Abstract
Aboriginal Australians experience trauma that is linked to continuing colonising practices in the present, and which are also reproduced throughout the more than 230 years of colonisation. Intergeneration trauma intersects with the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the welfare and justice systems. This paper examines evidence of the relations between trauma and colonialising practices imposed on Indigenous peoples, as past and present conditions leading to intergenerational trauma. Historical and present-day conditions affecting Aboriginal children and families are shown to set in place the conditions producing trauma over time.
Highlights
Indigenous peoples’ engagement with policing and the justice and welfare systems has been a longstanding problem in most parts of Australia
Before returning to the evidence of subjectivising of Aboriginal persons and personhood, and to core knowledge of the present trauma experienced by Indigenous Australians, it is necessary to examine some of the sources of this knowledge and to give attention to the place of the human sciences, in both the psysciences and the social domain
Attempts were made to sever Aboriginal peoples’ connection to Country, critical to health, wellbeing and Indigenous self-determination, through exclusion and resource engineering. These remain as elaborations of the killing fields, and subsequent detention and subjugation of Aboriginal peoples give acknowledgement to the present, those ‘strategies, technologies, programs, techniques’ (Barry, Osborne and Rose 1995) that are the contingencies of systems of power we inhabit today
Summary
Indigenous peoples’ engagement with policing and the justice and welfare systems has been a longstanding problem in most parts of Australia. The purpose of historical investigation is specific in what it studies and brings to light in the present: the kinds of controls and oversight of Aboriginal peoples in these extended and ongoing circumstances of removal from their lands, communities and families; the containment of peoples over generations and decades, decades, which became centuries.
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