Introductory activities

What is history?

Edward Hallett Carr was a British historiographer who, in 1961, published a book, What is History? In it he asserts that history is essentially the interpretation of the facts that a historian gathers to present an argument. Carr’s ideas have been challenged in more recent times but his central thesis, that History is interpretative rather than objective, still has force and is very relevant to our study of Dark Emu.

In this book Carr argues that historians are not objective and detached in their re-telling of the past, but that they choose their facts and interpret them according to their personal ideological beliefs; we can only see the past through the lens of the present.

In Dark Emu Bruce Pascoe has written a popular history in which he draws upon the observations of early European explorers in Australia to challenge the long-held belief of ‘white settler’ Australians that Aboriginal people were ‘primitive hunter-gatherers’ with no concept of attachment to and ownership of the land. (Students should listen to this ABC podcast that shows that Aboriginal people did, in fact, have a very deep connection to their land, their Country).

Students should be asked to consider as they work through this unit why it has taken 250 years for settler Australians to come to a fuller ‘understanding of the past’ and indeed for some, that understanding has still to be achieved. The answer may lie in the deliberate misrepresentation of Aboriginal people as a colonial way of justifying their violent dispossession.

Whose history?

On page 104 of Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe refers to ‘the national story’. He means the dominant story that Australians tell about themselves and their country. He understands that at the moment, this story does not include the achievements of pre-colonial First Nations people.

  • Discuss with students the idea that a dominant version of Australian identity is based on the twin myths of ‘the bush’ and ‘the Anzacs’ that are endlessly recycled by groups such as advertisers, farmers’ associations and the Australian War Memorial so that this dominant version has come to seem natural. (Here the word ‘myth’ does not mean an untrue story, but rather a story that people tell each other about their history, their present and their future). Representations of people, places, events and things within these myths will construct a version of national identity that suppresses other possible versions and privileges certain groups in society at the expense of others.
  • To check out the above contention ask students whether they have ever been asked to contribute money at their local supermarket to help drought-stricken farmers, or discuss with them what happens at their school on Anzac Day.

To illustrate what a challenge to the dominant national story can look like, ask students to carry out the following exercise:

  • Research with students the story of Eliza Fraser, after whom Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland is named. Explain to students that after she was shipwrecked on 22 May, 1836, she finally reached the island with her party and lived for some time with the local Indigenous people, the Badtjala, sometimes known as Butchulla. The important point to make with students is that Eliza Fraser claimed later that she was kidnapped and badly mistreated by them and that this led to a retaliatory massacre by British soldiers.

Then explain to students that in contemporary times the descendants of the Badtjala people have ‘written back’ against Eliza Fraser’s version of events aka the dominant story of what happened in 1836. Show them the short animated interactive documentary, K’Gari, that provides an Aboriginal perspective on the story of Eliza Fraser.

K’Gari gives an alternative version of an event in Australian history. It is actually in binary opposition to the dominant story; that is, it lies at 180 degrees opposite to Eliza Fraser’s story.

Bruce Pascoe’s aim

However, Bruce Pascoe does not aim to rewrite the national story from an entirely Indigenous point of view. He says in his introduction (page 3), ‘…by adjusting our perspective by only a few degrees, we see a vastly different world through the same window.’

  • In recent times an Indigenous presence has been introduced into Australian schools in the form of a week-long ceremony called NAIDOC Week.
  • Ask students whether they think NAIDOC Week has given them a ‘window’ into Indigenous Australia.
  • Discuss with them whether they think NAIDOC Week is as important to the ‘national story’ as Anzac Day. To do this they can reflect on how the two ceremonies are conducted respectively in their own school.
  • Ask them whether they think that NAIDOC Week lies at ‘a few degrees’ or 180 degrees to the dominant story of Australia.

Whose interest was served by early histories?

As an example of an early history of colonial settlement refer students to the book, In North Queensland: Early Days by Edward Palmer (the teacher can locate this book at Project Gutenberg) that was published in 1903. In it, Palmer writes about the occupation by white settlers of the state of Queensland. As part of the introduction a Mr G. Phillips writes:

The author of this book, the late Edward Palmer, was himself one of that brave band of pioneer squatters who in the early sixties (the 1860s) swept across North Queensland with their flocks and herds, settling, as if by magic, great tracts of hitherto unoccupied country, and thereby opening several new ports on the east coast and on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, to the commerce of the world. In writing of these stirring times in the history of Queensland, Mr. Palmer has dealt with a subject for which he was peculiarly qualified as an active participant therein.

  • Use a wall map to illustrate the country that Phillips is referring to: virtually the hinterland of the present state of Queensland from Rockhampton north to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
  • Have students look at the AIATSIS map of Aboriginal Australia.
  • Then ask students whether they think that the territory of Northern Australia was unoccupied. Ask them to suggest why Phillips would have made this statement.
  • This short animation (located towards the end of the webpage) offers a visual representation of the government-sanctioned occupation of large areas of Queensland to support this short extract from Edward Palmer’s account of pastoral expansion in North Queensland in the 1860s.
  • To counter the statement that Northern Australia was unoccupied, refer them to sections in Dark Emu in which Pascoe has quoted the observations of the famous explorer, Charles Sturt, about the achievements of Aboriginal people on land further south e.g. the creation of ‘vast and pleasant grasslands’ produced by Aboriginal stewardship (p. 33); the building of substantial houses ‘…made of strong boughs fixed in a circle in the ground’ (p. 106).
  • Ask students why they think colonial settlers (and their apologists like Phillips) and historians of the time ignored the evidence of settled Aboriginal communities provided by the journals of Sturt (and other explorers like Major Thomas Mitchell).
  • It would be useful for the teacher to explore Phillips’ use of language to represent the occupation of this country as a heroic venture (‘brave band’, ‘as if by magic’, etc.). Do they agree with Edward Carr that historians are influenced by their own ideologies? Of course, Phillips is not a historian but he has written a foreword to a popular history written by Edward Palmer.
  • What do students think were the attitudes of Australians at the time (‘the present’) that Phillips wrote these comments about ‘the past’?
  • Ask students what it is about their ‘present’ (and his) that has allowed Bruce Pascoe to write Dark Emu.

What’s at stake?

In terms of the relationship between settler Australians who have come to Australia from other places around the world and Indigenous Australians, the country has reached a decisive moment. In recent times, Indigenous leaders gathered at the iconic site of Uluru and composed the Uluru Statement from the Heart that asks that their voice be enshrined in the Constitution. The idea is that a panel of Indigenous representatives should be included in the structure of the federal parliament to advise parliamentarians on any legislation that affects Indigenous people. This suggestion has been opposed by conservative politicians who have tried to appeal to the racial prejudices of their constituents.

What will prevail? The past or the present?

Another history

In 2018 a new history of Australia, Deep Time Dreaming by Deakin University historian Billy Griffiths was published. As the name suggests this was a history not of post-colonial Australia but of 65,000 years of pre-colonial Australia. Griffiths based his history on the work of archaeologists like John MulvaneyRhys JonesIsabel McBryde and others whose work since the 1960s has shown that the claims made by Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu, based on the journals of white explorers, are scientifically correct. Here are some of the interesting points made in Deep Time Dreaming that teachers could discuss with students:

  • That since they arrived on this continent 65,000 years ago Aboriginal people had constantly adapted to changing environments (periods of drought, extreme flooding and so on).
  • That Aboriginal people had not just adapted but were also ecological agents, managing the Australian landscape.
  • That the countryside observed by the English in 1788 was not a wilderness but rather a product of millennia of Aboriginal management.
  • That Aboriginal clans had occupied their land over very long periods of time, revealed by archaeological evidence. (The archaeologists used an approach called stratigraphy, the drilling down through levels of land sites to show continuous occupation of Country over many generations.)
  • That Aboriginal occupation of the continent, rather than being ‘timeless’, (a colonial trope used to prove that Aboriginal people had done little with the land), involved great changes in culture and the environment over a vast period of time.

Billy Griffiths asserts that there is no such thing in Australia as ‘non-Indigenous’ culture, that modern Australia sits over 65,000 years of the Indigenous shaping of this place. This idea is evident in Tony Birch‘s novel, Ghost River, which brings together a creation story and archaeology.

In the novel Ghost River two young Aboriginal boys living in the working-class suburb of Collingwood, Melbourne, in the 1960s form an attachment to both the Yarra River and a marginalised group of homeless Indigenous men who live near to the river. To both the boys and the men the river has a spiritual and symbolic meaning. However, the Yarra River is not the ‘ghost river’. Tony Birch suggests that in pre-historical times before the arrival of white people another timeless river, part of ‘deep time’ flowed underneath the Yarra. This sounds like an Aboriginal creation story but, in fact, as Tony Birch points out in Meanjin Quarterly (Summer, 2019):

Beneath the surface, commencing on the bed of the contemporary (i.e. the Yarra) river’s mouth, the ancient Birrarung River continues its journey. I find it comforting to know that although we cannot physically see the old river. It is there; a repository of story and knowledge. (p.133)

Creation story and science come together and again support Bruce Pascoe’s thesis.

And now, to Dark Emu itself

Share with students this extract from an interview with Bruce Pascoe by Jade Richardson for Verity LA (October 19, 2016). The interviewer reports that:

For starters, he wants to clear up a few true facts about Australia’s past. His most recent work, Dark Emu, is a non-fiction study of pre-colonial Aboriginal culture and conditions. It is a carefully told and well-evidenced proof that no, Australia was not empty and uncared for when the British colonists arrived – and yes – Aboriginal people were very much involved with cultivating, settling and working the landscape using engineering, crop raising, irrigation, horticulture, building and patience – which is nothing short of gob-smacking news to your average ‘Aussie’.

  • Ask students what they think Jade means by ‘gob-smacking’.
  • Do they agree that most Australians would know very little, if anything, about traditional Aboriginal society or culture?
  • Ask students if they are surprised by what Jade Richardson has to say.

Thinking about the title

In the same interview Pascoe explains the title of the book. ‘He named his book Dark Emu to honour the starless void in the Milky Way, shaped like an emu and riven with ancient Aboriginal story about the power and beauty of darkness, emptiness, the creative spirit.’

  • Ask students whether they think that naming the book after an Indigenous observation of the heavens is a powerful way of signalling Pascoe’s project to challenge a white view of Australian history.

Today the British explorer Captain James Cook is regarded as the bringer of Science and British law to this continent, as if Indigenous people did not have their own explanations of the natural world or their own laws and customs.

  • Explain to students that Western science has its counterpart in Indigenous astronomy. This knowledge of the stars goes beyond creation stories and acts as a guide for everyday activities in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities throughout the year. The stars are a way to navigate space, like a compass, and time, like a clock or calendar.

Dark Emu asks us to seriously question what we think we know about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It puts forward the argument that the hunter-gatherer label as applied to Indigenous Australian people by colonial settler society is inaccurate and demeaning, and offers historical evidence that, in addition to ‘hunting and gathering’, which itself requires a very sophisticated knowledge of the environment, Indigenous people cultivated the land in pre-colonial Australia. Bruce Pascoe argues that by the time of colonial occupation Indigenous people in a number of places had reached the stage of early agricultural development, which in turn led to sedentism (i.e. staying in one place) and the construction of permanent housing and other associated infrastructure. More broadly, Pascoe’s text is concerned with sustainability and living in harmony with a living planet, and questions whether the dominant capitalist paradigm of exploitation of resources, commercialism and consumption is the one best suited to these aims.

In this way, the book deals with themes of power and discourse, societal change, and intercultural relationships and understanding.

The text is essentially an extended essay advocating strongly for a reassessment of pre-colonial Indigenous Australians as ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers and advocating for their knowledge of Country to be incorporated into modern Australian approaches and thinking. (Pascoe uses the word ‘mere’ in an ironic way to undermine the notion that hunter-gathering is simple, requiring little knowledge of the land.)There are no characters or plot as we are used to in fictional work, but historical figures are included with whom we can engage and identify as important identities in Pascoe’s argument.

This text will almost certainly be challenging for senior English students. It will ask them to question and reassess many of the ‘truths’ that they have learned about their world to this point. There is also a risk that students will feel uncomfortable engaging with discussions of race. This unit, and particularly the preliminary introductory activities, are designed to set the book in a contemporary context, make teachers more comfortable with discussing the book and allow students to speak their minds on a range of issues pertaining to pre-colonial Aboriginal society and its role in helping to develop modern sustainability.

The first two activities should be conducted while the students are still reading the text.

Setting the circle

Place chairs in a circle and explain to students that learning was done in a circle for thousands of years in this country.

Tell the students that much of the work in this unit is going to be done in this same way, and they should be prepared to participate in group discussions on the book and its themes.

New ways of thinking

To paraphrase E.H. Carr, cultures and worldviews are never static; people view the past and re-write its history from the perspective of the present. The following exercise is designed to illustrate to students that what seemed sensible in the past can now be reviewed using new ideas of the present.

The point of this exercise is to allow students to see that existing systems may be improved upon and are constantly being shaped and reshaped by people from a position of new knowledge and moral thinking.

  1. Ask the students to reflect on their years of schooling as their time as secondary students draws to a close. Facilitate a discussion on what they would change in the Australian schooling system if they could. Some conversation starters might include:
  • school timetabling (start and end times)
  • the necessity of uniforms
  • curriculum changes
  • more experiential learning.
  1. Another good example of how societal norms and worldviews can change over time is the success of the ‘Yes’ campaign in the 2017 Marriage Equality plebiscite. Obviously, the view of the majority of Australians towards non-binary sexuality had changed significantly from past attitudes.

Make the point to students that in the same way, with greater knowledge and information about pre-colonial and colonial-era Australian history, hopefully a majority of Australians will view the past (and the present) through the ‘same window’ but from a perspective a ‘few degrees’ away and accept the wisdom of Dark Emu.
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Two ways of seeing the world

The settler view: Journal entry
  • Ask students to imagine that they are colonisers exploring the Australian outback in the early 1800s. Ask them to write a journal entry describing what they see, the trials that they need to go through, any encounters they have with wildlife and Aboriginal people, etc. Encourage the students to use their imaginations – this is going to form a crucial learning experience for them as they explore the book and its themes.
A counterview: a conversation between two Aboriginal men
  • In her novel The Secret River Kate Grenville narrates a confrontation between her protagonist, William Thornhill, and two Aboriginal men who obviously resent greatly Thornhill’s invasion of their land. The historian Inga Clendinnen criticised Grenville for representing the thoughts and feelings of Thornhill but not those of the Aboriginal men who are described mainly in terms of their actions.
  • Ask students to adopt the point of view of the two Aboriginal men and write a short script of a conversation between them when they come upon the Thornhills on their land. Then ask the students in pairs to perform their scripted conversations to the class.

Unpacking colonialism

Background note: Colonialism and imperialism are two sides of the same coin. Powerful metropolitan and usually European countries (e.g. Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and others, etc) took control of other less-developed countries and claimed sovereignty over them. This is what James Cook, on behalf of King George III, did in 1770 at Possession Island when he declared the eastern part of Australia a colony of Great Britain.

Declaring sovereignty was not necessarily the same thing as taking ownership of land. Imperial countries generally felt that they had to negotiate the exchange of land or sign a treaty with the Indigenous people of the country. This did not happen in Australia where sovereignty and control of property happened at the same time as Henry Reynolds points out in his book The Forgotten War. (This was contrary to nineteenth century international law.) In fact, at the time of Federation, 1901, the federal government in Melbourne had limited control over large parts of the continent and no control at all over remote areas where Aboriginal people continued to exercise sovereignty over their land and lives. In fact, even today Indigenous activists and lawyers point out that Aboriginal people have never ceded sovereignty.

However, colonial settlers supported by soldiers from their home country generally felt a sense of entitlement in occupying the land of others. To do this they often needed to tell themselves myths like the one that students will now study.

The myth of ‘progress’: How to take land from others

  • Show students American Progress (1872), a painting by John Gast. (The picture depicts the female personification of Manifest Destiny leading American colonisers west. Her representation dominates the picture, as the painter has presented her as a sort of benevolent giantess. She holds a school book in one hand and is spooling out telegraph cable with her other. Before her, a coloniser rides aggressively at a herd of buffalo. Similarly, a group of colonisers aggressively approaches a group of Native Americans, who look terrified.)
  • Discuss with the class this picture and facilitate its analysis.
Some key focus questions:
  1. What is this picture saying about progress?
  2. What do you make of the representations of Indigenous people in this picture?
  3. What do you think this picture says, on the one hand, about exploiting the land for money and, on the other, about responsibility to nature and the environment?

Conversation through structured yarning 

Divide the class into groups of five to six students. Remind them of how Yarning Circles work. Make sure that they observe the process.

Set up the key conversational question for each group to discuss: Did Aboriginal Australians have a civilisation?

(Remember that colonists argued that Aboriginal people had not developed the land and did not have a complex civilisation. This became a powerful argument for dispossessing Aboriginal people of their lands.)

However, before students can arrive at an answer to this question in a meaningful way, they should work their way through the following activities.

  • Show students this YouTube clip: What is a civilization? Hold a class discussion on the various aspects of civilisation listed in the video.
  • Discuss with students the fairly obvious fact that the aspects listed in the video represent a European point of view.
  • Create a simple retrieval chart with two columns, one headed ‘European view of civilisation’ and the other ‘Aboriginal society and culture’ (as described in Dark Emu).
  • Ask students to list the aspects of civilisation outlined in the video in the left-hand column.
  • Then ask them to write down examples from the various chapters of Dark Emu to show that Aboriginal people, in their own ways, had met the criteria for being described as ‘civilised’. For example, one of the characteristics of a civilisation mentioned in the video is a ‘system of law’ so students can go to Chapter 6 of Dark Emu, find examples of Aboriginal law and write the examples into the right-hand column of their chart.
  • Complete the chart with input from students. (Small groups of students could be allocated a chapter each and then each group could contribute to the class chart.)
  • Ask students whether they think these aspects of ‘civilisation’ were visible to the early settlers in what they saw in Aboriginal society and culture, and if so, would they have behaved differently, not greedily and violently over-running Aboriginal land?
  • James Boyce in his history, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land suggests an answer to that question: He says that an illegal squatter camp on the banks of the Yarra River in the Port Phillip colony marked the beginning of the illegal conquest of much of eastern Australia. The British government, which could have controlled the expansion of European settlement, failed entirely in its legal and moral duty.
  • At the end of his book 1835, Boyce suggests an alternative to what actually happened at the Port Philip colony. Point out to students the failure of the government of the colony to put into practice the official British government policy. Boyce criticises both Governor Bourke and James Stephen, the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (1836–1847), for not preventing the violent conquest of Aboriginal land by squatters through the simple measure of denying formal land ownership to those who did not follow the law and instead took over land illegally.

Debrief the conversation with the students at the end of the session.

Do they agree that pre-colonial Aboriginal people had a civilisation?

What did they learn? Was there any dissent in the group?

Why do you think this was the case?

Do they think that Bruce Pascoe has made a convincing case?

As a matter of interest point out to students that the concept of Terra Nullius has already been exploded in 1992 by the High Court decision in the Mabo case.
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PERSONAL RESPONSE ON READING THE TEXT

Once students have completed reading the text, move on to these learning activities.

Class discussion on Dark Emu

Facilitate a class discussion using the following focus questions:

  1. How did you feel while reading this text?
  2. What did you expect from the activities that we conducted while you were reading?
  3. What was challenging for you? Is there anything you are still finding hard to accept?
  4. How do you think this text would be received by the wider Indigenous community?
  5. How do you think this text would be received by the wider non-Indigenous community of Australia?
  6. A useful question that should always be asked about any text is, ‘Whose interest is served?’ Bruce Pascoe often reflects on why earlier historians did not reach the same conclusions he did from the observations of explorers like Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt. Why hasn’t the recent work of historians (e.g. Henry Reynolds), archaeologists (e.g. Billy Griffiths) and journalists (e.g. Paul Daley) been acknowledged and led to changes in the ‘national story’? Whose interest is served by the suppression and omission of their observations about Australian history? Why do you think this is the case?

(The answer probably lies in the continuing power of the white colonial story and the on-going colonial voice in Australian politics, especially among conservative politicians and the people they feel they represent. In a recent interview at the beginning of 2020, Sussan Ley, the Federal Minister for the Environment, articulated a prevalent point of view regarding Australian history when, referring to bush fires and climate change, she said, ‘200 years of human settlement in this relatively young continent is catching up with us’. Obviously, Ms Ley does not have much knowledge of Australia’s pre-colonial history or of its Indigenous people.)

  1. Bruce Pascoe does acknowledge the work of Bill Gammage, an Australian historian, who argued in his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, that Aboriginal people had virtually shaped the landscape of the whole Australian continent, using techniques such as ‘fire-stick farming’. Gammage’s thesis was supported by the Tasmanian geographer W.D. Jackson and the Canberra pre-historian Rhys Jones. Obviously, their views give support to Bruce Pascoe’s argument in Dark Emu. Even so there were those, especially natural scientists, who criticised Gammage’s ideas. Students should be alerted to some subtle points in response to Gammage’s overall thesis. For example:

The word ‘estate’ does tend to give the impression that the whole continent was managed in a homogeneous way. In fact, the continent was not a single place but rather a mosaic of different ecologies, all of which required different management strategies.

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Power and authority

Ask students to re-read Chapter 8, and particularly pp. 221–222 concerning the early explorer Angus McMillan. Point out to students that McMillan was able to treat the two Indigenous men, Johnny Cabonne and Jemmy Gibber, as slaves because of the institutional power that he had over them. (That is, his power came from the colonial government, which was the situation in all colonised countries.)

Unfortunately, colonial attitudes towards Aboriginal people still prevail in modern Australia. On 25 July 2016, the ABC broadcast a Four Corners report that disclosed the abuse of Aboriginal youths in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, a maximum security prison for juvenile delinquents located east of Darwin. Youths had been subjected to beatings and the use of tear gas.

Ask students whether they think that all Australians should be protected by the rule of law rather than being indiscriminately punished by gaolers.

Explain to them that the power of the state can be used to support one version of history over another.

SYNTHESISING TASK – AN ALTERNATIVE AUSTRALIA

Preamble

Because of official policy and decisions made at both the British government level and that of the colonial governments in New South Wales and Port Phillip in the early nineteenth century, the Australia that we now occupy suffers very serious and detrimental effects.

Of course, Indigenous people have suffered from that time onwards: devastating oppression and the loss of their cultures and their land, (their Country). However, the dominant culture has also suffered serious destruction of the environment over this period and especially in recent times with serious droughts threatening pastoral and agricultural industries in rural areas, destruction of the Murray-Darling river system and unprecedented bush fires reaching even to major city limits in 2019–2020. Some of these threats are, of course, the results of extraordinary climate change.

Your task

Imagine an alternative history of Australia based on a negotiated collaboration between two equal groups, white settlers and Indigenous people, instead of the laissez-faire occupation of the land and the destruction of the Aboriginal way of life allowed by Governors Gipps and Bourke.

Write a chapter for a history book based on an alternative vision of a future Australia. Consider the benefits of the contributions of the cultures of both groups. Your study of Dark Emu should provide you with some knowledge of Indigenous culture to which you can add, if required, other information gained from further research.

Some things to think about:
  • The leadership skills provided by each culture. For example, a hierarchical structure set against leadership based on extensive discussion among elders.
  • Ways in which the land could be shared to accommodate the different cultures.
  • The outcomes of a Yarning Circle in which participants from both groups learn by listening to each other, reflecting and accepting difference, and finally reaching consensus.
  • The rituals that might occur between the two cultures, e.g. taking time to learn each other’s languages, protocols, etc.
  • Differences in the exploitation/management of the environment.
  • Differences in religious/spiritual beliefs.
  • Ways in which the current political, social, economic and cultural situation for Indigenous people would be different if the strengths of Indigenous culture and civilisation had been acknowledged.

The purpose of this exercise is for students to speculate about a different (and better) contemporary Australia if white settlers had understood and honoured the strengths of Indigenous cultures and civilisation. In many ways teachers will see Aboriginal students taking a leadership role in classroom discussions. It will hopefully give them ideas to challenge negative ideas and stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples.
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