NT stolen generation seeks compensation

When Eileen Cummings was four, she was taken from her home on an Arnhem Land cattle station and sent to Croker Island. She didn't see her mother again until she was 19.

Now 71, Ms Cummings, as chairwoman of the NT Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation, wants the federal government to give compensation to the NT people who were taken.

On Friday, the seventh anniversary of former prime minister Kevin Rudd's apology, Ms Cummings said nothing had changed for Aboriginal people, and successive governments had failed to consult the people for whom they were making indigenous policy.

"In New Zealand, they've got Maori affairs; in Canada, they've got Native American affairs. Why can't they have affairs here? We can run ourselves rather than government being politically biased and using us as guinea pigs to improve themselves," Ms Cummings told AAP.

"The Aboriginal dollar is the biggest bucket of money that the governments deal with ... we're an industry in itself and they won't allow us to run our industry."

The scars of those separated from their families and who lost their language and culture could never be healed, and the government had a responsibility to compensate them, Ms Cumming said.

"We grew up as an alien to our own people and an alien to the ordinary community because we were children of mixed race and they didn't want anything to do with us," she said.

"It was their shame that we were there - white man's shame."

Other states offered different forms of redress but no such scheme existed for the 2000 children who were taken in the Northern Territory, she said.

"The federal government says they'll never compensate, but the children of the NT are wholly and solely the responsibility of the Commonwealth and it's time they acknowledged that," she said.

The NTSGAC wants funding for a healing centre to be built where Aboriginal people can work with health, education and employment services to try to resolve the ongoing trauma.

"Nobody came to the stolen generation and asked us what we really wanted. They just put in these programs and expected us to fall in line with them," Ms Cummings said.