In Australia, today is Invasion Day

​In Australia, today is Invasion Day, or Survival Day... and I want to say sorry. Sorry for my ancestors, sorry for my government. I am sorry for my white privilege, for all the places I simply cannot understand, because I view the world through the lens of my own privileged upbringing. I am sorry that all over the world there are First Nations people who are displaced, who have had their children stolen, their oral traditions broken, their songlines drowned and destroyed by the stomp of booted feet where before those songlines were danced with lightfoot grace.
I am sorry that even in writing this post I am blind and deaf and clumsy, like Shrek at a tea party, smashing all the china with the best intentions of just pouring someone a cuppa. I cannot truly understand and I am sorry for that, that my heart cannot truly know the pain in the shards of anguish cutting the brothers and sisters I have never met to the bone.
I am sorry that the invisible webs of violence still exist, in my attitudes, in those around me, in the systems that well meaning people use to 'fix' an untenable situation and just make it ten thousand times worse. I am sorry that I walk on land that covers pyramids of bones, that my happiness comes on the backs of displaced and dispossessed and massacred people.
I ran an event last Friday night and in my heartfelt (but ultimately ignorant) acknowledgment of the original Gadigal custodians of the land, the floor upon which we danced, I also acknowledged that there is a tension in me, shame at the actions of my ancestors, in my own habitual and cultural attitudes.
Shame that I cannot change the past, and the tendency that I, that white people, can ‘do’ the acknowledgment without feeling the true cost, without feeling our own discomfort at what it really means. We can pat ourselves on the back, tick the box, yes I said the words, I am not one of the invaders, I am making reparations, all the while wallpapering over the squirm in our guts with our attempts at worthiness.
For myself, in my heart…. I call bullshit.
I cannot make reparations. How can I repair genocide? How can I mitigate the annihilation of a culture that has caretaken this country with grace and wisdom for 80 000 years? How can I meaningfully say sorry for the loss of the songs, art, the ceremonies, the history, the wisdom? It is on par with the library of Alexandria being burned. It is worse. It was deliberate. It still is.
So today, on Invasion Day, I want to acknowledge that I am a privileged white woman who walks barefoot through the blood of a culture that essentially died so that I may exist. I mourn its loss. I grieve the conversations I will not have, the things I now cannot learn, the connections unavailable to me, to those I love. I grieve the loss to the world of such a people, such incredible connection to all things. I grieve the richness that is lost, here in Gondwana and all over the world where First Nations peoples have been dispossessed and displaced and their cultures destroyed and their families massacred.
And now I am going to shut the fuck up, go sit outside with my butt in the dirt of this old old land, and I am going to listen really really hard to the grief songs from the indigenous ceremonies that are right now happening in parks and on beaches and in halls everywhere today. I am going to listen to the speeches and stories and the rage. And I am going to lay my head on the earth and thank the spirits of those who have died, those who still die, from suicide and addiction and essentially the broken heartedness that comes when someone steals the sun from the sky and the stars from the night and the animals who are your brothers and sisters and the trees that are your friends and kills your relatives over and over and says, ‘here; you can live in this concrete box now, and be grateful’.
With every exhalation I am going to say I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. And it will never be enough.
Gina