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There are many ways to remain connected to the past, and sometimes we seek to remain connected to help define and anchor us, and sometimes we must see it plainly and decide ( decide” comes from the Latin word, decidere, which is a combination of two words: de = 'off' + caedere = 'cut') that it can no longer hold us, and that we need to be free from it.
Trauma, pain and harm works in that way, it can define us, impact us, and continue to alter us, or we can meet it head on and decide to see it as something set in a time and place, like a cut to skin, and then focus no longer on the cut but on healing the pain, and tending to the wound until it no longer defines any part of the conversation.
Each day allows for a new meaning to that day. On Jan 26 we will wake full in the knowledge that Aboriginal people are here, still here, still Black, still capable, still able, still thriving through the cut, healed and scarred but still here with no intention to disappear. Uninterested in the cut that took place 233 years ago, which is nothing but a minor infliction upon a body of some 70,000 years of age. To give it more kudos than that is to suggest its ability to minimize the strength, resilience of systems, and peoples and connections much greater than narrow interruption.
Colonization is like a bad date, it does not define any version of love, of self or love towards others. Only you can give more meaning to it, only we can keep re-telling the story as a warning that creates fear of love eternally, or we can simply lay it down in time and place and see it for what is it, and behave differently seeing the scar as memory not to be forgotten, but not the definition of who we are.
We refuse to re-tell a tense, violent, ugly story again and again instead we call upon community to act different, be different, and behave knowing that in the daily action is where the story is either given life or re-framed.
Choose Jan 26 to tell a different story, play you part in the story deliberately. We are not bound to a time frame that represents 0.33% of time.
We look froward to more time in the creation of a future, more healing and less re-wounding.