Day to Day happenings in my life

Indigenous

PROMPT November 26th

I am writing this prompt today from the current and ancestral home of the Anishinaabe people. In your entry today, research and write about the indigineous and native peoples who lived on the land where you currently reside. If you are in the United States, take time during your Thanksgiving meal to thank your ancestors and the indigenous people of your area.




The most important story which happened in my neck of the woods was the killing and beheading of a young Noongar warrior.

Yagan was an Aboriginal Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key part in early resistance to British colonial settlement and rule in the area surrounding what is now Perth, Western Australia.
Yagan was pursued by the local authorities after he killed Erin Entwhistle, a servant of farmer Archibald Butler. It was an act of retaliation after Thomas Smedley, another of Butler's servants, shot at a group of Noongar people stealing potatoes and fowls, killing one of them. The government offered a bounty for Yagan's capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, shot and killed him. Yagan's execution figures in Australian history as a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers. He is considered a hero by the Noongar.
After his shooting, settlers removed Yagan's head to claim the bounty. Later, an official sent it to London, where it was exhibited as an "anthropological curiosity" and eventually given to a museum in Liverpool. The head was held in storage for more than a century before it was buried with other remains in an unmarked grave in Liverpool in 1964.
Over the years, the Noongar asked for repatriation of the head, both for religious reasons and because of Yagan's traditional stature. The burial site was identified in 1993; officials exhumed the head four years later and repatriated it to Australia.
After years of debate within the Noongar community on the appropriate final resting place, Yagan's head was buried in a traditional ceremony in the Swan Valley in July 2010, 177 years after his death.