A dominant culture may treat a subordinate culture with good intentions but very negative outcomes. Give at least one example and discuss reasons for the failure of the effort.

Some of the greatest assaults committed on particular cultures have been with good intentions. In some cases, the cultures just may have different viewpoints as to what is right, or best in that specific situation. For the Australian Aboriginals, the greatest assault may well have been the taking of children from their families; they later became known as the ‘Stolen Generation’. These children were then raised among the white community, usually with minimum knowledge of their true identity. This essay will focus on the good intentions of the white Australians, the objective of which was to incorporate these Aboriginal children into the white Australian culture, as well as the reasons for such a drastic failure of this effort. This effort caused families to be torn apart and children to grow up in a culture that was not naturally their own.

From the late 1800’s until the practice was officially ended in 1969, Indigenous children were taken from their families to be raised by white Australians. This was a common occurrence in every Australian state and could generally be separated into three forms: some children were placed into Government run institutions, others were adopted into white families and the remaining children were fostered into white families (Stolen Generation [accessed July 2003]). The adoption and fostering of Indigenous children was more common among the ‘fair-skinned’ children, as they were expected to be less conspicuous amongst those children that would become their peers. Unfortunately, this was not a new practice; Indigenous children were being separated from their families from the very first days of the European occupation of Australia. These children were kidnapped and exploited as cheap sources of labour; it was only late in the twentieth century when news of some of the atrocities being committed by European settlers upon Indigenous people reached the British Government that a Select Committee was appointed to inquire into the treatment of Aboriginal people.

The separations of these children were seen to be in their best interest; they were part of deliberate policies of incorporation, an apparent effort to make all Australians similar in their cultures. This effort was designed to cut the children off from their culture so that they could be raised to think and act as ‘white’; so they could learn to be ‘real’ Australians. This was intended to be in the best interest of the children in question, yet the majority of children who were separated from their families grew up knowing very little about their real identity or their culture. So they always struggled to find a way to connect themselves to their peers, as they were being taught to look, act and dress the same as the white children surrounding them. It is hard to understand how many children were expected to fit in when they did not look the same and many children would have known in their hearts that something was missing. As many of the Stolen Generation were still very young when taken from their families, they would have had to learn to adapt to the styles and culture of the family within which they were now living. Children have enough to learn as they grow up without the added struggle of starting their lives all over again in a new community; a fate that befell the majority of the Stolen Generation.

Some children may have had trouble communicating with their peers, at least before they had completely adapting to the ‘white’ culture they were integrating to. Many assumed Aboriginal English to be a worthless pidgin language, as many primary school teachers had never been taught about the (multi-) linguistic backgrounds of some of the students they were teaching, they assumed the children speaking Aboriginal English were speaking gibberish. This in turn led to further devastation to the culture of these children as memory after memory was forced out of their minds to make way for ‘white’ culture (Muecke 1999).

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