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.
In Australia's Parliament this afternoon (16th Oct) there was a debate around The Water Trigger. The Bill needs to pass bc it is urgently needed to ensure that gas fracking projects don't harm local water resources and the local environment.
In NT two projects are in the final stages of authorisation. Both will poison water in the local #indigenous communities.
Precisely.
Go without water ?
In Australia 2023 ???
Saturday's referendum NO-voters need to realise that the referendum wasnt about division, bc Australia has division and inequality ALREADY .
How about some fracking in Dutton's seat?? God forbid !!!! His supporters would demand a #Voice and rightly so.
How many Australians really KNOW anything about First Nations' hardships or how the machinery of White Australia racism really works?
Truth is, like all other #FirstNations globally, they are in the way of the colonising overlords who want to seize land and resources for their own use.
And historically those overlords just needed to "wipe out" those indigenous ppls by any means possible: massacres, displacement, theft, siege, exploitation, disease, death, imprisonment...
The way Australia's First Nations are being treated nowadays is nothing new. They are unheard and invisible and 60% of voters are just fine with that.
If one more settler tells me that the referendum results happened because of some reason other than anti-Indigeneity I'm going to fucking snap I swear.
So far I'm seeing a lot of white and non-Indigenous people be shocked that Australia is racist, seeing them talk about how now they know where the most racist parts are they'll go elsewhere on holidays, and tone police Indigenous people for telling colonisers to fuck off.
"I was given some advice before making it into Parliament - to not take anything personally or it'll eat you up."
"In only a couple of weeks, in only 14 days, this Government has attacked my whole world from every corner."
"Health, taiao (environment), wai (water), whenua (land), natural resources, Māori wards, reo, tamariki. How can I not take anything personally when it feels like these policies were made about me?"
"I am not fearful of this place, or this debating chamber."
"I was perfectly fine growing my kūmara and learning maramataka (Māori lunar calendar), but this House kept tampering with things they shouldn't be touching, and that's why I left the māra (garden) to come here."
-- Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke (NZ MP for Hauraki-Waikato, and three youngest NZ