Indigenous Trauma Quotes

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source. To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide.

Indigenous communities have suffered horribly as a result of residential schools.

Three years ago the Government announced the creation of Reconciliation Place, and said that it would include a memorial to those removed from their families. However, they refused to include any of those who were removed in the design of their own memorial.

It will take 150 years or seven generations to heal the wound of the residential school.

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

Among the worst examples is that of the Alberni Indian Residential School (British Columbia) where, during the 1920s, children caught talking Indian suffered the hideous ordeal of having sewing needles pushed through their tongues.