the people that make claims to land based on their 'heritage'. I don't care about race itself, just that aboriginal based claims are the most prominent. Maybe I generalised that too much.

Lastly I'm not claiming to be a scotsman by any stretch of the word, I am an Australian, aboriginals today are by extenstion australian and have to cope with society's rules. I also couldn't care less if they want to follow tradition and live out in the wilderness, like I've already mentioned. That has nothing to do with me or society.

You agreed with my point in your second last paragraph, European society focus on land and hence if anyone wants to live in a western culture they must adapt to it. The colonial conquest of Australia was anything but fair, agreed but making ammends by giving developed land away because of its ancestral background doesn't make anyone any happier and hurts society on the whole. I think it's a little late to be apologising now, anyway.

That last statement was a joke, remember what that is? Besides, I said gold diggers not aboriginals so I think the perceived racism is on your head, there. And for the love of god, don't hold a few isolated cases against an entire country of 20 million. Hell, most if not all of the aboriginals I know are just as productive as their anglo-saxon counterparts - visiting instead of reading the odd news report and statistic might help. Fine, the majority of unemployed citizens being aboriginal is a moral wrong on the side of the employers but that is neither mine nor your responsibility. You might also like to know that government support exists for such things, and in most cases aboriginals and torres straight islanders get significant increases in their payments - not that that makes it right, but it is entirely possible to live in more than 3rd-world conditions even on the dole alone.

See, I kept the swearing and cussing to a minimum. Can you read that without taking it personally now?

 

I didn't take it personally. I said that you did. Since you don't consider yourself a Scotsman, you're right, you don't have any claims to any part of Scotland. I don't know how I missed it before, though, but actually the Scots and the Irish have an incredibly long history of rebelling against Great Britain moving into their nation. Damn Scots and Irish. Maybe if they just got a job.

I won't make any judgments on your own family, but I should also point out that if everybody had been orderly and respected the letter of the law to begin with, Australia would have grown in an entirely different way.

Generally, when land is "given" away, it is not out of misplaced sentimentality, but because of very old treaties that our ancestors buried and ignored. There is already a tendency to respect older treaties than the ones that Aboriginals in both our countries ask for.

Canadian Aboriginals also get support. Unfortunately, they also have a lower graduation rate than other races. One reason for this might be laziness, but since we wouldn't let that be our only reason if the kid was white or black or Asian (especially not Asian. We'd be totally caught off guard by our own preconceptions), we can't really let it be the only reason for an Aboriginal. Studies have shown that Aboriginals face larger problems from bullying in their schools, tend to come from impoverished families, and are more likely to be mentally handicapped than other minorities (in the local New Brunswick area, the theory as to why this was had to do with the sub par water system poisoning children and pregnant women). Canadian Aboriginals actually end up paying more money than Canadians of other ethnic groups because they have to put additional money into special needs assistance, tutoring, etc. From what I read of Aboriginals in your country, the drastic differences in life expectancy, wealth, and education were about the same. I applaud your parents and grandparents for ending your Stolen Generation era 25 years before we did, though.

Since you've said you don't have a problem with the race itself, and only their claim to land based on heritage, however, I will put aside the fact that Europeans and their descendants did and continue to do bad things to the Aboriginals of their colonies. Instead, I will put forward some other ethnic groups that have tried to get their land back, and ask you "Why exactly are the Aboriginals the assholes here?"

The most obvious is the one that sparked your comment in the first place. Israel and Palestine. This may be getting stale, but the conflict is also a nasty after effect of European intervention. While the media would have us believe that the conflict has been going on in a bloody frenzy for thousands of years and that the two ethnic groups never appreciated eachother, it's actually not true. Jews and Arabs lived together without warring in Israel pre-20th century. It was not until the British decided that the Jews could have Israel (there are both cynical and positive reasons why they might have done this, but that isn't the topic) to themselves that trouble started. At this point, the two sides are at eachother's throats, and Jews and Arabs have been made to despise eachother because of this conflict.

But wait! I'm pretty sure that Israel won the war several times over. How come those Arabs keep coming back? Why do they keep killing people? I mean, if they just accepted that they would never get to live there and move on, life would be better right? While there are many people who believe this, I for one, do not. I don't believe in violence on a large scale (nor does anybody else here, I would dare to say), but I think that injustice has been done against them.


Back to the Irish and the Scots. The Irish have fought bloody battles against the British for quite some time. But Ireland had been a part of Great Britain from 1801 until some time between 1922 and 1937 (depending on where you want to place the formation of the actual state of Ireland). Northern Ireland is still owned by the British. That's 200 years! And yet, for three decades, the Irish fought for their heritage. Silly Irish, getting your little piece of island back won't make anybody happy.

Scotland, on the other hand, still has many supporters looking for independence from the UK. But that's foolish! I mean, Scotland hasn't been independent since 1707, 63 years before the British even claimed Australia as theirs! If the Aboriginals' heritage isn't worth saving because it has been so long, the Scots' aren't either, so it's time for them to just move on.

Damn, what's going on in the Balkans right now? They don't even seem all that ethnically different, and they want eachother to get the fuck out of eachother's country. Enough so that they've been genociding eachother. And all for heritage? Man, that's crazy.

Damn those Australian Aboriginals, trying to get their ancestral homelands back through legal channels. You know, people who try to pull off such non-violent tactics ought to be strung up. I think James Earl Ray might be able to help with that.

 

And apparently it's time for me to use this to defuse an excessive arguement again.