Another day, another unflattering portrait of a public figure, and this time, the Streisand effect is in play too. TIME magazine reports on Australia's wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart, and her attempts to get a painting of her removed from the National Gallery of Australia. The portrait by Vincent Namatjira, an Aboriginal Australian artist, is part of a series in which he uses humor and exaggerated features to portray the rich. “People don’t have to like my paintings, but I hope they take the time to look and think, ‘why has this Aboriginal bloke painted these powerful people? What is he trying to say?’” he said in a statement shared with TIME. The gallery, to which Rinehart is a donor, is not backing down, saying it “welcomes the public having a dialogue on our collection and displays.”
I love this time of year. My neighbours start using their fireplace, and the smell reminds me of visiting my Nanny and Poppy's farm when I was a kid. It was pmuch the only time I felt safe growing up.
Colonialism has mastered the crime of stealing our children for generations and then punishing and criticizing our parents and grandparents for how they originally raised children.
Then, they went ahead and stole, renamed & rebranded our sacred original parenting instructions as “attachment” parenting, “conscious” parenting, “gentle” parenting, “positive” parenting, and “child led” parenting.
It has been used as a tool of profit.
It has been used as a means of stealing babies from families, then forcing the mothers and fathers of those babies to take colonial based parenting courses in order to get their babies back. And those colonial based parenting courses are heavily twisted and skewed versions of our parenting instructions - but twisted and skewed so severely, so deeply, that they only accommodate and feed colonial agendas and systems.
It is a matter of indigenous parents today abiding to colonially twisted, and colonially backwards parenting “styles” in order to fit the criteria of being a “good parent.”
Here’s the thing though.
Residential schools, the 60’s scoop, the child welfare system, and every other colonial policy embedded in the colonial fabric of society was created to do just this.
Keep the children out of our families to continue the ongoing attempts of assimilation and genocide against our peoples.
Even today.
So rather than pushing for “attachment” parenting, “conscious” parenting, “gentle” parenting, “positive” parenting, and “child led” parenting let us open into, revitalize, maintain and relearn the original instructions of raising and nurturing children.
Let us heal and dissolve what generations of colonialism has embedded into our parenting styles.
May we do our best to continue that.
So we can continue to raise children in the ways that we were originally meant to….
For generations to come.
Because this is the least we can do for the children in our lives today.