A NAME FOR US ALL
Words by Theri Grogan-Yip - a Tolai and Kuku Yalanji Woman
Photography by Rhett Kleine
On the 25th of May this year, an unarmed black American man died under the knee of a white police officer. In that moment he became every black life, every black person enslaved, put in chains, lynched from trees and whipped while tied to poles. Every nameless and faceless person who has been told their life did not matter. In George Floyds death, he gave a name to the nameless. In his cries, a sound too familiar, we hear hundreds of years of suffering. Oceans away, Indigenous Australian’s hear those cries; this is what is history to us.
Black Lives Matters is not a story for us First Nations Peoples. It is not something I can analyse or use
statistics to explain, this is our life – it is our mothers and fathers, it is our family who have come before,
and the generations to come who will live in a world that we did not create but a world we have to survive.
I can’t breathe.
Words we have heard here in Australian prisons. They were David Dungay Jnr.’s last words in 2015, before he died in Sydney’s Long-bay Prison. It has taken the death of a black man in American for many to open their hearts and mind to what happens in their own backyard. Our black people, here in Australia, die in custody and the numbers continue to rise.
When I look at black America, I see part of myself and my family’s history. Black Americans taught us to dream and like black Americans, Indigenous people are at war every day. We are a at war with the system. We are at war with the police. We are at war with statistics, but apparently, we should ‘just move on’.
We are not a statistic. We are human. We are real. Our pain is real.
Our nation is built on genocide and lies. Indigenous people spend a lot of our lives trying to pick the pieces up, trying to understand why we do not have a life like the majority of Australia, figuring out where we fit in. How do we pick ourselves up and move on from a past that continues to define our present? Often, we are asked; why don’t we just get over it, forget about it. Why do we have to continually talk about race and racism.
It’s simple, because it still exists. It can touch our lives at any moment. It is because I know people in my life whose lives are framed around race and are still shackled by the chains of our history. We have walked the longest road, carried the greatest burden for all of Australia. Despite everything that has happened to us, we offer our forgiveness and ask all of you to walk the last part of this journey alongside us.
Many want Indigenous people to admit our pain has become our identity, so much so that we ourselves continue to hold ourselves back. How does one stand up and move forward in a system that has continuously proven to keep you down?
What many don’t acknowledge is not only do we exist on country that was stolen from us and built to keep us down, we have inherited intergenerational pain. It is called Epigenetics, scientists have proven that those who experience intense trauma, such as genocide, pass that down through their DNA. Pain and suffering courses through our blood, yet countless presume to know a black person’s experience through a self-serving lens.
At the end of the day, you can never wholly understand what it is like to be a black person on country that was built by your enslaved great grandparents and the many before. Though we weren’t there physically, that doesn’t mean we aren’t affected by that history.
The Aboriginal Flag to me appeals to the very foundations of Aboriginality, the bare core of who we are.
The red, our red earth, the red ochre used in our ceremonial practices.
The yellow, the sun, our bearer of life and our protector.
The black, us – Aboriginal Australia.
Together these colours represent our struggles, our pride, and our culture. Symbolic of unity and national identity for those who have fought tirelessly to be recognised and treated as equals on their own land. WAM Clothing, a non-indigenous company, holds monopoly in a market to profit off Aboriginal people’s identity and love for their country.
A white man who owns the copyright to our flag, is the same man who was fined $2 million dollars for counterfeiting Indonesian copies of boomerangs and indigenous art as legitimate pieces of our culture and history. This year during the AFL’s indigenous round, Sam Booster (beforementioned white man) denied the AFL the rights to raise the flag of our country in celebration of our culture.
The flag is about pride, not profit.
