Roger that. I’ve had it up to —> <— here with the whole “myth of the noble savage” milieu. I don’t know much about Australian aborigines but I’m betting they were largely similar to their American counterparts. Yeah, yeah, proud sacred traditions... Yadda yadda... Enough.
Time to face the fact that these indigenous people were a small, Stone Age bunch of barbarously warring tribes. Far from living in “harmony” with nature... There just weren’t enough of them to permanently damage an area before they moved on and depleted the next place. Life was, as they say: primitive, brutish and short. Theirs was a declining future. Far from any advancements of civilization they didn’t even have that most basic building block of success: a written language. An oral tradition seems romantic to phony college professors and hippies but it dooms a people to a desperate existence and denies them any real inter-generational knowledge transfer. Far from any lies about blankets they were already being wiped out by disease well before Europeans arrived.
Plenty of injustices were done to them. That’s true. So what? History is replete with unfairness the world over. There is no point and nothing gained by carrying any sense of guilt or tendering any apology some hundreds of years in the future. It’s the story of the planet. Get over it.
:-)
“Far from any lies about blankets they were already being wiped out by disease well before Europeans arrived.”
Well, the big decimation occurred before Europeans came to North America, but not before European contact. The Spanish had already given them smallpox and other diseases, and it spread throughout both continents rapidly, so that North America was mostly depopulated when Europeans got around to settling it.