Aboriginal Practitioners Research Articles

Aboriginal Practitioners’ Perspectives on Culturally Informed Practice for Trauma Healing in Australia

Colonisation continues to impact Aboriginal children and families through perpetual cycles of transgenerational trauma. To achieve culturally safe and effective healing, practitioners working with Aboriginal people must be culturally competent, yet existing research suggests culturally informed practice (CIP) is often poorly understood and implemented by many practitioners. Centring Indigenous perspectives, the present study explored how Aboriginal practitioners in Australia conceptualise and use CIPs when supporting Aboriginal children and families to heal from trauma. Six Aboriginal women practitioners from mental health and social work settings participated in individual research yarns. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to generate four themes, including centring Aboriginal ways, approaches to healing, creating space for healing, and reflexive and responsive practice. CIPs are embedded within Aboriginal approaches to healing, consider the impacts of trauma and colonisation, and require all practitioners to actively engage with Aboriginal people and their ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Development of an Aboriginal Resilience and Recovery Questionnaire – a collaboration between practitioners and help-seeking clients of a Victorian Aboriginal community controlled health service

BackgroundIndigenous experiences and perspectives of resilience, healing and recovery from trauma is gaining increasing attention, with a growing qualitative literature that spans multiple indigenous cultural groups. However, few quantitative measures are available. In this article, development of a preliminary version of the Aboriginal Resilience and Recovery Questionnaire is described.AimThe first aim of this study was to describe findings from two focus groups that provided theoretical knowledge and development of items for a draft version of an Aboriginal Resilience Recovery Questionnaire. The second aim of the study was to conduct a preliminary psychometric analysis of the properties of the measure.DesignMulti-method research design grounded in indigenous research methodologies.MeasuresAboriginal Resilience and Recovery Questionnaire, Australian Aboriginal Version of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire Trauma symptom subscale, Growth and Empowerment Measure.Results(1) Two focus groups with six counselling staff from an Aboriginal health service were run that explored Victorian Aboriginal understandings of resilience, healing, and recovery from trauma. Sixty different protective factors viewed as potentially important to resilience, healing and recovery from trauma were identified by participants. (2) Following a review of the resilience literature, 75 items were reviewed and revised, with additional items developed by the focus group. (3) The final outcome was 60 items selected for a preliminary version of the Aboriginal Resilience Recovery Questionnaire, 50 of which made up 19 different subscales in addition to 10 single items. (4) Structured interviews were conducted with 81 help seeking Aboriginal clients recruited from the same health service. Preliminary psychometric assessment of the Aboriginal Resilience Recovery Questionnaire was undertaken using Principal Components Analysis. Two component subscales were extracted with adequate internal consistency and good convergent and discriminant validity. For both subscales there were moderate to strong positive associations with empowerment, and moderate to strong negative associations with trauma symptom severity.ConclusionThe preliminary results are promising for a strength-based resilience measure developed from the knowledge of Aboriginal practitioners and staff of a counselling service. Further research to address some psychometric limitations in the measure is required. A larger sample size will allow for a common factor analysis to be conducted. The Aboriginal Resilience Recovery Questionnaire has potential to assist Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and other organisations to evaluate whether services and programs can effectively support community members to strengthen individual, relational, community and cultural resilience resources.

The social and emotional wellbeing needs of Aboriginal staff in out of home care: Walking in two worlds

BackgroundThere is a disproportionate representation of Aboriginal children in the Australian Out of Home Care system. An important strategy to ensure Aboriginal children experience trauma informed care that is culturally situated is to have access to Aboriginal practitioners. The experiences of Aboriginal practitioners working in Aboriginal Out of Home Care have not been explored thoroughly. Participants and settingThis community led research was undertaken on Dharawal Country on the South Coast of the Illawarra region, Australia with an Out of Home Care program managed by an Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation. The study included Aboriginal (n = 50) and non-Aboriginal (n = 3) participants connected through employment or community membership to the organisation. ObjectiveWe aimed to explore the wellbeing needs of Aboriginal practitioners working with Aboriginal children in Aboriginal Out of Home Care. MethodsThis co-designed qualitative research project used yarning sessions (individual and group), co-analysis with co-researchers, document analysis and reflexive writing. FindingsAboriginal practitioners are required to bring their cultural expertise to their work and with this, there is an expectation of cultural leadership and the fulfilling of cultural responsibilities. These elements bring with them emotional labour that must be acknowledged and accounted for in working in the Out of Home Care sector. ConclusionThe findings point to the importance of establishing an organisational social and emotional wellbeing framework in recognition of Aboriginal practitioner's specific needs, centring cultural participation as a key wellbeing and trauma informed strategy.

‘Creative histories’ and the Australian context

This article brings together a group of history practitioners who, prompted by their experiences of creative approaches to the theory and practice of history, are exploring how the term ‘Creative Histories’ might apply within the Australian context. While the term and practice of Creative Histories has gained international currency in recent years, little has been done to consider its development and relevance in Australia. Here we develop a working definition for the term which has been shaped in conversation with Creative Historians at the University of Bristol and a suite of interviews conducted with 10 Australian ‘creative historians’ who have worked or still work within the academy, as well as four Indigenous artists, academics and activists who each employ creativity in the ways they ‘practice the past’. Together, these influences indicate that questions of purpose, poetics and politics go to the heart of Creative Histories in Australia and that a fuller understanding of both Creative Histories and the creative histories of Aboriginal practitioners will make a useful contribution to conversations concerned with decolonising the discipline in Australia.

Ensuring Knowledge Transmission in the Aboriginal Child Welfare Field

This issue of the First Peoples Child & Family Caring Society is the third volume produced by the Caring Society since our first inaugural issue was released in 2004. It demonstrates our commitment to ensuring knowledge transmission in the field of Aboriginal/First Nations child welfare. An important aspect of knowledge transmission is the need to ensure that the knowledge generated by the authors within the journal, as well as how the journal is prepared, is shared with the wider community. The collection of essays in this volume details distinctive issues that confront many Aboriginal/ First Nations and child welfare and social service agencies on a day to day basis, whether they are located on reserve, or in rural or urban localities. Issues around identify formation in relation to adoption and suicide prevail as the top themes within this volume. All of the 10 articles in this edition weave together important elements of storytelling and Indigenous knowledge that are unique among Aboriginal practitioners and community researchers.

Providing culturally informed mental health services to Aboriginal youth: The YouthLink model in Western Australia.

Aboriginal young people are more likely to experience mental health issues and to access mental health services than other young Australians, yet there are few culturally informed mental health programs and services available. This study describes and documents the effectiveness of the culturally sensitive model within YouthLink, a state-wide mental health service program in Western Australia for young people aged 13 to 24 years of age. A mixed-method design including a descriptive approach reporting on the YouthLink framework and an empirical research design where 40 Aboriginal clients completed client feedback monitoring measures between 2014 and 2016. The YouthLink culturally informed conceptual framework adheres to best practice principles relevant to work with Indigenous people, family and communities. Aboriginal young people indicated improvement across the treatment period as shown by within-group differences between the first and last session scores on feedback measures. Therapeutic alliance (together with lower baseline acuity and female gender) also contributed significantly to positive treatment outcomes. Through a strong role of Aboriginal practitioners, relationships with Aboriginal communities, and greater service flexibility that embraces cultural meaning and knowledge, YouthLink has sought to enhance its response to the needs of Aboriginal youth.

The Intersection of Trauma, Racism, and Cultural Competence in Effective Work with Aboriginal People: Waiting for Trust

The consistent failure of initiatives aimed at addressing discrepancies between Australia's Aboriginal and non Aboriginal citizens point to a need to address responses to Aboriginal people by mainstream service providers. This practice paper draws on the experience of Aboriginal and non Aboriginal practitioners in the trauma field to consider the limitations and potential of “cultural competence” as a construct for working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Key limitations are the lack of accounting for the trauma and ongoing racism experienced by Aboriginal people, which result in isolation of communities, protection of abusers, and under-use of mainstream services by Aboriginal people. When trauma and racism are addressed, successful and respectful engagement with Aboriginal individuals and communities becomes possible and the potential of cultural competency initiatives can be realised. A three-step process for achieving this at the personal, practice, and agency levels, which has been developed in a collaboration by Aboriginal and non Aboriginal practitioners, is outlined.

Aboriginal Practitioners Speak Out: Contextualising Child Protection Interventions

One month before the June 2007 Federal Government Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory some 55 West Australian Aboriginal child protection workers attended a 3-day summit in Fremantle. Their purpose as front-line practitioners from across the State was to identify how more nurturing and healing communities could be developed and supported in a climate of despair. This paper reports on how the summit was designed and on some of the ideas and concerns that emerged within this dialogical space of cooperative inquiry. The project was a partnership between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal representatives of university, government, and community-service bodies. Aboriginal practitioners identified the complexity of what was happening in their experience and where changes were needed. Integral to this participation and coproduction of knowledge by Aboriginal child protection workers was the provision of a safe space for the articulation of reflected experience. Implications for policy, practice, and curriculum of both process and outcome dimensions to considering Aboriginal views on this contentious issue are discussed.

The Diy Habitus of Australian Hip Hop

Since its origins in the late 1980s, Australian hip hop continues to be fundamentally a do-it-yourself (DIY) subcultural field which has little or no music industry input or support. This paper profiles some of the small labels and producers in Australian hip hop (Obese, Elefant Traks, Nuff Said, Crookneck, Invada, etc.) and examines how they have formed from the ground up, using community radio stations such as 2SER, PBS and 3ZZZ, and websites such as Ozhiphop.com , to promote their music, as well as organising their own gigs and tours. It also examines Aboriginal practitioners of hip hop, who have even less infrastructure than the DIY network of independent producers and labels. Drawing on Holly Kruse's writing about ‘situated practices’ in independent rock music, which refers to Bourdieu's ‘fields of practice’ and ‘habitus’, I examine the subcultural networks and associations that have emerged in Australian hip hop, mediated through a nexus of genre, gender, space, location, race and ethnicity. The concept of habitus is arguably a useful way of referring to hip hop practices like MCing, DJing, breakdancing and graffiti, as well as the social behaviour associated with the hip hop subculture.