A PhD student at the University of Queensland sees close parallels between the history of some Native American Indians and Australia's Aborigines.
John Lambert has unearthed accounts of more than 100 Indian children being taken from their parents; 30 later died and many others were returned to their families to die. The children's circumstances, he says, were similar to those of this country's so-called Aboriginal 'stolen generation'.
Mr Lambert's research in the History Department has also revealed the story of American Indians being removed forcibly from their land, ownership of which was subsequently taken from them.
Mr Lambert said of the two tribes studied, the Chiricahua and San Carlos, both part of the Apache people, the Chiricahua were treated as prisoners of war between 1886 and 1913.
During that time they were moved off their lands in Arizona and taken first to Florida, then Alabama and finally to Oklahoma.
'They were kept in unhealthy conditions, exposed to a number of new and fatal diseases such as TB, and further ravaged by alcohol. As a result they suffered a rapid population decline,' he said.
Mr Lambert said from the 1870s most Indians were living quite happily on reservations and working in the towns, on ranches or in the mines.
But some could not adjust to the new economic and social conditions, and they found a leader in a malcontent shaman (medicine man) called Geronimo.
Mr Lambert said Geronimo regularly got drunk and sometimes led more than 100 others in breakouts from the reservation. The subsequent crime sprees were blown out of proportion by the media, and later Hollywood, which painted Geronimo as a major chief or warrior.
However, these anti-social activities were enough to trigger a drastic official response. In
1886 about 500 Indians were removed from Arizona, separated from their children and, for the next 27 years, treated as prisoners of war.
Mr Lambert said treatment of the Indian tribes mirrored that of the Aborigines and lessons could be learned in Australia by looking at how America had since come to terms with its past. In 1971 almost US$25 million was paid in compensation for lost Indian lands.
Mr Lambert's interest in American Indians dates from his childhood in Tamworth. When westerns were shown at the local cinema it was quite an occasion - the staff would get dressed up and bales of hay added to the atmosphere.
Though he left school after grade 10 to join the building trade, Mr Lambert maintained his interest in Native Americans and amassed a substantial library on the subject.
In 1991 he graduated from St Lucia with an honours degree in history having written his thesis on Native Americans. Mr Lambert is the only person in the History Department at the University to have studied Native Americans for a PhD.
After he started the doctorate in 1992 his supervisor was James E Officer. Based at the University of Arizona, he was Associate Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy.
Dr Officer, who was also a friend of screen actor John Wayne, died in 1996 and Mr Lambert's current supervisor at St Lucia is Dr Martin Stuart-Fox.
Mr Lambert said researching the Chiricahua and San Carlos tribes had become a study of violent but hopeless resistance against technological change and numerically superior newcomers, the first of whom were the Spaniards.
'Due to their prolonged opposition to settlement by outsiders, perceptions of the Inde (Apache) as a naturally violent people have tended to persist,' he said.
'As late as 1930 they were still perceived as possessing an ?inherent savagery, blood-lust and hatred for the white people'.'
However, Mr Lambert said their hostility was primarily a means of coping with the decline of their society under the impact of Spanish, Mexican and then Anglo-American invaders.
Mr Lambert is bringing together many strands of his research in a book, Brokers of Cultural Change: The Conquest of Native America, due out in October.
For further information, contact John Lambert (telephone 3375 1255).
