Do you have some good ideas/stories on Indigenous Peoples?
I see in our competition on "What's good about Australia" there was a dark stain of a reference to "apartheid laws" for indigenous peoples of Australia and though there are numerous examples of Australia's indigenous peoples assimilating with a world away from what their ancestors led and I have not in detail compared apartheid to the treatment of aboriginals, there may be some similarities and also some marked differences.

Apartheid aside, Australia is not alone in having indigenous peoples who have faced huge problems in adapting and some have chosen to and still choose to lead a life in some repects closer to their own laws.
I know of one well documented example of where an outback police officer in recent years did not condone but allowed with agreement of the participants a spearing of an aboriginal man as retribution for an interclan offence - he had medical staff and an ambulance on hand.
As ghastly as that may seem, the officer knew full well that retribution would occur one way or another and I see his facilitating of it in a monitored manner as showing quite some initiative.

I give that as an example of what difficulties can be faced both by indigenous peoples and authorities in attempting to provide a healthy positive life for them.
The difficulties that aboriginal peoples can have with alcohol is not unknown and they are also not alone in that people of other races also have problems with substances of addiction. The aboriginal peoples may well have a greater % of peoples suffering, and then with reliance on welfare, not much in way of employment prospects, loss of welfare money on grog, the flow on into violence against women and children (and their rape and/or murder) in their communities has become endemic.

It has been a perennial problem and there are many people who have worked closely with indigenous leaders and still are no closer to solution if there is one.
Sure in early settlement history there were massacres and then through attempts by aurthorities to give children a better life we have "the stolen generation" but with the efforts over decades that have been made to assist indigenous peoples to have a better life, I feel we are a long way from apartheid.
In fact, though we do have settlements where many indigenous peoples live, they are not restricted and there are also many indigenous peoples who do successfully live in cities/towns, and some not so successfully too, but then they are not alone there also.

You also have very small groups who take the challenge and live remotely and do make a success of it - see post on Iga Warta in travel.

It seems to me the places that have eliminated a lot of the problems have done so by assimilating the local people, intermarrying, and coming close to eliminating their culture, though they sometimes co-opt it as their own.

I have a very unpopular view on cultures and language being lost. I think that you have to lose things to gain. I mean, how many people complain that the Swiss and the Germans no longer wear dirndle and lederhosen? Who cares? They drag them out for festivals and to work in a tourist bar. Given a choice between retaining their 'culture' and being a rich country full of healthy people, what do you think they would choose?

I don't know you can maintain a separate society inside a country.

That's not very politically correct, sunshine. What if they don't want to assimilate? And what are they losing? For that matter, what are we losing as cultures disappear around the world?

I'm convinced there is no good solution. Every possible outcome has other bad aspects. Assimilation means loss of culture. Failure to assimilate means isolation and exclusion. Reservations provide a chance to preserve the culture. Reservations remove people from any hope of participating in any aspects of the social fabric of the country.

Whatever is done will be wrong.

Sunshine, Lots of people maintain strong sub-cultures within a larger dominant culture. And we do call Australia a multi-cultural society.
To say, "Given a choice between retaining their 'culture' and being a rich country full of healthy people, what do you think they would choose?" is really ignorant. Sorry to be so blunt, but it sounds like you don't even know what Aboriginal culture is. Ofcourse they would choose their culture. It's who they are. You don't know any Aboriginal people, hey?
Aboriginal Australia was a rich country full of healthy people prior to collonisation. They can still have that now. We all can. Providing that Aboriginal people in remote areas receive the same services (health) and opportunities (jobs) that all Australians do.
Aboriginal National Parks and Wild Life Rangers in the Northern Territory (Arnhem Land) are being paid carbon credits by BHP for their traditional back burning practices which result in savings on Carbon Dioxide emmisions. It's all scientifically tested and part of a world-wide movement in 'carbon trading' which benefits us all in the face of climate change. So there you have 'traditional people' earning a living from their 200,000 year old culture and helping us out of an major environmental crisis. What's wrong with that? We need more of it. And there is heaps more ... if non-Aboriginal Australia would only listen...

Good points there Tania Syron and I think the key link missing from many of our indigenous peoples lives is that of not just job opportunities but jobs that they can see as a career to help them in accomodating different life values that have been thrust upon them.
Mind you, in doing that how with civilised values (though we still maim and kill oneanother but not condoned or promoted) does our multicultural society acomodate ritual spearing (though again all changes are usually progressive).

Senator Gary Humphries raised in parliament a bit over a year ago that the answer to indigenous problems was not just more money and he has had agreement in principle on that from some indigenous leaders in wanting to see developments that have indigenous peoples doing better for themselves from opportunities created.
I wrote to the Senator at that time in regard to Australia having the water problem down south and oodles of each year running off into the Gulf (the turning of some of the run-off not being by any means a new concept) and I put to the Senator that with a project that could swamp the Snowy Mountains Scheme in size and where there will be environmental issues to be considered in what are usually relatively dry flood plains, what better people to use from day one in such a project than perhaps indigenous peoples. He responded well to the concept and now that a $30M research project has been initiated to study the feasibility of such a plan, I have again reminded him of the value there for Australia and indigenous peoples.

I think I will also copy in at this stage Ministers Brough and Turnbull for they both appear to genuinely support respectively action to support the welfare of indigenous peoples and better water use. I'll keep the forum updated on any contact or information forthcoming.

I was also interested to read your cooment on the burning off carbon credits and I had read of that somewhere recently (can't remember where) and do remember being puzzled as to how could this work - getting credits for burning off?
Thinking off it again, I can only surmise that modelling/calculations show that the new growth allowed/promoted by burning off far outweighs the carbon emission of the burning and lesser growth that occurs when no burning off occurs - if so, still a concept I imagine even some of the best minds could be sceptical of.
Do you have a link to anything of the study or advice on the basis of the benefit.

If it were so easy, we wouldn't have these problems, would we?

A lot of cultures have struggled with this, and I don't see a whole lot of good solutions worldwide.

Can any of you name a place that has successfully worked this out?

There's probably not a lot to disagree with Kanga and you even read of the problems that indigenous tribes of South America, Africa and Asia face with the onset of developments by peoples also considered indigenous but more adopting other ways.
But that's not to say indigenous peoples have no future and there should be no responsibility by either government or themselves to determine it. There are indigenous people, even in Australia who have prospered in one way or another and leaders amongst themselves who also recognise that they have to help themselves.
I think a good move is to encourage those leaders and support them in developing their own futures and it's going to be a step by step approach and difficult ones at that for if you look at what unemployment in cities can do in being passed on from one generation to another, not to mention all other community social afflictions, then multiply that for the number of affected generations and the numbers without employment and the magnitude of the situation can become enormous.

More the reason, thinkers and doers of solutions are needed.

What is happening with the carbon credits is that industries or the government are giving up their carbon credits so the traditional burning can occur. This does not result in a reduction in anything, it just shifts it. It has nothing to do whatever with what is grown.

I'm with Kanga on wanting the names of the places that have done a good job of this. I'd like the names of these vibrant and (prosperous, I assume) sub-cultures, because all the ones I can think of are really pretty well assimilated.

What part of an indigenous culture should be maintained? We tend to think in terms of language, art, music, oral history, and customs, but only those customs that we consider acceptable. Had the Maya survived, would we support their right to sacrifice humans, or have ball games that only ended with the death of the opponent? Probably not.

Often, though not so much here, there is an effort to get indigenous cultures to retain the things that we think are 'cute'. We want them to live in cute little thatched huts, as long as we don't have to live permanently in the hard to clean, maintenance-heavy, and frequently rodent-infested buildings. Or wear uncomfortable clothes, and cook over fires. Then we call the area 'spoiled' when they get anything modern at all.

Changing cultures, the loss of some, the integration of many facets into new cultures, that's the basic thread of civilization's deveopment. We can't stop it.

But aside from all that, I really have no right to much of an opinion and definitely no right to a say. It's up to the people involved to choose, and the most we can offer is support of those choices.

And I think, in general, people will choose the modern, and perhaps choose some of the downside, alcohol and drugs, Gameboy addiction, or whatever. But the more we try to guide and fight the choices, the more problems it seems to cause.

We just need to get out of it.


OK, off my soapbox.

Name them, please. Again, all I can think of are places where they are assimilated.

As for Australia being multi-cultural, it's pretty easy when you don't let anybody in unless they already speak English and have a skill you need. They are already pretty aculturated already.