Things I didn’t know about our history

Currently we are in Australia. About a week ago we went to the Melbourne Museum, and we went through the indigenous exhibit and I learned about things that happened in Australia that I had no idea about. Today, I will be diving in to those topics, and things that we aren’t really taught in schools in depth.

What we didn’t get told:

In school, we learn the history of colonization through the lense of the colonists. We learned about the Europeans coming to Canada, about the trading posts, and then we were told that there was a war. However, it was kind of glossed over, and even using the word war makes it seem like both sides had close to evenly dead, or one side had a little more. What really happened could really be classified as a genocide. Two thirds of the indigenous population died throughout the years, whether from the diseases the Europeans brought, or the hundreds of massacres that there were. The weapons weren’t fair, considering the indigenous people didn’t have as many advanced forms of weaponry. This wasn’t taught in school, but early in my life from my dance teacher, I learned about the battle of Culloden and there was a LARGE emphasis on how unfair it was because the British had guns and the Scottish only had swords. When it was a white- on white war, the unfairness is shown, but when it is white on brown the genocide is glossed over. And that’s not okay. Calling it a war and leaving it at that leaves a thought of equality in deaths, and when there are plaques for the very few Europeans who were killed by First Nations peoples, but none of the thousands of First Nations people who were massacred. I do admit, we approach the topic told residential schools with more grace and better, and I think that is one thing we do right. Some have many things to improve on how we teach things. I feel maybe we should bring it up then go in depth about massacres later, but since I’m only grade 7, I’m not sure if we do. Later on. Last year we did an art piece for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s day, but that was because of my teacher, not the school system. Overall, we don’t learn enough, and that can lead to toxic mindsets in adults. There are people who say that indigenous people should “get over it” when the final residential school shut down in 1996. There are people alive that went to residential schools. And they aren’t 80. They are 40 years old. The horrors done to indigenous people aren’t years and years in the past. They are 30 years ago, and still today, many terrible things happen to indigenous people when we turn a blind eye. The same things happened to Australian indigenous peoples all around their country. So we need truth and reconciliation, and we’re going to keep needing it until things are better.