Yuyutsu, I’m wondering what meaningful life you think aboriginal people lived before white settlement.
As Joe says, life was very hard, full of uncertainty about food and water supply. Infanticade was practised on a wide scale to keep the population down and women free to gather food for men.
There were no pain relievers for injuries, rotten teeth or illness, no antibiotics for infections.
No insect repellent to protect them from the hordes of mosquitoes and sand flies that plague so many areas of this country try. And when you are old and frail, waiting in dread for the day your daughter leads you away into the bush, with a few days supply of food and water, to abandon you there whilst you wait to die.
Frankly I cannot imagine trying to sleep on a hot humid piece of dirt constantly bitten by mosquitoes, in pain from injuries inflected by my husband or his number one wife, worrying about whether we would find any food the next day.
Working 9-5in an airconditioned office seems pretty good to me after imagining that.

Dear Joe,

"Sadly", because they become trapped in the Western lifestyle, whereby they are indeed materially better off, but spiritually poor.

It is true that people in closed-off communities often fail to have an idyllic life, or as you noted, even a good life - but at least the possibility exists (with appropriate effort), whereas once trapped in cities and all the temptations that come with it, it is more difficult to escape: indeed the incidence of "ghastly lives, short lives, lives plagued with violence, abuse, ill-health" is much reduced in cities, but "sense of utter futility and pointlessness" increases - universities offer no cure for it.

While there is no denial that aboriginals had quite a few problems of their own, white-man has done them a disservice by inviting them to its own spiritually-empty lifestyle. Now that they mostly integrated, both people are equally deserving of pity.

Your final statement is so pessimistic: "We're all in this society, forever, and all of us have equal rights to seize every opportunity."

- What about the opportunity to escape this society and be left alone?
Now, if your claim is correct, then it is equally unavailable to both white and aboriginal.

Dear Nana,

Yes, what you mention is true: life for aboriginal people was indeed uncomfortable. Now they have (or are in the process of acquiring) the comforts of the white man, but at what price?

Suppose you had, as you described, an inconsistent food and water supply, no pain relievers, rotten teeth, no antibiotics, no insect repellent and were sleeping on a hot humid piece of dirt constantly bitten by mosquitoes, etc. and the devil offered you to sell your soul for the opportunity of working 9-5 in an air-conditioned office: would you accept his offer?

Yes, the flesh is weak so most of us would be tempted, but then regret it bitterly in the long run.

Hi Yuyutsu,

I think you may have shot yourself in the foot with your attempted rebuttal of what Big Nana wrote :)

The noted anthropologist W. E. H. Scanner wrote, after fifty-odd years of work in the North, that he had never met an Aboriginal person who, once they had experienced the ration system and other aspects of Western life, had gone back out into the desert.

People make choices, and thank God that goes for Aboriginal people. Stay in your cave if you like but don't expect anybody else to do the same.

Cheers,

Joe

Yuyutsu, how did aboriginal people sell their soul?
Indigenous spiritual beliefs and modern technology are not mutually exclusive.
Christians, Muslims, Jews etc. all manage to juggle their beliefs with modern day life, why can’t aboriginal people do the same?

Dear Joe,

I do not mourn the aboriginal people for the life that most of them had, but rather for the life they could have had (and that a few of them may have actually had). They made a choice to become westerners because that's the easy choice down the garden-path and turning back is now more difficult for them.

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Dear Nana,

«Indigenous spiritual beliefs and modern technology are not mutually exclusive.»

The temptations that come with modern technology compete over our time and attention. When people (indigenous or otherwise) used to do monotonous work that did not require the mind much, their span of attention was great and they could dream, meditate or pray as they worked or walked, but now the entertainment industry cannot keep a frame for more than 5-6 seconds, otherwise people consider it boring.

«Christians, Muslims, Jews etc. all manage to juggle their beliefs with modern day life, why can’t aboriginal people do the same?»

It's not about belief - it's about practice and the problem is that we don't manage to live spiritually as our attention is drawn away by all the beeps and gadgets. This afflicts "whites" and whitened-aboriginals alike.