Across the planet, the modern lifestyle that we take for granted in the developed world has come at a high cost to Indigenous or First Peoples, and the simple but sustainable and intelligent lifestyles they have maintained for thousands of years. As they have been dispossessed of their traditional lands and lifestyles, colonised by European cultures that do not accept or understand their ways, First Peoples struggle everywhere to maintain their culture, spirituality and stewardship ethic. The inherent value of this wisdom is beyond question. Colonised First Peoples have been surviving on the edges of an often alien prevailing culture and nowhere has this been more poignantly heartbreaking than for the Aborigines of Australia whose disadvantaged status is amongst the worst in the world and is well documented. This occurs within a very wealthy western nation. How do these social gaps become established and maintained?
Unfortunately there is a widespread lack of understanding of the true nature of Aboriginal disadvantage. Many in the white, dominant culture feel that Aboriginal people should just “get on with it”, “get a job”, “stop being so lazy”, and try harder to fit into white culture and overcome their disadvantage. The stereotype of the lazy, drunk, uneducated Aboriginal person who is treated leniently by the court system and given too much welfare, is widespread. Many people do not appreciate the depth of transgenerational trauma that runs through Aboriginal communities and also within most colonised First Peoples across the world.
The sorts of traumas that Aboriginal people have had to deal with in the past that have led to transgenerational trauma include:
- being removed from their traditional lands leading to loss of culture and identity;
- exposed to diseases they had no immunity to (sometimes deliberately);
- Elders and community leaders rounded up and jailed leaving the communities leaderless;
- given alcohol and opium;
- given white flour and sugar, sometimes deliberately laced with poison;
- women raped and subjugated by white colonisers and the resulting cross-cultural children forcibly removed from their parents;
- genocide- deliberate rounding up and murdering of whole clans, as well as bounties given to those who killed Aboriginal people;
- and blatant individual and institutionalised racism and ignorance by the dominating culture.
“Aboriginal youth in the Kimberley region may experience several layers of trauma, through their own direct and secondary exposure as set against a backdrop of historical unresolved trauma and grief. These layers of trauma are thought to be cumulative in the manner in which they inform the adolescents’ experience, and continue to adversely reinforce the basic assumptions that are violated by chronic trauma exposure; that the world is meaningful and safe, that the self is worthy, and that others can be trusted”...8
.... “the endemic nature of family violence over a number of generations has resulted in a situation where ‘violent behaviours become the norm in families where there have been cumulative intergenerational impacts of trauma on trauma on trauma, expressing themselves in present generations as violence on self and others”...Trauma, Transgenerational Transfer and Effects on Community Wellbeing
Today in the modern Australian society, institutional racism continues largely unchallenged as people are constantly exposed to stereotypes of Aboriginal people by a media fixated with scapegoating, supported by governments that advocate simplistic and ineffective solutions to the very real and deeply entrenched problem of Aboriginal disadvantage and continue to divide and conquer Aboriginal people through arduous Native Title land right determinations, mining rights negotiations and Northern Territory-style interventions.
The Australian Aborigines are of course only one community of people that are humiliated in these ways- there are many other communities of First Peoples around the world who are struggling, from the indigenous Amazonians whose beloved forest is being devastated at an alarming rate, the damning of rivers in many places such as India and Canada which stops the indigenous people from being able to carry out their traditional fishing and hunting, to large scale mining which dispossesses Indigenous people from their land in the northern continental America and many other places. Many Indigenous peoples have fought long hard battles to retain or regain control of their lands, but most have been forced to make unworkable compromises along the way, and many have lost their battles completely.
“These people have already made the place no good with their bulldozers. Our sacred places they have made no good. They mess up our land. They expose our sacred objects. This breaks our spirit. What will we as a people do if these people continue to make all our land no good?” ...The Yungngora community, Australia.
The ongoing legacy of unresolved trauma through the generations makes it very difficult for healing to occur and for those affected to succeed in western cultures. Children who are brought up in a violent home can have as severe cognitive damage as those affected by excessive maternal drinking- and many have both. The cognitive damage that occurs is cumulative since it is not a one off traumatic event but a whole childhood of them- and since neuro-developments are dependent on earlier developments taking place sequentially, normal development is disrupted and doesn’t occur.
“Continuous trauma results in the loss of more energy efficient brain mechanisms for homeostasis until the person is left with much less efficient brain mechanisms and much of the brain functioning must be devoted to simply maintaining homeostasis. This explains why children experiencing early life trauma have difficulty with focus and may appear constantly agitated [hypervigilant] when dealing with linear or production oriented tasks.”.... Early Childhood Laying the Foundations for Life
Despite the unacceptable levels of trauma, there are many Aboriginal people who maintain a high level of social and cognitive function, and who provide good role models within their communities. In fact, despite the common stereotypes, there are proportionally more teetotallers among the Aboriginal population than there are in the non-Indigenous community. Further examples of success are that there are many more Aboriginal footballers (11%) in the Australian Football League (AFL) than their proportional representation in the Australian population as a whole (2.5%); there are sports stars such as Cathy Freeman, actors such as Ernie Dingo and Deborah Mailman, politicians, teachers and lawyers who have been highly successful as functional role models. The flourishing Aboriginal Art movement has been able to put money back into traditional communities, and also seen some highly successful artists whose paintings have sold for over $1 million, evoking serious investment from collectors and investors .
“It's this increasingly casual reaction to Indigenous achievement and success that is a marker of how far we've come. It's becoming unexceptional to have successful Indigenous filmmakers, artists, doctors, academics, lawyers, nurses and politicians. This is the other side, the often – and unfortunately – untold side, of the story we hear about Indigenous Australia.” ....Mick Dodson, Australian of the Year 2009
Even with these notable examples of success, there is a long way to go to improve the life expectancy, health, employment, imprisonment and income of many Indigenous Australians (see Figure 1). The size of the social gap demonstrated by the information in Figure 1 is cause for international concern, especially when one considers the wealth currently being generated by sections of the Western Australian community.
Healing these transgenerational and early life traumas will take a rebuilding of broken trust, time to understand and acknowledge the depth of the problem, deeply assessing and learning from the many failed attempts from ill thought-out institutional interventions. There are of course programs that have served Indigenous people well and these are usually characterised by high level involvement by an effective ethical Eldership in their planning and implementation.
Indigenous Spirituality and a sense of cultural identity are also keys to healing trauma among Indigenous peoples. There have been successful programs which have taken Aboriginal youth offenders out on country to better connect with their own sense of cultural identity. Experienced mentors for these programs have successfully demonstrated what it is possible to achieve and the obligations that go with cultural attunement. Job-readiness training and employment outcomes are more highly successful when Indigenous youth have a robust sense of self and cultural identity.
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| Aboriginal Elder Dean Wynne out on country with Aboriginal youths |
The culture of institutional Paternalism towards Aboriginal people which has been the approach since the beginning of colonisation and continues today, needs to give way to an approach that directly involves and deeply listens to Aboriginal people in directing their own solutions to the problems they face. The time for going in and making changes for them for their own good is long past and obviously ineffective, and offensive.
The people who are making a difference are listening, patiently, and gaining trust through a long term approach of working with Aboriginal people rather than on their behalf. Aboriginal people are clan based, not tribal, and collective leadership is a distinctive feature of clans- there was no single leader but a collective process involving Elders and community discussion.
It is essential for development of community spirit and collective identity, that many voices are heard amongst Elders and communities. Guidance should be taken from the outcomes of these discussions. This would be true self empowerment in action.
Indigenous research methodology and governance processes are based on wholism integration, connectedness and adaptation and are now needed in the West more than ever. Across the world, a new generation of Indigenous leadership has emerged, and the First Peoples are taking their place in the world community, with much to offer in this time of environmental and social crisis.
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