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Notes -
I've always wanted to see a detailed side-by-side analysis of life outcomes for the 'stolen generation' versus those who remained in remote communities. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the stolen generations actually benefited from the transaction
I agree that it would be interesting to see a detailed analysis like that and I realize you aren't saying large QOL improvements would be exculpatory ... but reading your comment made me think about discussions about progressive indoctrination in US schools.
It's plausible that learning progressive manners and beliefs will give children a substantial leg up, socio-economically. Depending on events, graduates of the Evanston, IL public schools system might be on average, better-positioned than those from, say, the Florida suburbs in the US of 2045. But I don't think many parents resisting leftward changes to their public schools would be impressed by that.
The analogy is quarter-baked, but just contemplating it weakens my openness to arguments that material improvements can justify inter-generational dispossession (for lack of a better term)
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Weren't a lot of them half-caste? Seems to complicate things- would they have been treated as full community members had they stayed, or would they have been discriminated against? I'm sure it varied from community to community. Did they have an IQ advantage over their coethnics, or were the white men who impregnated aboriginal women an example of not sending our best? Etc, etc.
IIRC this was part of the justification for removing them from the communities after some bad headlines around treatment of half-caste children
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It's hard to judge - the stats that we have generally compare members of the Stolen Generations (in Australia) typically compare them either to non-Aboriginal people of the same cohort, or to other Aboriginal people in general, rather than to members of remote communities.
These statistics suggest that an SGer is on average worse off than the median Aboriginal - but as you say, SGers were specifically selected from among the worst-off Aboriginals. Is an SGer better or worse off than they would have been had they not been removed? That's the question we don't have an answer for. AIHW's full 2018 report is here. From page 74 on they show that SGers were worse off than 'the reference group', but the reference group is Aboriginal people in general, not remote communities. We have some stats on health in remote communities here and here, but cross-referencing those is more work than I'm up for at the moment. Suffice to say that we know remote communities are significantly worse off.
Yeah the Aboriginal statistics are pretty inherently tainted by the amount of 1/16th suburban Sydneysiders who get meshed in with the residents of Meekatharra. I did a year in Darwin and until you've been out there it's hard to really understand what the situation on the ground is like with the remote populations.
I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences. What’s the situation like on the ground?
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It's precisely because they benefited they can be enough of a fixture in the culture to make a fuss. The kids who got adopted can use the education and stability they got from it to make a fuss about how it robbed them of their culture. While those who got to experience the culture first hand probably just died of alcohol poisoning or are trying to forget they ever grew up on the rez.
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