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Tag: forced assimilation
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Gypsy and Traveller History: Slavery, Persecution and Survival
I am currently working through the Proud Gypsy Traveller website, page by page, reviewing what we have written and deciding what needs updating. When I reached our original timeline, I realised how much has changed—not only in the evidence now available, but in my own ability to research it. I now know how to follow…
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The Tinker Experiment: Why Did It Happen, What Happened—and Why Should We All Know About It?
For generations, Scottish Gypsy Travellers were pushed from the road, separated from their children and placed in isolated, substandard settlements. This is not only a story about the past. Its consequences are still being lived today. By Violet Cannon, Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC A man appeared to have wandered into the exhibition almost by accident.…
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This Was Never Just a Scottish Problem, was it?
I’ve been sitting with this for a while now. Like a lot of us, I was brought up hearing bits of things — never the full story. Things half said. Things you don’t ask too many questions about. Things that sit in families but don’t get written down. I’m Romani Gypsy, with Scottish Gypsy ancestry…
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20 February 1856: Abolition Without Accountability
20 February 1856.In the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, nearly 500 years of enslavement formally ended. Between 1385 and 1856, Romani people were legally treated as property. They were owned by monasteries, noble families and the state. They were sold. They were inherited. They were separated from their children. Their labour sustained estates, institutions…
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No Man’s Land” — and the Stories We Were Told
I was told my whole life that I was English. English Gypsy. It wasn’t said harshly. It wasn’t said defensively. It was simply offered as fact, the way families hand down recipes or habits or certain turns of phrase. It was part of who we were. We were English. And yet, there were the trips…
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Scraps From the Table: Colonial Britain’s Ongoing Harm to Gypsy and Traveller Communities
Content Warning: This blog contains references to racism, forced displacement, slavery, institutional abuse, forced exclusion, state violence, cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma experienced by Gypsy and Traveller people under colonial and state systems. We live within a colonial system that has, for more than 600 years, labelled Gypsy and Traveller people as criminals, trespassers, and…
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Did We Give You the Kilt and Bagpipes, and In Return You Gave Us Intergenerational Trauma?
Did we give you the kilt and the bagpipe, and in return you gave us silence ? This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a reckoning. For generations, Scottish Gypsy/Travellers were persecuted not only through public disdain but through deliberate, state-backed efforts to erase who we are. In March 2025, the Scottish Government finally admitted it: what…