By the Fairview Banner
It's time for the U.S. to say sorry, too.
Australia apologized to its indigenous peoples, and the United States should do the same.
On Feb. 13, Australia's new prime minister apologized for successive government policies that inflicted profound suffering to Aboriginals.
Between the late 1800s and 1969, the Australian government and church missions removed Aboriginal children from their families, often by force, to live in internment camps, white foster homes and other institutions in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream Anglo-Australian society.
Sounds bad, right? Well, the story in our country is essentially the same.
Native American peoples and their children were considered wards of the U.S. since early times. Politicians such as Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson addressed Native Americans as children. Lewis and Clark said to Otoe people they met in 1804: "Children, the great Chief of America has become your only father."
This patronizing attitude was held by Anglo-American society for centuries while carrying out the land invasion and genocide of Native American peoples.
Among the first impulses of Euro-American settlers was to abduct Native American children in Virginia in the early 1700s to educate them, "civilize" them and replace their indigenous ways of life with Anglo-American ones.
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