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I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

In refugee camps around the world, I met people who were gone. They were still walking around but had lost so much that they were unable to claim any sort of identity. Others I met found who they truly were, and they generally found it through service to others. They became teachers when there was no school, books or pencils.

Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.

My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the past.

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.