From prejudice to pride
Patty Mills is the perpetually perky point guard with the no-frown clause in his contract who leaps off the bench, or lunges toward teammates, or fist bumps reporters at every opportunity.
Except now, in one of the more anomalous moments you’ll see in the Northwest, the second-year Blazer is pulling away.
“Unless someone asks me, it’s not a subject I talk about much,” Mills said.
The subject pertains to his Indigenous Australian heritage, more specifically his Aboriginal mother, Yvonne, who as a 2-year-old was taken from her mother along with her older brother and three older sisters. The abduction was part of a national effort led by the Australian government and church missions to remove Indigenous Australian children from their homes and assimilate them into white culture.
It is now classified as “The Stolen Generation,” and Yvonne was a textbook victim.
“That’s the chip I carry on my shoulder,” Mills continued. “Not just being an Indigenous Australian, but knowing that my mom’s side of my family never got to see me play.”
Seeing how she went to a family that fed, sheltered and schooled her, Yvonne didn’t initially feel wronged. Later, however, she found herself in and out of hospitals because she couldn’t adapt to her new diet — an adjustment that nearly killed her sister.
What she didn’t know was that the government was intercepting a deluge of letters from her mother; letters fervently explaining that she never wanted to give her children up, letters to the welfare department at Christmas begging for her baby daughter back, letters chronicling a mother’s pain that Yvonne would not discover until the national inquiry of the Stolen Generation began in 1995.
Like Patty, this is not a topic she discusses often, and speaking about it earlier this month from her home in Canberra, Yvonne couldn’t help but weep.
“I’m sorry, I’m having a little bit of a moment here,” she said. “I just feel so bad for my mother. It was a terrible life. A life of being judged by other people because her skin was dark.”
