Black Armband History, Americas
Assimilatory pushes for national "oneness" are always accompanied by calls to forget "black armband history". This doesn't mean forgetting war memorials and rememberance days, but for some reason it does mean forgetting nation-defining events such as:
- The Cherokee Trail of Tears, when in the winter of 1838 thousands of people either froze to death or died of starvation.
- Sand Creek and the murder and mutilation caused by Col. Chivington and his men, and the Washita River, where Black Kettle was murdered in his sleep along with his wife and many of his people.
- The Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, where thousands died while being herded like animals from Dineh land in Northern Arizona to Southern New Mexico.
Black Armband History, Australia
In Australia, it was the same, with a long history of massacres ending with the last official (government funded) ones in the late 1920's. Most towns were built on blood, then swept clean with new names, new plants and new peoples.
Let's just look at one small town's story as an example. Marriba (Marri - kangaroo, ba - plenty) in the late 1800's had a remnant community of Aborigines who had made a niche for themselves in the new "settlement", helping the invaders learn about their new land. One day an officer and his men rounded them all up and shot them in the middle of the town. The community pitched in to buy him a ceremonial sword to commemorate the event. Marriba was then Anglicised to "Maryborough" and the colonisation was complete.
This is just one story of thousands in Australia. There were millions of us when the Europeans arrived, and now there are only about half a million, even though our numbers have increased steadily over the last half-century. Can you imagine the extent of the slaughter?
How can such a stain be ignored?
To read about the first ever Government-mandated massacre in Australia, see my article Terrorist Attack On Aborigines.
