The City of Perth Citizen of the Year award 2023 means only as much to me as the added agency it gives me to help as many of our forgotten citizens I can reach among my people.

Half my people nationally are left behind and still will be so after I am gone from this world. This will still be the truth even with the Voice enshrined constitutionally, still will be the case even after all the Truth-telling is exhausted, after any or all treaties are sealed with the invaders.

It breaks my heart; the unseen fights I and my colleagues put up to stop children being removed by the all-knowing so-called protection authorities - by the invader.

Our people will continue to comprise more than a third of the prisoner population and by the time I am on my deathbed my people will be one in two prisoners.

We can celebrate on an individual level an award for recognition of service. We can celebrate on a national collective levels symbolic measures and the levers of power within them - Voice, Truth Telling Commissions, Treaties - which will do some good but cannot ensure the greater universal good so tragically overdue.

We talk about Black Excellence. These are the invader's words - throughout the world - subsuming many of us to presume we can inch along to "equality".

I see only Black suffering. My people die by suicide at the world's highest rate, are jailed at the world's highest rate, our children are removed at among the world's highest rates.

I will never not speak out because if I don't then I dance to the oppressor's tune.

We must stop this selling the idea of all eyes on Black Excellence, hide the suffering. We need to see some White Excellence - of the type that helps ends Black Suffering.

Megan Krakouer

National Suicide Prevention & Trauma Recovery Project

City of Perth Citizen of the Year 2023