Cultural Juxtapositonist

RESOURCING A NEW PEOPLES MOVEMENT Bruce Reyburn April 2005.

http://www.jargonless.com/~songline/

"The release of the book “Black and White Together” by Sue Taffe is very timely. Her work in collecting the oral histories of people involved in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) reminds us that a peoples movement has a fundamentally important role to play in bringing about important social change.

In some ways we are now revisiting the stage when the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was founded and brought a range of indigenous and non-indigenous people (including unions, academics and churches) together to work for recognition of indigenous rights (including citizenship).

John Howard’s ‘leadership’ has taken us back to a similar stage. But this time there are important differences. Not only are there many resourced Aboriginal organisations (compared with the 1960s) and a host of other social and environmental experiences but also there is a shift underway which removes the false certainties of the modern era..."

Read More - http://www.jargonless.com/~songline/

___________________________

The Redfern Park Statement

And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition
Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

Speech by the Hon. the Prime Minister, P.J. Keating - 10 December 1992 Australian. Launch of the international year for the world's indigenous peoples.

http://www.keating.org.au/main.cfm

________________________________________

Aboriginal resistance: source material
http://www.curriculumsupport.nsw.edu.au/hsie/abstud/resistsource.htm