Are you Aboriginal - or an Australian who is an 'Aboriginal of Distant Descent'?
Aboriginality of Distant Descent
Due to the increasing publicity of the genealogy work on our Dark Emu Exposed website, we are getting an increasing number of emails from readers who believe they may have some Aboriginal ancestry.
These are people who are currently living their lives as just ‘Australians’, with not much thought having been given to their family ancestry. Alternatively, they may be aware of some distant ancestor being supposedly Aboriginal and now it seems a good idea to have a go at finding out if they indeed have Aboriginal ancestry.
These readers ask us for our advice on how they can determine their family trees and find out if they are of Aboriginal descent.
After much thought our advice to these readers is the following.
If you want to learn more about your family’s heritage, talk to as many of your family members as possible and draw up a rough family tree based on any documents or oral history you can glean from your family. Do your DNA test at a website such as Ancestry.com. You can use an alias if you want to keep your DNA results confidential.
Once you have completed the above you will then have a very rough idea of your family’s background. You can then go to a professional genealogist who will do your family tree accurately (assuming records can be found) for several thousand dollars [yes, each family tree we do at DEE cost thousands]. Or you can learn basic genealogy yourself on the Ancestry.com website and have a go at doing your own family tree.
If your family tree or oral history or DNA test suggests you are of Aboriginal descent, in our opinion, that doesn’t necessarily make you ‘Aboriginal’.
If you ask yourself, did my mum and/or dad identify as Aboriginal? Did one or more of my four grandparents identify as Aboriginal?
If you answered no to these questions, in our opinion, you are not Aboriginal - you have be away from Aboriginal culture and family for too long. Rather, you are of Aboriginal-descent only, and most likely distant descent at best.
Now you are completely entitled to call yourself Aboriginal, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to believe it. We at Dark Emu Exposed believe that for you to call yourself Aboriginal, you would be ethically bound to reconnect with your Aboriginal kin to learn about your extended family, its society and culture.
For us to respect your claim to be Aboriginal we would expect to see that you yourself believe that you are Aboriginal in thought and deed, and that your Aboriginal ‘mob’, or community, see you as one of them and recognizes you as Aboriginal.
Our personal view is that we think it is unethical to just ‘tick the box’ and claim you are Aboriginal because you have a long-lost ancestor in your family tree who was Aboriginal, or your DNA suggests you are of Aboriginal descent.
To be ‘really’ Aboriginal, in our opinion, is to fully comply with the 3-part rule, where you are of Aboriginal descent, plus you understand Aboriginal society and recognize yourself as Aboriginal, and are recognized by other Aboriginal people as being Aboriginal.
This means you will need to talk to your local Aboriginal land council or organization (and/or your ancestor’s land council or organisation) in the region of your ‘mob’ to try to reconnect to your Aboriginal heritage and your other Aboriginal family members.
Being Aboriginal in the real sense should not just be a ‘fashion accessory’, granted to you because you have, say 5%, Aboriginal DNA.
It is entirely your choice if you want to identify as Aboriginal on this basis, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to recognize you as Aboriginal just because you have 5% Aboriginal DNA and you walk around with face-paint and wrapped in a possum coat.
At Dark Emu Exposed we only put our resources and money into doing genealogical work on public figures or people who are paid by the taxpayer and who are claiming to be Aboriginal, but the records clearly show that they are not. They are in fact ‘fakes’.
Our project is focused on exposing fakes for the common good of our society, in the interests of Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people alike as well as for the long-suffering taxpayer.
We therefore have decided not do genealogical work for non-public figures, who wish only to explore their own family heritage for personal reasons.
