Beautifully written.
5 stars
One of the things that non-Australian (possibly non-Aboriginal) people may struggle with is getting into the dialect that is used, but that's part of what makes this book beautiful. It's told about Aboriginal people and using language that is, largely, the common vernacular for them. It forces you to understand it, and that's a message that often gets left out when describing how things are written. Sometimes that's as much part of the message as the rest of the book.
This book, though it is written as a narrative, is non-fiction; it is an biographical account of the author's mother as she, along with two other girls, escaped from a settlement where they were forced to live. It's about people from the Stolen Generations, Indigenous people who were stolen as children and forced into residential schools as part of an assimilationist policy.
And while this book takes place in 1931, …
One of the things that non-Australian (possibly non-Aboriginal) people may struggle with is getting into the dialect that is used, but that's part of what makes this book beautiful. It's told about Aboriginal people and using language that is, largely, the common vernacular for them. It forces you to understand it, and that's a message that often gets left out when describing how things are written. Sometimes that's as much part of the message as the rest of the book.
This book, though it is written as a narrative, is non-fiction; it is an biographical account of the author's mother as she, along with two other girls, escaped from a settlement where they were forced to live. It's about people from the Stolen Generations, Indigenous people who were stolen as children and forced into residential schools as part of an assimilationist policy.
And while this book takes place in 1931, it's important to remember a few things: a) Indigenous children across the planet are still being taken from their families under the guise of "child welfare" (for the US context, check out the over-representation of Indigenous children in foster care), b) a lot of other policies and decisions made by governments still exist that undermine the rights of Indigenous people (think DAPL in the US, mining in Australia), and c) many of these places, while they've "apologised," have done a lot of fuck all to do much more than lip service.
