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#Post#: 89--------------------------------------------------
Bess Nungarrayi Price
DIR By: Catherine
Date: August 18, 2011, 2:20 pm
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HTML http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/against-change-for-the-wrong-reasons/story-e6frg6zo-1225766571739
Against change for the wrong reasons
August 27, 2009 12:00AM
I WAS born under a tree at a place called Yuendumu. My father
was 10 when he first saw a white man. I speak Warlpiri and some
of four other languages plus English.
We have had so many self-appointed people, black and white, who
have decided to be our spokespeople, who know nothing about us
and our issues.
They are the people who have been running the show all these
years without ever asking us whether it's OK for them to do so.
They are the people who want to keep us in the dark as if we are
some sort of Stone Age people.
It took urgent measures by the federal government in 2007 to
help our people, for them to recognise what was happening to
them and do something for themselves before it was too late.
I am one of those people who embraced the government's move. To
me it meant at last somebody was acknowledging there was a
crisis that needed to be addressed. For a long time our people's
lives have been in a state of crisis, spiralling downwards,
rapidly, uncontrollably.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
The protesters against this intervention seem to care only when
whitefellas kill blackfellas. They don't care when our kids are
killed by their own people or they commit suicide.
Three of my brothers drank themselves to death in the Alice
Springs town camps. Two nieces, one 21, one 26, did the same.
My granddaughter was murdered in a town camp, stabbed by her
ex-husband. The ambulance wouldn't go in there without a police
escort because the drunks attack them when they go there to save
a life. So she died waiting for them.
I could go on all day about the violence I have seen. Yet these
protesters treat me like an enemy. They have told the world that
I am a drunk and that I support the government only because it
pays me to do work for them.
They have never given me a chance to talk at their rallies.
They bring white students and cranky Kooris and Murris up from
down south who know nothing about us and who hate whitefellas.
They look for local people who think like they do and try to
keep the rest quiet and away from the media.
I know plenty of Aboriginal women here who want the intervention
because they can feed their kids now.
The protesters treat them like enemies as well. They never
support the old women who come in from the bush to protest
against the grog.
They attacked the women at the women's centre at Yuendumu when
they set up their own shop. They took the side of the violent
men and the corrupt ones in our communities and refused to
support the women worried about their kids or sick of being
beaten up by drunks. They have never even tried to talk to us.
White people told us that they wanted to preserve our language,
so now my people can't express themselves to the rest of the
world and rely on white people to do it for them. I went to
school before the bilingual program started, yet I speak
Warlpiri and English better than our kids and our grandkids.
Our people need to be challenged. There needs to be an open and
honest debate among ourselves. These protesters have done their
best to stop that from happening, calling it "solidarity". With
all the money the government has poured into our self-managed
organisations and communities, everything has gotten worse.
Our organisations can put energy into campaigning against
government policies and getting the UN to take notice of their
views, but they don't stop our men from murdering our women, our
kids from killing themselves. They don't keep our languages
alive. All they can do is bleat for more money. We have the
strength ourselves if we can only be honest for once. The
intervention started this debate. That is the best thing about
it. It has made us think for the first time about what's
happened to us, where we are and where we want to go.
The Racial Discrimination Act has not protected our people from
ourselves. Now we know that and can do something about it. Let's
roll forward instead of backwards.
I was disgusted by the two meetings with you (the Rollback the
Intervention group) that I attended in Alice Springs. All the
talking was done by English speakers.
Almost all of the ones talking do not speak our languages. They
had no interpreters so my people could tell you what they think.
The announcements relating to the meetings were last minute, in
English and hidden away in the classified ads that my people
don't, and many can't, read.
I asked people to come and talk but they said: "Kurntangka" -
shameful. Those people at the meetings do not make them feel
welcome or confident; in fact they intimidate them.
My people, the ones with the problems that the intervention is
designed to address, were deliberately excluded. They were
lining up and down at the pub and the bottle shops as they do
every day or sitting in filth in the camps worrying about their
kids and waiting for the next round of grog-fuelled violence.
You were given a fairytale version of our culture by people who
don't live by our law. That mob wants you to think that it is
the government that causes all our problems. That is an
outrageous lie.
The government gets it wrong because it consults with the wrong
people. It gets it wrong because it cannot help people who
won't, or don't know how to, help themselves. We want to be able
to help ourselves.
We want leaders who will lead us out of our misery, not sit
around whingeing about how hard their lives are when they have
the jobs and the power. We want leaders who tell us that we are
not victims who can't do a thing for ourselves but sit around
dying while we wait for the government to get it right.
We want leaders who will convince our own mob to stop drinking,
fighting and feuding, who will get our kids into school so we
can produce our own professors of indigenous rights who can go
to your country to listen to your people's stories.
Bess Nungarrayi Price is the chairwoman of the Northern
Territory's Indigenous Affairs Advisory Council. This is a
speech she prepared for a meeting of the Rollback the
Intervention group.
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