Indigenous Australians had their languages taken from them, and it's still causing issues today [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/20/australia/australia-indigenous-language-rights-intl-hnk/index.html

(CNN)"I'm Fanny Smith. I was born on Flinders Island. I'm the last of the Tasmanians."

The audio is scratchy and distorted, sounding at times like it is being spoken through a wall. Yet the voice speaking is high and proud, with long, stretched syllables in English. When she breaks into song, in her native language, it is half chant, half bluesy-spiritual.

Smith was born on the Australian island of Tasmania, in December 1834, to the Palawa people, an Indigenous population that had lived on the land for at least 34,000 years.

By the time she died in 1905, Smith was the last native speaker of her people's language.

It was one of more than 250 distinct languages spoken on the Australian continent when Europeans began arriving in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since then, colonial rules systematically stripped Indigenous peoples of their languages through English-only education policies and discriminatory practices, causing deep-rooted issues that held communities back socially and economically, and fractured their identities.

*snip*