Aboriginal Engagement Research Articles

Growing Indigenous graduates in the health professions: a case study in decentralised student selection and engagement

ABSTRACT This case study research, informed by an Indigenous Research Paradigm, sought to ascertain the impact of a university’s decentralised health faculty Aboriginal engagement program. It involved analysis of health faculty and other faculties’ 2016–2020 student commencement, enrolment, completion, and retention data. The health faculty was more likely to have Aboriginal commencements in 2017 and 2018 due to a more equitable student selection process focused on applicant success factors and inclusive of Aboriginal epistemology. Other faculties’ Aboriginal commencement improved when a similar process was adopted. Excepting 2018, the health faculty was more likely to have Aboriginal completions and from 2017 onwards, Aboriginal enrolments. An increasing faculty retention pattern existed likely relating to earlier student engagement and planning. The decentralised model, led by Aboriginal people and supported by faculty and university, also provided processes for Aboriginal students, to crucially be, belong, and further grow as, Aboriginal people. With this presumably better positioning of graduates’ standpoints as Aboriginal health professionals to engage with healthcare cultural safety. This is important as health professions education is predominantly conceived by colonial paradigms which can promote assimilation. Despite improvements, inequities remained. Higher education should aim to graduate as many Aboriginal health professional graduates as possible to address healthcare inequities.

The state of disclosures on Aboriginal engagement: an examination of Australian mining companies

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the nature and level of disclosures on engagement with Aboriginal communities by Australian mining companies.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis of annual and sustainability reports of Australian Stock Exchange listed companies was undertaken to address the central research aim of this paper. An Aboriginal engagement framework was developed based on the five dimensions suggested by Reconciliation Australia.FindingsThe findings of the study report an overall low level of disclosures on Aboriginal engagement by mining companies and reveal that corporate disclosures largely focus on Land and Native title agreements, Aboriginal employment and corporate investment in Aboriginal socio-economic development. The least reported issues include Aboriginal immersion experience, Aboriginal inclusion in leadership roles and commitment to the reconciliation process. The findings of the study suggest that although corporate engagement practices have started to recognise and incorporate marginalised stakeholder rights and issues, only a few companies have created necessary avenues to empower Aboriginal communities. Regarding the reconciliation process, the findings reveal that the companies are mostly reporting on only three out of the five dimensions of the framework.Practical implicationsThis study provides a better understanding of the current state of Aboriginal engagement practices in the mining sector, in particular the issues and gaps in reporting Aboriginal engagement to align it with the national reconciliation process, which will be useful for policymakers and, possibly, standard setters to develop future Aboriginal engagement and disclosure policies.Originality/valueIn spite of the rapid development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure, disclosure of corporate impacts on Aboriginal people and reconciliation with Aboriginal communities has been given little attention in business CSR practice and previous CSR disclosure literature. This research fills this gap and investigates the increasing uptake of Aboriginal engagement disclosures by business corporations.

An exploratory study of culture in treatment for Aboriginal Australian men in residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation services

The objectives of the research are to describe the cultural activities offered in residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation for Aboriginal Australian men, along with client perceptions of the benefits associated with these cultural activities. Participants were 101 Australian Aboriginal male clients attending five residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation services in New South Wales. Participants completed a semi-structured interview and questionnaires that included the Growth and Empowerment Measure, the Aboriginal Cultural Engagement Survey, Clinical Global Impressions, and two questionnaires regarding cultural engagement while in treatment. Service users indicated that the most beneficial cultural activities offered within services were traditional art/craft, culturally-focused talks/meetings, and being on the land. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that cultural engagement in everyday life significantly predicted empowerment but not other measures of mental ill-health. The opinions of service users are presented, and recommendations are made regarding ways to enhance the effectiveness of cultural activities within drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs.

Teaching the Whitefella—The Role of Cultural Tourism in Opening Remote Indigenous Art Centres to Non-Indigenous Visitors

This article explores how a remote Aboriginal-owned and -run art centre, Ikuntji Artists in Haasts Bluff, has developed grassroots-level cultural tourism. While not many remote Indigenous art centres engage with the tourism industry, Aboriginal tourism engagement has only recently been identified by the Northern Territory Government as a major business development area. Steered by the member artists and the board, the art centre has been able to create a range of workshops and activities that can be offered to small-scale tour operators. Over the past five years, an arts festival and various workshops for university field students and other small tour operators have been hosted. Member artists, staff and the board as well as the community see cultural tourism as an opportunity to share their culture by way of teaching visitors about the Luritja language, culture and country. Thus, this article argues that art centres can engage meaningfully in cultural tourism and support remote Indigenous communities in the sustainable development of cultural tourism.

Donald Thomson: Observations of Animal Connections in Visual Ethnography in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT Donald Thomson is a legendary Australian anthropologist particularly noted for his early fieldwork in Northern Australia. He lived for extended periods in remote areas in Cape York then Arnhem Land from 1929 until 1943. While in the field, he made meticulous ethnographic and natural history fieldnotes, took aesthetically beautiful photographs and amassed a particularly large museum collection. Thomson made a delineation between his academic publications on anthropology-related subjects and those that related to natural history, reflecting the epistemological divide during his lifetime. Aboriginal engagement with different animals is hard to find by reading classic ethnographic texts, which tend to refer to animals as human symbols or totems, rather than as living beings of significance. Thomson’s fieldwork is exemplary, in terms of showing how anthropologists can utilise a combination of detailed observation, visual ethnography and zoological findings in order to enrich our understandings of relations between other cultures and other animals.

Sources of uncertainties in environmental assessment: Lessons about uncertainty disclosure and communication from an oil sands extraction project in Northern Alberta

This study investigates practices of uncertainty disclosure and communication in Canadian environmental assessment (EA) in the context of the Joslyn North Oil Sands Mine project. Nineteen interviews with project stakeholders were conducted, revealing significant uncertainties about the project, attributed to multiple factors including lack of clarity in the terms of reference and requirements of the proponent; the project’s predicted impacts and proponent commitments to mitigation; cumulative effects and the potential for effects interaction with other projects; Aboriginal engagement, including engagement processes and broader socio-political context; and poor uncertainty disclosure and communication practices. Some uncertainties were disclosed but at times downplayed to render the project more palatable through the EA process. Informants stated that this is not an uncommon occurrence in oil sands EA. Recommendations to improve uncertainty disclosure and communication in EA and enhance the consideration of uncertainties in decision-making are provided.

Enriching Aboriginal Engagement in Schools through Service-learning: The Biidaaban Experience

This paper involves an inquiry into the effects and affects of service learning in a Biidaaban Youth Group (BYG) programme under the auspices of the Biidaaban Community Service Learning centre (BCSL) at a small northern Ontario university. Phenomenological, hermeneutical, and narrative inquiry approaches were applied to interviews with stakeholders in BYG including a First Nations’ parent, a school-aged child, a First Nations’ grandparent and Elder, an education community partner, and a university-student tutor. The concepts of pathic teaching and liberatory service learning help to frame the findings of this study. Analysis of the data evidenced authentic caring for self and other and genuine reciprocity that is transformative and enabled participants to attain a liberatory level of social change and social consciousness as key components of the high quality of service learning that is perceived by those who serve and those who receive service from this unit.

Land, Labour and Ambivalence: Lutheran Missionaries Managing Land Disputes at Cape Bedford Mission

This article provides a close reading of a land dispute between Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford mission during the 1920s and 1930s in order to extrapolate understandings of missionary ambivalence, power, and privilege within colonial processes of dispossession. The main contention is that missionaries felt compelled to promote Aboriginal engagement in agricultural labour in order to ensure that they could visibly demonstrate the land's productivity, and then maintain access to it. It also contributes to understandings about missionary power and privilege within the colonial context and how at times the authority of missionaries was undermined by bureaucracy. It points to the discrepancies between settler and humanitarian discourses around Indigenous land use in Queensland's north during this period, and the relationships between missions and the state.

Improving the participation and engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in business education

ABSTRACTMost Australian universities have among their goals to increase the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at their institutions. In the Australian higher education context, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are seriously under-represented, particularly in business education compared to other disciplines. An understanding of why a larger proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students do not choose to study a discipline that provides promising employment opportunities, is fundamental to improving the status quo. This paper reviews the literature to identify key barriers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ participation and engagement in business education. Apart from multiple general barriers to participation in higher education, factors specific to business as a profession and as an academic discipline are also considered. The paper then discusses a number of strategies Australian educational institutions could pursue when seeking to increase participation and engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in business. Drawing on the review, the paper concludes with recommendations for higher education institutional policy to further improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student participation and engagement in business studies.

Media Constructions of Aboriginality: implications for engagement with coal seam gas development in Australia

ABSTRACTRecent neo-liberal policy frameworks in Australia advocate economic development opportunities for Aboriginal Australians as a viable strategy to redress the marginalisation and social disadvantage that appear to characterise many Aboriginal communities. In New South Wales (NSW), Aboriginal peoples are currently negotiating with industry for the chance to participate in coal seam gas (CSG) development opportunities. Based upon research focusing on CSG development in the Northern NSW region, this paper argues that certain constructions of Aboriginality inhibit successful Aboriginal engagement with the economic opportunities provided by CSG. This paper illuminates the role of the media in facilitating dominant discourse about Aboriginality and the implications of those constructions for Aboriginal engagement with the mainstream economy. Findings demonstrate that the media are complicit in constructing Aboriginal peoples in a way that could prejudice their attempts to engage in economic opportunities that do not align with the dominant constructions of Aboriginality.

Aboriginal student engagement and achievement: educational practices and cultural sustainability

Aboriginal student engagement and achievement: educational practices and cultural sustainability

Maintaining Aboriginal engagement in Australian museums: two models of inclusion

Recent decades have seen efforts by museums to become more inclusive and to open up space for the sharing of different voices and different perspectives. Such efforts have been driven by broader social and political changes in support of these inclusive practices. In Australia, where the political context has shifted away from policies of Aboriginal self-determination, a potential gap has opened between museum and government priorities with regard to Aboriginal engagement, putting efforts toward inclusion at risk. It is therefore vital to consider how museums have enacted practices of inclusion and to consider their vulnerabilities to changing social and political contexts. To illustrate such consequences, this paper considers Aboriginal inclusion within two Australian state museums, the Australian Museum and Museum Victoria, and argues that inclusionary practices need to enter institutional structures in order to have sustained meaning despite broader political change.

Aboriginal engagement and agreement-making with a rapidly developing resource industry: Coal seam gas development in Australia

The onshore development of coal seam gas (CSG) is expanding rapidly in Australia. The industry's interaction with Aboriginal people has entailed 35 Indigenous Land Use Agreements in the State of Queensland in the period 2010–2013. Though the mining sector and, to some extent, conventional oil and gas development, are the source of much of our knowledge about agreement making in extractive industries, CSG extraction presents distinctive challenges. The industry has a distributed footprint on the landscape and multiple megaprojects are creating new forms of infrastructure to extract and handle the gas. This development is occurring during a period of evolution in law and regulation. The issues associated with agreement making and implementation that arise in this context are addressed here as seen from Aboriginal and practitioner viewpoints. Drawing on qualitative interviews, participant observation, applied native title research and indicative legal cases, we address the significance of capability challenges, the need for improved industry understanding of Aboriginal cultural politics, more explicit attention to factionalism among Indigenous groups, and the requirement for greater professional collaboration among all parties. CSG development can be seen to have accelerated the exposure of the resources sector more generally to the complexities of agreements with Indigenous people.

‘Caring for country’: a review of Aboriginal engagement in environmental management in New South Wales

This article discusses some emerging models of Indigenous engagement in environmental management in New South Wales and urges expansion of such engagement. NSW Aboriginal people own only around one per cent of the state's land, which suggests that land ownership and rights-based approaches to Aboriginal participation in environmental management are insufficient in NSW. Alternative approaches that recognise Aboriginal responsibilities to ‘care for country’ are needed. This article reviews opportunities for Aboriginal people to be involved in environmental and natural resource management activities, noting some of the constraints. It suggests some ways to extend such Aboriginal engagement, emphasising both employment creation aspects and the need to reconcile Indigenous and western governance arrangements for the natural environment.

Expert opinion on the criteria and indicator process and Aboriginal communities: Are objectives being met?

Developed in the 1990s, the process of criteria and indicators (C&I) has been used to conceptualize, evaluate and implement sustainable forest management (SFM). However, to assess their effectiveness we explore whether their use in management leads to changes, especially at the local level in Aboriginal communities. More specifically, can C&I justify Aboriginal use of C&I? Since local-level C&I are a recent initiative, the effectiveness of the C&I process in assessing progress towards SFM was assessed via interviews with experts associated with the development of local-level Aboriginal C&I frameworks in Canada on use, integration and needs of Aboriginal communities for C&I. Our results suggest that C&I in Aboriginal communities are considered to be “just another reference point” because: 1) Aboriginal objectives are maintained at arm's length from the forest management process; 2) the use of C&I as a negotiating tool has not been sufficient to culturally adapt forest management for Aboriginal values and objectives and 3) Aboriginal values have been restricted to the elaboration of C&I and the Aboriginal definition of SFM, but they are not part of the evaluation nor the implementation of SFM. In contrast to the forest industry, Aboriginal communities identified the following objectives as motivation for using C&I: Aboriginal representation, Aboriginal engagement, capacity building and empowerment. Without explicitly acknowledging these Aboriginal community objectives, C&I becomes a tool restricted primarily to forest managers and thus sustainable forest management becomes unattainable. In effect, the underlying issue is not C&I in themselves but the limited role Aboriginal communities have been allowed to have in the SFM process.

Aboriginal engagement: a key component of project commercial value

Effective engagement with Aboriginal peoples for project access involves more than cultural understanding and settling the compensation quantum. The GLNG project involved the largest successful Aboriginal agreement-making project in Australian resources sector history. The success was based on a structured approach to Aboriginal engagement that managed project risk in relation to cost, delay and legal action as well as creating an opportunity for Aboriginal communities to create sustainable futures. Key components of the approach include: Enhanced internal governance; and, The recognition that project value can be created by effective risk management and non-adversarial negotiation pratices. This paper aims to show how a commercial orientation to Aboriginal engagement, rather than a corporate social responsibility approach, can create substantial project value and deliver significant sustainability outcomes for Aboriginal communities in the project area. The paper will use the GLNG project Aboriginal engagement and agreement-making process to illustrate how enduring value can be achieved for the company and the Aboriginal communities.

Commercially driven social benefit: a structured approach to Aboriginal engagement

Most corporate approaches to engagement with Aboriginal Australians are determined by a tension between two poles: seeking access by minimal legal compliance or a form of enlightened charity known as corporate social responsibility which, in turn, is driven by a tension between the simple concept of charity and seeking a social licence to operate. Obviously companies require both legal access and a social licence to operate. The Santos model of Aboriginal engagement proposes community driven commerciality through a structured process that seeks to manage project risk in terms of cost, delay and legal action. Importantly, Aboriginal engagement at Santos is about development of sustainable relations with Aboriginal communities and to contribute to those communities to, in turn, becoming sustainable. Projects and legal compliance provide an opportunity for Aboriginal people and companies to sit at the table together. The development of the project to the operation phase allows the company and the community to plan for, and achieve sustainability in a mutually beneficial manner.

Increasing the sustainability of a resource development: Aboriginal engagement and negotiated agreements

While the role Aboriginal people play in environmental governance programs are often underpinned by the Crown, Aboriginal peoples are ratifying negotiated agreements with mining proponents to ensure their issues and concerns are addressed. This paper examines Aboriginal participation in mine development to show how more inclusive social and environmental development models can support a more sustainable development. Through two complementary processes, negotiated agreements and environmental impact assessment, Aboriginal peoples are maximizing their benefits and minimizing the adverse impacts of a project to create a more sustainable resource development. Case study analysis of the Galore Creek Project in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, illustrates how environmental impact assessment and negotiated agreements can co-exist to positively contribute to a successful mineral development, and hence operationalize sustainability within this context.

Beyond policy and planning to practice: getting sexual health on the agenda in Aboriginal communities in Western Australia

BackgroundIndigenous Australians have significantly poorer status on a large range of health, educational and socioeconomic measures and successive Australian governments at state and federal level have committed to redressing these disparities. Despite this, improvements in Aboriginal health status have been modest, and Australia has much greater disparities in the health of its Indigenous people compared to countries that share a history characterised by colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous populations such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America. Efforts at policy and planning must ultimately be translated into practical strategies. This article outlines an approach that was effective in Western Australia in increasing the engagement and concern of Aboriginal people about high rates of sexually transmissible infections and sexual health issues. Many aspects of the approach are relevant for other health issues.ResultsThe complexity of Indigenous sexual health necessitates inter-agency and cross-governmental collaboration, in addition to Aboriginal leadership, accurate data, and community support. A recent approach covering all these areas is described. This has resulted in Aboriginal sexual health being more actively discussed within Aboriginal health settings than it once was and additional resources for Indigenous sexual health being available, with better communication and partnership across different health service providers and sectors. The valuable lessons in capacity building, collaboration and community engagement are readily transferable to other health issues, and may be useful for other health professionals working in the challenging area of Aboriginal health.ConclusionHealth service planners and providers grapple with achieving Aboriginal ownership and leadership regarding their particular health issue, despite sincere concern and commitment to addressing Aboriginal health issues. This highlights the need to secure genuine Aboriginal engagement. Building capacity that enables Indigenous people and communities to fulfill their own goals is a long-term strategy and requires sustained commitment, but we argue is a prerequisite for better Indigenous health outcomes.

Social Justice in the Forest: Aboriginal engagement with Australia's forest industries

What remains of Australia’s native forests are important to Aboriginal people for environmental, cultural and economic reasons. Managers of forests in protected areas at State and Commonwealth levels have policies for involving Aboriginal people in forest management and for protecting the intangible and tangible values that Aboriginal people place on forests, but there are limited opportunities for significant economic returns to Aboriginal communities. Outside of conservation reserves, there are native timber production forests on crown land, plantations on private and public land and, forests on Aboriginal land, that offer a range of opportunities for Aboriginal people to engage with forest industries. Cultural traditions and values continue to play a role but they are manifest in different ways, depending on the local situation.