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7 - A healing foundation for Aboriginal community development
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- By Judy Atkinson, Southern Cross University, Caroline (carlie) Atkinson, We Al-li Pty Ltd in northern New South Wales
- Edited by Cheryl Kickett-Tucker, Curtin University of Technology, Perth
- Edited in association with Dawn Bessarab, University of Western Australia, Perth, Juli Coffin, Notre Dame University, Australia, Michael Wright, Curtin University, Perth
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- Book:
- Mia Mia Aboriginal Community Development
- Published online:
- 06 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 24 October 2016, pp 110-127
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES on the layered generational trauma, with a felt sense of injustice, that permeates many Aboriginal beliefs and behaviours and impacts on present-day community development (Atkinson 2002). Trauma-informed community development principles and practice can help facilitate healing and build community development capacity. There is a strongly articulated and expressed desire for healing across all levels of Aboriginal communities; however, healing must occur across all social systems (individuals, families and communities) if it is to influence whole-of-social change and growth. Community development can support the social movement towards healing, but it requires an investment in building workforce capacity and skills to implement Aboriginal healing programs using community development principles.
Symptoms as history
Both health and social indicators can be considered as ‘symptom as history’ (Atkinson, Nelson, Brooks, Atkinson & Ryan 2014, p. 290). Mollica (2006) suggests that knowing the generational traumatic impacts of individual and collective histories allows us to understand present-day physical and psychological circumstances. Reynolds (2013) also provides a powerful commentary on the impacts of colonisation, and the sense of injustice: ‘If there was no war, then thousands of Aborigines were murdered in a century-long, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government’ (p. 201). These ‘killing times’ (Bottom 2013) are part of an oral history and collective memory which maintain a felt sense of profound injustice. These ‘killing times’ enabled the ‘expropriation of the most productive land’ and the ‘transfer of sovereignty from the Aborigines to the British Government and its successor colonial administrations (Reynolds 2013, p. 201).
These times were traumatic and the trauma was compounded the loss of life and wellbeing resulting from introduced disease, epidemics and starvation. It was impacted by what Price (1963) and Baker (1983) refer to as the overt physical violence of the frontier, the covert structural violence of the state, and psychosocial distress, named by some as cultural and spiritual genocide (Atkinson 2002, pp. 58–73).