Assimilation is often described as a choice — something Indigenous people opted into in order to belong. That story assumes conscious decision-making, clear alternatives, and freedom to refuse. My experience tells a different story. What is commonly called assimilation is better understood as containment, navigated through survival rather than choice.
My relationship to white society was not shaped by desire or agreement. It was shaped by deep survival responses learned early, before I had language, context, or safety for reflection. Staying was not a considered decision. Joining was not consent. These were reactions formed in environments where refusal carried consequences that were felt rather than explained.
I did not join white society. I was trained into it.
I stayed because leaving meant death — cultural, social, sometimes literal. These consequences were rarely named, but they were understood in the body. Survival did not involve weighing options; it involved responding quickly and accurately to threat. What looks, from the outside, like participation or adaptation was, from the inside, an ongoing negotiation with danger.
This is also why I joined, and remained within, the church.
For many Indigenous people, the church functioned as one of the few available forms of safety within white society. It offered protection, legitimacy, and care — always conditional, but often crucial. It provided access to education, employment, and networks that reduced exposure to harm. Within a hostile system, the church appeared not as freedom, but as shelter.
What matters here is that this movement into the church was not driven by belief alone. It was driven by survival responses shaped by trauma that had not yet been named or understood. Faith became entangled with safety. Obedience became confused with goodness. Endurance came to look like virtue.
Much of my life has been lived not from conscious choice, but from a traumatised intelligence — not trauma as pathology, but trauma as an operating system. Decisions were filtered through fear before they reached desire. Silence felt safer than refusal. Compliance reduced risk.
The church rewarded this intelligence. It valued restraint, gratitude, humility, and obedience — precisely the qualities white systems reward in Indigenous people. In return, a kind of belonging was offered, provided it remained polite, non-threatening, and grateful.
I am not interested in condemning faith. What matters is recognising coercion where it exists. Christianity, as it was offered to me, did not arrive in a neutral space. It arrived already aligned with colonial authority. Care came with conditions. Love came with expectations. Belonging came at the cost of erasure.
This is why I can say, without contradiction: I am Christian because I had no other choice.
Identity, in this context, is not celebratory. It is descriptive. I am Wiradjuri, embedded at birth. Indigenous of the universe. Australian for the purposes of management and control. Christian through survival.
The uncomfortable truth is that much of what is later judged as complicity began as unexamined survival. Trauma does not announce itself. Reaction precedes reflection.
Assimilation was never a choice. Neither was the church.