Beyond Sorry

 Again this week I went to the Wednesday night movie were we watched the documentary of "Beyond Sorry." This movie took place an a extremely rural area in Australia. You could think of these people almost as like Native Americans here in the United States. One day a white man came to their villages and acted as though he was asking the adults about something. When in reality he was counting all the children. He later returned with other men and took all the children from these villages. Once taken these children were sent away and basically had their previous culture literally beaten out of them. Every single piece of their culture from the past they were forced to forget. Finally, decades later these children that were taken wanted to come back home. I want to say it was about 43 years later. Not all of the children did because it was their forgotten past and they had their own families now. However the ones that did had an emotional ride in front of them. When they returned they were not welcomed back with open arms. Their real blood mothers were told that all their children were dead, and in this particular culture mothers and families are forbidden to talk about deceased children. So the families were in shock and denial. However, they families would finally come along but it was not an easy process. This documentary features a group of children from this awful time period and situation. Mainly it focuses on this one woman Zita and her story. She wanted to actually come back and embrace her past family and culture. It really shows the struggles she went through in being accepted back in. In the end she was able to gain relationships back and even moved back into her original homeland with her husband, even though she already had a family of her own. During the discussion we talked about and compared how here in the United States we had the same events happen with the Native Americans. The Native Americans children were taken and had their culture beat out of them until they had completely forgotten. Over all this was a very interesting documentary.