Languages in the Big Apple

How does a country make up for the mass murder and subjugation of the land’s indigenous people?

In America, we scoot them onto reservations and give them booze and gambling licenses. In Australia, they’ve recently decided to include Aboriginal languages in the curricula of schools with large indigenous populations.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that after successfully testing of the idea on Bourke High School, Australian school officials are eager to introduce Aboriginal language programs into many more schools, with hopes that doing do will “improve Aboriginal retention rates and literacy standards” and help “Aboriginal students identify with their culture [to improve] their confidence and sense of identity.”

After the start of British colonization of Australia in 1788, the Aborigines — much like the Native Americans here — suffered greatly at the hands of Old World epidemic diseases: over half the Aboriginal population was killed by Small Pox alone. Add to that the loss of their own land and colonial violence, and by 1900, only ten percent of the population remained. Today, around 35,000 Aboriginal students are enrolled in Australian state schools, 35 percent of whom complete their 12th year of education.

While including Aboriginal studies in Australian schools may seem a token consolation to a wronged people, it actually represents a pretty progressive step in repairing the damages of colonialism. And with conservatives throwing so many hissy fits about foreign languages in American public schools — the Arabic school in Brooklyn, the many Spanish-speaking schools in California — not to mention the continuing problems facing Native American youth (they have the highest suicide rate of any ethnicity), perhaps we could learn something from Australia.

Read the original article here.