dadpad wrote:Largely this is similar to Aboriginal Australia. The difference is that because of our young history (oxymoron?) many aboriginal people still have a continuing association with their tribal lands. Where possible "ownership" of tribal lands is being transfered back to those persons who can demonstrate a continuing association with their lands.
(it's a lot more complicated than that simple explanation)
I recently re-read
The Fatal Shore, which lead me to think a great deal about this issue, as well as to research it online.
It is interesting that Captain Phillip decreed that the aboriginals should be treated fairly, and that anyone killing an aboriginal would be hanged. Soon after the arrival of the First Fleet, the English became aware that the aboriginals were dying of small pox in large numbers. No small pox appeared among the English, however, whether among the military detachment or among the convicts. It has long been alleged that the aboriginals contracted the small pox from members of the First Fleet, and in some cases it has even been alleged that the English intentionally infected the aboriginals with small pox. However, the absence of small pox among the Marines and the convicts is evidence that neither allegation is true. Very likely, aboriginals in what is now Victoria contracted small pox from European sealers or whalers who were already known to have established sealing and whaling stations on the islands in Bass Strait. If that were true, then small pox would have spread in the aboriginal populations south of Port Jackson, and eventually to the Eora in the vicinity of Sydney Cove.
Small pox, of course, did a good deal of the work of ridding the land of aboriginals, just as it did often in North America. In North America, the hostility of the aboriginal tribesmen to the English colonist doubtlessly arose from their contacts with the Spanish who had colonized what is now Georgia on the southeast coast of the United States, and who had pushed outposts as far north as what is now Virginia. The Spaniard had no compunction about slaughtering the local populations. Although the Indies Commission of the Inquisition prohibited the outright slaughter of natives, who were to be given an opportunity to convert to Catholicism, the
conquistadores on the scene resented the Indies Commission, and ignored their injunction when not actually under the eyes of a member of the Inquisition. By the time the English landed and established Jamestown in 1607, the local tribes already despised and mistrusted Europeans, and additionally were suffering from a prolonged drought which made food resources scarce. There was some skirmishing between them, but the English managed to hang on (about 80% of new arrivals did not survive their first year in the colony), until 1622, when the Powhatans attempted to unite the tribes to exterminate the English.
Similar wars in New England, in which the aboriginal inhabitants became alarmed at the constant arrival of new settlers, and eventually went to war with them, helped to establish a pattern. Not long after the North American colonies were established, the crown, in the person of Charles I, began a long struggle with Parliament which resulted in the three civil wars of the 1640s. The North American colonies were largely forgotten, and were left to their own devices to survive among a warlike and hostile population. They developed a siege mentality, and among the Puritans of New England, there was no compulsion to convert the Indians to Christianity, and many of the Puritans were wont to describe the natives as the agents of Satan. The pattern of hostility, murders and reprisals was set for the centuries to come. The French in Accadie (Accadia, now New Brunswick in Canada and Maine in the United States) also added fuel to the fire by encouraging the Migma (known as Micmacs to the English) to attack the English colonists, which lead to more hostility, more murders and more reprisals.
In New South Wales, the small pox epidemic apparently carried off a great deal of the Eora and the other local tribes. Phillip in writing a description of the expedition which found and established the colony on the Hawkesbury River comments that the local aboriginal population had suffered badly from the small pox. In North America, the original settlers in both Virginia and New England went through starvation years, just as was the case with the First Fleet. There, in North America, the aboriginals often helped to feed the English, which lead to later resentments, especially in Virginia in the grip of a years-long drought. But in New South Wales, the penal colony was on its own. No such relationship was formed with aboriginals, and often, to the resentment of both the Marines and the convicts, he (Governor Phillip) gave food stores to starving aboriginals who were sufficiently devastated by the small pox as not to be able to rely upon hunting and fishing.
The hostile attitudes which arose also came from the fact that the aboriginals who survived the small pox became the
de facto warders of the convicts. Any convict who escaped into the bush had not only the daunting prospect of surviving in an alien landscape, but one in which there were armed and capable natives (they were deadly with their spears and spear-throwers), and one in which the escaped convict went unarmed. The North American colonists were well-armed, and made a point of being well-armed after the first years; the convict in New South Wales had no such resource. Although within less than 30 years free settlers came to outnumber the Emancipist settlers, the attitude of former convicts was quickly adopted by free settlers. In the poor grazing land of the bush, it required a hell of a lot of acreage to graze sheep, and often the outstations were manned by convicts who were unarmed, and who were not capable of defending themselves, let alone their livestock.
The situation was even worse in Van Diemen's Land. There, free settlers were a rarity, and the outer stations were the property of Emancipists who used assigned convict labor. The resentment of and hostility toward the aboriginals lead to the near complete extermination of the aboriginals, with the only Tasmanian aboriginals to survive being those who had been kidnapped by sealers or whalers and taken to the islands in the Bass Strait.
That is, roughly and simplistically, the view i have taken from Hughes and from my other reading. I'd be interested to know how you see the development of attitudes as between the aboriginals and the English.