Indigenous Australians had their languages taken from them, and it’s still causing issues today

CNN — “I’m Fanny Smith. In Canada, too, a government survey found First Nations and Inuit people lag far behind non-Indigenous populations “as measured by most major indicators of health.” “Indigenous health is widely understood to also be affected by a range of cultural factors, including racism, along with various Indigenous-specific factors, such as loss of language and connection to the land, environmental deprivation, and spiritual, emotional, and mental disconnectedness,” researchers Malcolm King, Alexandra Smith and Michael Gracey argued in a 2009 paper for The Lancet. PETER PARKS/AFP/AFP via Getty Images Douglas Whalen, a speech and language expert at the City University of New York, said that those communities which retained their Indigenous languages showed better results across a host of health metrics, from “suicide to diabetes.” “Not that I believe that language has magical properties – although some communities do – it’s just that it reestablishes a sense of community and connectedness that is currently lacking for many people,” he said. “You feel it, that loss.” Michael Walsh, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, said that in his work on language revival, working with people rediscovering their Indigenous languages, “what always struck me very forcibly was the way an individual would say that getting their language back had changed their life.” “We’ve got the gloomiest statistic of the highest level of youth suicide among Indigenous people in the OECD,” he added. Paul Kane/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty Images A lost pearl Whalen, the CUNY expert, said that “when you talk to people from Indigenous communities” about the value of language in promoting general health and other outcomes, “they are completely unsurprised.” Testifying before an Australian parliamentary inquiry in 2012, Yurranydjil Dhurrkay, a woman from Galiwin’ku, an island off the coast of Arnhem Land, said that “our language is like a pearl inside a shell.