TheRundown:Australia ByEujinyCho

The Stolen Generation refers to the period between the 1910s and 1970s in which thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities - to be raised in missions, reserves, or white households, and to undergo harrowing years of cultural erasure and trauma.

This atrocity had its origins in deep-rooted racism towards Indigenous Australians, which began with the colonisation of Australia in 1788 and only worsened through decades of dispossession, conflict and violence From the late 19th century, the rising concept of paternalism - the idea that Indigenous Australians were incapable of caring for themselves due to their innate ‘inferiority’ - led to the Aborigines Protection Act of 1909 that lent state governments power to forcibly remove supposedly ‘destitute’ and ‘neglected’ Indigenous children from their families. Relocated to missions and reserves, these children were segregated from both European settlements and their own communities; cut off from their culture, livelihood and language and treated, in essence, as a ‘dying race.’

However from the 1930s, when it became clear that Indigenous Australians were not ‘dying out,’ the government shifted their approach to an equally sinister and aggressive policy of assimilation that was officially ratified in 1937 One that aimed to ‘breed out colour’ in the Indigenous populations and ‘civilise’ those individuals whose ‘Aboriginality could be overcome.’ Whilst fully Indigenous children remained segregated on reserves and missions, biracial children were forcefully absorbed into white communities in an