Aftermath of Empire


I have lived the better part of my life in remnants of the British Empire: 21 years in Australia and 34 years in Canada.
I swore allegiance to our Queen way back in OZ, and haven't sworn allegiance to anybody else since. Don't know what that makes me right now.
There are many similarities between the two former colonies: Their governments and institutions and the inconvenient truth of displaced native populations.
In both cases these peoples were not readily assimilated into the imposed colonial structures, government, legal or commercial on account of the fundamentally different mindsets of settlers and native people.
So, indigenous folks were pushed aside into convenient spaces where they would have a minimal impact on the settlement process.
During this time the mainstream population developed attitudes of superiority over these 'less than human' obstructions to 'progress' and a scheme was developed, both in Australia and Canada to remove young children from their families and try to turn them into 'little Europeans' who could become 'productive members of society'.
This scheme was likely cooked up somewhere in the empire by intellectuals, politicians and religious dudes looking for a publicly funded pie they could share in.
The attitude of the day was that indigenous folk were an excellent feedstock for public enterprise which had the approval of God, to booth.
Or so our ignorant and arrogant forebears thought, patting themselves on the shoulder in the process.
It is for us to pay the price for what they did.

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