James T. Collins

Language death in Maluku The impact of the VOC

Any aborigines were simply pests to be removed ... The Tasmanians were shot where they were found, or rounded up into prison camps, where the survivors languished in miserable conditions. The last of them, a woman called Trucanini, who had been raped by the white convicts and then used by the authorities as a pawn to bring her people in, died in 1876. A unique branch on the tree of the worlds languages was thus destroyed along with its people.