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PrintA confronting moment
Oxfam Australia supported Jirra Harvey to attend the Asia Pacific Indigenous Youth Network Forum in Baguio City, Philippines. Jirra is pictured with fellow participant Iana Takarangi, of New Zealand. Photo courtesy Jirra Harvey.
It was only after travelling to another continent and experiencing the cultures of other young people from around the world, that young Aboriginal woman Jirra Harvey realised she knew so little about her own.
It is a confronting moment, the first time you see yourself as a product of attempted cultural genocide. Even more so when you have just witnessed the very acts that almost wiped out your own people being committed against our Indigenous brothers and sisters from the Asia-Pacific.
I consider myself pretty educated on the Aboriginal civil rights movement, on my ancestors’ struggles to keep our culture strong. I’ve given many talks on the Australian Government’s assimilation policies and how they affect our communities today. But it was in a Filipino province that the personal effects of colonisation truly hit me.
It was the final night of the Asia Pacific Indigenous Youth Network (APIYN) Forum in Baguio City, Philippines, which Oxfam Australia sponsored me to attend. I was sitting around a fire with my new friends from various Indigenous communities, of whom I had been completely ignorant just 10 days before.
The local Cordillera community had taken us in, cooked up a big feed and were now singing the songs of their struggle, catchy tunes sang in traditional dialects. Then it was our turn. Each international delegate performed proudly, eager to share their own culture with the group. But I couldn’t. I don’t know any of my language, my songs, or my people’s traditional dances.
My ancestors were punished with beatings, or even death, for passing on cultural traditions. But language was passed on in whispers, symbols drawn in the sand. Today, we have language revival programs and performing arts schools; it is partly my own complacency that has prevented my learning. Sitting next to that fire, sipping on homemade rice wine, I made a promise to myself. I will not represent my people again on an international scale until I can utter a greeting in my language. Until I can stand up at a solidarity night and share the traditions that my ancestors fought so hard to protect.
I grew up knowing the stories of colonisation that have been hidden from mainstream Australia; knowing of “games” played by settlers who buried black babies neck deep in the sand before kicking their heads off. Twenty years and a university degree later, I hadn’t realised the extent to which this kind of genocide was still occurring. Listening to fellow delegates from Burma, Thailand and the Philippines was like staring into the eyes of my ancestors. I have heard the stories, but I, like most Australians, saw them as belonging to yesterday.
The conference was run by a group of young, full-time volunteers. The APIYN Secretariat have a kind of passion driven by desperate need, the kind of dedication that our Aunties and Uncles must have possessed in order to win us the right to vote, the right to education and health care.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. Let’s pay tribute to the Aboriginal activists that fought diligently for the rights we now enjoy. And as we honour their struggles, let’s not forget that our Indigenous brothers and sisters are today fighting that very same war in disadvantaged communities across the globe.
“United, the people will never be defeated.”
Oxfam Australia supported Jirra Harvey to attend the Asia Pacific Indigenous Youth Network (APIYN) Forum in The Philippines, as part of its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth leadership program. Jirra has also been selected as one of 300 Oxfam International Youth Partnership Action Partners for 2007–2010.