Claire Henty-Gebert Cultural Identity

In the 1900s thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were dispossessed and put into missions. The act of dispossession is to forcibly remove an Indigenous person from their land, this is what happened to these children, but not only were they removed from their land, but also their families. This was extremely harmful to the children as although they gained a higher education than many other Indigenous people they missed out on learning about their cultural heritage, which is a fundamental part of Indigenous identity. Claire Henty-Gebert’s social and cultural identities have been negatively affected through the removal of her from her family and the moving around she had to do as she grew up in the mission she was placed …show more content…
The children were not allowed to see their parents and often never saw them again, even after they had left the missions. Although Claire did manage to track down her family she was never able to reconnect with her mother or father as they had both passed away (Henty-Gebert, 2005). The absence of a mother figure can have a dramatic affect on children and they may fail to mature properly (Bowlby, 1958). Self-esteem is often encouraged by the presence of people such as grad parents and aunts and uncles in a child’s life, especially if they have good relationships (Bowlby, 2008). A lack of affection from parents during childhood can make a child susceptible to toxic childhood stress, this can be damaging to children and affect them in the long term (Bergland, 2013). Parental warmth can alter that, if affection is given to children by their parents positive life experiences and good health are often observed, whereas when the relationship between the parent and child is not good, or the parent is absent the child is more likely to have a negative and unhealthy future (Bergland, 2013). Children with an absent father are also more likely to have a divorce (Kruk, 2012). Claire Henty-Gebert went through a divorce with her first husband Ronald Roberts, this could be due to the fact that she did not have a father figure in her life …show more content…
Whilst Claire was in the mission, all of the children were educated to the Intermediate standard for everyone at school (Henty-Gebert, 2005). This was a far better education than she would have received had she not been in the mission. Though Claire did not deem education a good enough excuse as Claire says “Yes I received an education, but I also lost my mother.” (2005). Not only did she begin to call Croker Island her home, but she also met her first husband there, whom she had three children to. For the first two years of their two eldest children’s lives they raised them on Croker Island before they were forced to move to Darwin. Although Claire had been removed from her family and placed in the mission she had grown to love it so much she was happy to raise her own children there. It is obvious she does not have bad memories of the place as otherwise she would have left as soon as she could. Most of the stories Claire tells in Paint Me Black are happy stories too; she seemed to enjoy her time there despite being taken from her family. She made many good friends and memories. Although the mission took away Claire’s cultural identity and may have affected her future life by removing her from her family there were positives that came out of it, for example education and her