Yagan was a Noongar warrior who played a key part in early indigenous Australian resistance to European settlement and rule in the area of Perth, Western Australia. After he led a series of attacks in which white settlers were murdered, a bounty was offered for his capture dead or alive, and he was shot dead by a young settler. Yagan's death has passed into Western Australian folklore as a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers. Yagan's head was removed and taken to Britain, where it was exhibited as an "anthropological curiosity". It spent over a century in storage at a museum before being buried in an unmarked grave in 1964. In 1993 its location was identified, and four years later it was exhumed and repatriated to Australia. Since then, the issue of its proper reburial has become a source of great controversy and conflict amongst the indigenous people of the Perth area. To date, the head remains unburied.
Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagan
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1801: The U.S. House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson as President and Aaron Burr as Vice President of the United States, resolving an electoral tie in the 1800 presidential election. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election%2C_1800)
1854: Britain recognized the independence of the Orange Free State in the present-day Free State Province, South Africa. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Free_State)
1895: The ballet Swan Lake was first performed at full length with music by Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake)
1959: Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, was launched to measure cloud-cover distribution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_2)
1979: About 120,000 troops of the People's Liberation Army of China crossed into northern Vietnam, starting the Sino-Vietnamese War. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
"Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen." -- Michael Jordan (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan)
daily-article-l@lists.wikimedia.org