> Only last week I read a primary account from a settler describing an [graphic depiction of allegedly institutionalized violence used for ritualistic, magical or religious purposes].
You know, I also read quite a few primary accounts of how the suspected witches were "convinced" to admit their "guilt" in Europe and later in North America. You can find similar examples everywhere - on every continent, in every culture. Humans are violent beasts by nature, there's really nothing shocking about that. And in terms of time-frames - the "settlers" (scare quotes because if they were settlers, then Putin's soldiers in Ukraine would be, too) were not strangers to torture, rape, and killing, both on societal and personal levels. Did they all get banished for non-violent crimes? Do you happen to know when the last European hand was chopped off for stealing?
Then there's an issue of how believable the account itself is. I'm not saying it's impossible for such a ritual to have been performed, but I'm skeptical: how was the settler allowed to witness the ceremony? How was he able to understand the meaning of it ("weak to boost vitality")? What could he gain by relying just the truth versus embellishing the story? How many other people independently verified that such a ritual took place? Which group of Aboriginal people, exactly, performed that ritual, and what evidence there is that it was widespread among other groups?
> This was not some flawless society to be fawned over and emulated
Which society is flawless? Other than yours, I mean - whatever it is. I also didn't say anything about "emulating" that culture: I said we should study it and learn from it. That doesn't imply that we should learn the violent parts, unless you think there are no non-violent things to be learned from it?
> this was a culture rife with violence, rape, torture and cannibalism.
So? It's a culture that flourished in one of the least welcoming pieces of land on Earth, I'd say that doing away with a taboo of cannibalism - that I don't know the evidence for, but I'll take your word that it existed - could have well been a survival strategy. Are people wrong to try to survive? Also, wouldn't cannibalism have a very visible long-term health effects? Is there evidence of such effects?
And again: violence, rape, torture? That's shocking? Not at all. There are nations with nuclear bombs (or close to it) where gang-raping 12 years old girls is normal - and it happens right now, just like it has been happening since before we started walking upright.
> And so I put the question to you: If you had the means and will to rescue a child from this fate, by taking her away to be homed and schooled in a facility for this purpose, would you still - in all your cultured wisdom - instead choose to sit idly by and "let nature take its course"?
That's a false dichotomy. You can both save the girl from suffering and preserve her ties with her family. You can influence the culture without shattering it. You can ease the dependency on violence without adding more violence to the mix.
Reading your other comments, you seem to say that there was nothing worth preserving in the Aboriginal culture, and probably many other cultures around the world, so why bother inventing other ways of "civilizing" the "savages"? I happen to disagree - a culture that stood the test of time so well has to have interesting aspects to it. There are quite a few such aspects that we know now - but there's no telling how many of them we've irreversibly lost. Lost, just because the "settlers" didn't bother to think and fell back to what they knew best: violence and contempt. That's really nothing worthy of praise.